The Hidden Face and the Unchanging Heart: Spiritual Desertion and the Distinction Between Withdrawn Comfort and Withdrawn Love in the Puritan Writers Sibbes, Owen, Brooks, Rutherford, Goodwin, and Bridge

This report examines how the English and Scottish Puritan pastors of the seventeenth century understood and treated one of the most painful experiences in the Christian life: the sense that God has grown distant, that his face is hidden, that the warmth of his felt presence has been withdrawn and the soul left in darkness. The Puritans called this experience by several names, including spiritual desertion, divine withdrawal, the hiding of God's countenance, and the loss of assurance, and they gave it more careful pastoral attention than perhaps any other movement in the history of the church. Their central conviction, worked out from different angles by Richard Sibbes in The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, by John Owen in his treatise on communion with God and his exposition of Psalm 130, by Thomas Brooks in Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices and A Cabinet of Choice Jewels, by Samuel Rutherford in the letters he wrote from exile, by Thomas Goodwin in A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, and by William Bridge in A Lifting Up for the Downcast, was a single distinction of immense pastoral power: that God may withdraw the felt sense of his comfort from a beloved child without in the least withdrawing his covenant love. The sun may go behind a cloud without going out. The believer who feels far from God may in truth be held as securely as ever, may indeed be nearer to God in the darkness than in the sunshine, and may trust that the withdrawal is real, painful, temporary, purposeful, and entirely consistent with being deeply and everlastingly loved. Through close attention to their primary works, this report demonstrates how these pastors offered the struggling soul both an unflinching honesty about the pain of desertion and an unshakable ground for hope in the finished work and unchanging heart of Christ.

The Puritan Doctrine of Divine Desertion: What It Is and What It Is Not

To understand the Puritan treatment of feeling far from God, one must first grasp the precise theological architecture within which they placed the experience, for their pastoral tenderness was never sentimental; it rested upon careful distinctions that they believed made all the difference between a false comfort that would collapse and a true comfort that could bear the whole weight of a soul in anguish. The foundational move was to distinguish sharply between the reality of God's love toward the believer and the believer's felt sense of that love. The Puritans held, in common with the whole Reformed tradition summarized later in the Westminster Confession, that those whom God effectually calls and justifies he also glorifies, that the union between Christ and the believer is unbreakable, and that God's love toward his elect, being grounded not in the believer's performance but in his own eternal purpose and in the finished work of the Son, is therefore as unchanging as God himself.[11][20] From this it followed with iron logic that the fluctuations a believer experiences, the alternations between warmth and coldness, nearness and distance, assurance and doubt, cannot be fluctuations in God's actual disposition toward the soul, which does not change, but must be fluctuations in the soul's perception and experience of a love that remains constant behind the changing weather of the heart.

This is why the Puritans were so insistent on separating two things that the frightened conscience almost always fuses together: the substance of grace and the sense of grace. The substance of grace is the actual saving relationship, the union with Christ, the justified standing, the indwelling Spirit, the covenant bond. The sense of grace is the soul's conscious feeling of that relationship, the experienced sweetness, the felt assurance, the warmth of communion. The tragedy of desertion, in their analysis, is that the second can be almost wholly withdrawn while the first remains completely intact, and the suffering soul, feeling the absence of the sense, concludes in terror that it has lost the substance. Owen states the principle with characteristic exactness when he insists that a believer may lose the sense and comfort of the forgiveness of sins while the forgiveness itself remains untouched, so that the person may be truly pardoned and yet walk without any felt evidence of it, groaning under a burden that the objective gospel has in fact already lifted.[4] The whole pastoral labor of the Puritan on this theme is, in a sense, the labor of persuading the soul that the loss of the feeling is not the loss of the thing felt, that a man dying of thirst beside a full well needs not water so much as eyes to see the water that is there.

It must be said at once, and not left to emerge only later, that the Puritans did not regard every darkness of soul as spiritual desertion in the strict sense. Some heaviness, they knew, arises not from any hiding of God's face but from the body and its frailties, from what they called melancholy, from grief, exhaustion, and sickness, and they counseled that such affliction be treated with tenderness and with means suited to the body as well as the soul, never aggravated by reading every low mood as a token of God's wrath.[10] Bridge was especially clear that a downcast Christian must not reason from the state of the animal spirits to the state of the soul before God, and the wider tradition, at its wisest, would bless the seeking of help from a physician, a counselor, a pastor, or a trusted friend who can care for mind and body alike. This humane caution belongs at the very threshold of the doctrine, before anything is said of the purposes for which God may permit the darkness, so that no sufferer mistakes a burden calling for care and companionship for a verdict of divine displeasure. We shall return to it, but it must be heard first.

