My dear friend Stephen Yuille recently posted a statement by George Smeaton (1814–89), who studied at Edinburgh University and was part of the group of friends which included Robert Murray McCheyne and the Bonar brothers, and whom I best know as the author of a fine book on the Holy Spirit. See here for more details on Smeaton: Catherine Dickie, “Rev Prof George Smeaton”, ninetysix and ten (http://ninetysixandten.wordpress.com/books/rev-prof-george-smeaton/). This is the quote Stephen posted on FB: “To convert one sinner from his way is an event of greater importance than the deliverance of a whole kingdom from temporal evil.” See https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1915445931773&id=1410695512.
Of course, there is a truth in this that escapes the modern who thinks only of this world.
But, I wonder if the whole idea is framed wrongly. In Micah 6:8 the prophet says, “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The Smeaton quote seems to leave no room for what the prophet sees as the Christian walk—for surely, this is fulfilled in the followers of the Christ. Are we not to do both: seek the conversion of sinners and see temporal justice done?
I fear that it was the sort of thinking in the Smeaton quote that allowed both the Presbyterians and Baptists to argue for the “spirituality” of the Church in the 19th century and leave undone those things in the social realm that ought to have been done. C.H. Spurgeon, so often a great guide, and here he does not fail us, would have none of it, and refused to sit down to the Lord’s Supper with a slave owner!
Put the Smeaton quote in context thus and see the problems with it: “To convert one sinner from his way is an event of greater importance than to end the abomination of slavery or to end the murder of all of the babies being aborted.” Put like that, we see the problems with the quote: it has set up a false dichotomy. Better to do both, as Micah says: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with…God.”