The Puritans were equally careful to distinguish spiritual desertion from several things it is not, and this negative work was as pastorally important as the positive. First, desertion is not divorce. When God hides his face he does not break the marriage covenant; he is, in the image several of them used, like a husband who turns away for a season to correct or to draw, not one who abandons the bride.[16] The prophet Isaiah had already given them the pattern in the words the Lord speaks to Zion, that for a small moment he had forsaken her but with great mercies would gather her, that in a little wrath he hid his face for a moment but with everlasting kindness would have mercy on her.[16] The Puritans seized on the deliberate asymmetry of that text: the forsaking is a small moment, the mercy is everlasting; the wrath is a little, the kindness has no end. Second, desertion is not necessarily punishment for a particular sin, though it may sometimes be occasioned by sin. The Puritans catalogued the various causes and ends of desertion with pastoral realism, acknowledging that God does sometimes withdraw the sense of his favor when a believer has grieved the Spirit, but insisting with equal firmness that God also withdraws it from his most faithful children for reasons that have nothing to do with any particular fault, in order to wean them from resting in the gift rather than the Giver, to deepen their humility, to make them long for heaven, to fit them to comfort others, and to display that grace stands by his power and not by the strength of their feelings.[8] Third, desertion is not the same as the darkness of the unconverted or the terror of the finally lost. The very capacity to grieve over God's felt absence, to hunger for his return, to fear nothing so much as losing him, is itself a mark of a heart that already possesses him, for no one mourns the absence of a God he never loved. This was one of Sibbes's most consoling observations, that the smoking of the flax, the mourning and the longing, is itself the evidence of the fire.[1]

There is a further distinction the Puritans drew that has proven remarkably durable, and it must be handled with care because it borders on questions that in our own day are rightly given also to physicians and counselors. The Puritans recognized that not all darkness of soul is spiritual desertion in the strict sense. Some heaviness, they observed, arises from the body, from what they called melancholy, from grief, exhaustion, sickness, and the frailty of the mortal frame, and they counseled that such affliction should be treated with tenderness and with means suited to the body as well as the soul, not aggravated by treating every low mood as a sign of God's wrath.[10] Bridge in particular urged that a downcast Christian must be careful not to reason from the state of the animal spirits to the state of the soul before God, and that a believer weighed down by bodily distress or natural sorrow should not add to the burden the false conclusion that God has cast him off.[10] This is a strikingly humane note, and one to which we shall return, for it means that the Puritan tradition itself, at its wisest, made room for the recognition that some of what feels like distance from God has causes that call for human help and care, and that seeking such help is no betrayal of faith.

Finally, and most importantly for the whole structure of Puritan consolation, desertion is by its very nature temporary and purposeful. The Puritans never treated the hiding of God's face as a permanent condition or a meaningless one. They read the Psalms, especially the great laments, as the divinely given record of saints who passed through the valley and came out the other side, and they took the rhythm of those Psalms, the movement from complaint to trust to praise, as the appointed shape of the experience. Weeping may endure for a night, the psalmist sang, but joy comes in the morning; the same psalm confesses that when God hid his face the singer was troubled, which the Puritans read as proof that even the man after God's own heart knew this darkness and did not remain in it.[12] Desertion, in their theology, is God's strange work, not his proper one; it is the momentary shadow within a settled purpose of love, permitted for ends that will one day be seen to have been merciful, and ordered by a Father who counts every hour of it and will not let it last one moment longer than the good of the child requires. This conviction, that the darkness is bounded, bounded by God's love on the near side and God's purpose on the far side, is the framework within which every individual Puritan voice speaks, and it is what keeps their honesty about suffering from ever tipping into despair.

Richard Sibbes and the Bruised Reed: Christ's Tenderness to Weak Faith

Richard Sibbes, the gentle Cambridge preacher whom his contemporaries called the sweet dropper for the honeyed comfort of his sermons, gave the Puritan tradition its enduring image of Christ's tenderness toward faltering faith in his treatise The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, published in 1630 and drawn from the prophecy of Isaiah quoted by Matthew concerning the Servant of the Lord: a bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.[1][2] The entire work is an extended meditation on the disposition of Christ toward the weakest and most damaged of his people, and Sibbes's governing pastoral insight is that the very qualities the desolate soul reads as evidence of Christ's rejection, its bruisedness and its dimness, are precisely the qualities that draw out Christ's tenderest care. A reed is already a fragile thing; a bruised reed is more fragile still, bent and broken and fit, one would think, only to be trodden underfoot or snapped and cast away. Yet Sibbes makes the astonishing observation that Christ deals with the bruised reed not as men deal with broken things, by discarding them, but by supporting and binding and healing them, so that the bruising which the world counts a reason for rejection is with Christ a claim upon his mercy.[1]

Sibbes was careful to define what he meant by bruising, for the word carried in his usage a precise spiritual weight. To be a bruised reed is to be a soul that has been broken in the sense of its own sinfulness and insufficiency, brought low by the felt weight of guilt or affliction, humbled to the point where it can no longer trust in its own strength, and left sensible of its need of Christ. This bruising, Sibbes taught, is ordinarily the work of God's own hand and the necessary prelude to the soul's resting wholly on Christ, for we never truly come to Christ until we have been driven from all confidence in ourselves; the same bruising that feels like destruction is in fact the ploughing that prepares the ground for grace.[1] Here Sibbes anticipates the whole Puritan analysis of felt distance, for he understood that the soul which is being bruised often experiences the bruising as God's displeasure, when it is in truth the operation of God's love making room for himself. The pastoral turn is decisive: the very pain that tempts the soul to conclude that Christ has turned against it is the evidence of Christ's careful work within it, for a reed that God did not intend to use he would not trouble himself to bruise.

The image of the smoking flax carried Sibbes's argument into the territory of felt spiritual coldness with even greater precision. Flax, the wick of a lamp, that is merely smoking is flax whose flame has all but gone out, giving off more smoke than light, offensive and faltering and seemingly on the point of extinction. Sibbes read this as the very picture of grace at its lowest ebb in the believer, the state in which faith and love are reduced to a spark buried under a great deal of corruption and coldness, so that the soul can scarcely discern any light in itself at all and is aware chiefly of the smoke, the sense of sin, the dullness, the absence of felt warmth.[1] And here he places his most famous consolation: in pursuing his calling, Christ will not quench the smoking flax but will blow upon it until it flames.[1] The soul in desertion looks at its own smoking wick, sees no bright flame of assured love, and concludes that the fire is dead; Christ looks at the same wick, sees the spark that his own Spirit kindled, and rather than snuffing it out he cups his hands around it and breathes upon it until it burns clear. Man, Sibbes observed, will quench the light for a little smoke, but Christ ever cherishes even the least beginnings of grace, so opposite is the holy nature of Christ to the impatient and impure nature of man.[1]

Sibbes turned this doctrine directly against the accusations that assail the deserted soul, and in doing so he modeled the very kind of interior dialogue that later Puritans would develop at length. He imagined Satan pressing the objections that any struggler will recognize. Satan will object, you are a great sinner; we may answer, Christ is a strong Saviour. But Satan objects further, you have no faith, no love; the soul may answer, yes, a spark of faith and love. But Christ will not regard that spark, Satan urges; and Sibbes gives the reply that gathers up his whole treatise, yes he will, for he will not quench the smoking flax.[1] The genius of this exchange is that Sibbes does not counsel the deserted soul to deny its weakness or to manufacture feelings it does not have. He concedes the smallness of the grace, the dimness of the light, the faintness of the flame; he grants that the soul is a bruised reed and a smoking wick, and then he shows that this very smallness is the object of Christ's special care, so that the honest confession of weakness, far from being ground for despair, becomes the very foothold of hope. The least true grace is precious to Christ, more precious than the soul that possesses it can imagine, because it is the seed of glory and the pledge of his own faithfulness to finish what he has begun.

The pastoral fruit of Sibbes's teaching for the person who feels far from God is threefold. First, it relocates the ground of assurance away from the intensity of the believer's feelings and onto the settled disposition of Christ, so that the question is no longer whether my flame burns brightly but whether Christ is the kind of Saviour who tends smoking wicks, and to that question the gospel gives an unambiguous answer. Second, it interprets the experience of weakness and coldness not as a sign of Christ's absence but as the ordinary condition of grace in a fallen soul that Christ has undertaken to nurse to full strength, so that the smoking is expected and provided for rather than fatal. Third, it holds before the soul the certainty of the outcome, for the text promises that Christ will not merely refrain from quenching the flax but will tend it till he send forth judgment unto victory, that is, until grace has fully triumphed; the faint spark is not merely preserved but destined to blaze, and the God who lit it has staked his own faithfulness on bringing it to that end.[1][2] Sibbes thus gave the tradition a picture of a Christ whose tenderness is proportioned not to the strength of our faith but to the weakness of it, a Christ who is drawn, as a nursing mother is drawn, precisely by the cry of the weakest child.

John Owen on Communion and the Loss of the Sense, Not the Substance, of Grace

If Sibbes supplied the tenderest image, John Owen supplied the most rigorous theology, and the combination is characteristic of the Puritan achievement: the same tradition that could speak so gently could also think so exactly. Owen's great work Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, published in 1657, laid the foundation by establishing that the Christian life is fundamentally a life of communion, a mutual giving and receiving of love between the believer and each of the three persons of the Godhead, in which the Father communicates his love, the Son his grace, and the Spirit his comfort, and the believer returns love, faith, and obedience.[3] This framework is essential for understanding Owen's treatment of desertion, because it means that the felt experience of God's presence is, for Owen, one real and precious dimension of communion, the sensible enjoyment of the love that God bears toward his people, and its withdrawal is therefore a genuine loss and a real interruption of enjoyed fellowship, not something to be minimized. Owen never treats the sense of God's love as a trivial thing whose absence should not trouble a mature believer; he treats it as the sweetness of the marriage, the felt warmth of a real relationship, whose loss the soul is right to mourn.

Yet precisely because Owen understood communion so richly, he was able to locate desertion within it without letting it destroy the relationship, and this he did through his fundamental distinction between the several kinds of divine love and the several kinds of the believer's apprehension of it. Owen taught that God's love of benevolence and election, his eternal purpose to save, and the love with which he embraces the believer in Christ are absolutely unchangeable, grounded in his own nature and in the finished work of the Son, and are neither increased by our obedience nor diminished by our failures; but the communications of that love to our sense and experience, the felt manifestations of favor that God grants in the ordinary course of fellowship, do vary, and it is these, not the love itself, that God withdraws in seasons of desertion.[3] When a father is displeased with a child he loves, Owen observed, his love does not cease but its manifestations alter; he withholds the smile and the embrace for a season, not because the child has stopped being his child but because the very love that made him a father now takes the form of correction. So God, without any change in his everlasting love, may alter the manner in which he communicates the sense of it, hiding the tokens of favor while the favor itself stands sure, and the believer must learn to distinguish the Father's frown from the Father's heart, knowing that behind the frown of a moment stands the love of an eternity.

Owen developed this most fully in his masterwork on the experience of guilt and pardon, A Practical Exposition upon the Hundred and Thirtieth Psalm, which takes as its text the cry out of the depths and traces the soul's passage from the terror of unforgiven sin through the discovery of forgiveness with God to the settled peace of assured pardon.[4] The whole treatise turns on a distinction that Owen believed the frightened conscience desperately needed to learn, the distinction between the sense of sin and the loss of forgiveness. A believer, Owen argued, may have a most acute and overwhelming sense of the guilt and vileness of his sin, may feel himself buried in the depths and abandoned by God, and may from that feeling conclude that he is not, or is no longer, forgiven; and yet the forgiveness may be entirely secure, purchased and applied, wholly independent of the fluctuating sense of it.[4] The believer's business in such depths, Owen taught, is not to wait until he feels forgiven before he believes it, which would be to make the ground of faith his own shifting emotions, but to look away from his sense of sin to the objective declaration of the gospel, that there is forgiveness with God, and to wait upon the Lord, as the psalmist waited, more than they that watch for the morning, trusting the promise in the dark until the felt assurance is restored.[4]

This account of waiting is one of Owen's most valuable contributions to the pastoral care of the deserted soul, for it dignifies the very experience of unresolved darkness by giving it a name and a task. The soul in desertion is not simply to endure passively nor to manufacture feelings it lacks; it is to wait, and waiting in Owen's exposition is an active, God-honoring exercise of faith, a fixing of the eye upon the promise while the heart is cold, a hoping against hope, a refusing to let go of God even when God seems to have let go of it.[4] Owen took great pains to show that this waiting is itself a work of grace and a form of communion, perhaps a purer form than the enjoyment of felt comfort, because it loves and trusts God for himself and for his word rather than for the pleasant sensations he gives. The soul that clings to God in the dark, believing his promise against the testimony of its own feelings, honors God more, Owen suggested, than the soul that basks easily in the sunshine of assurance, for it trusts the Giver even when the gifts are withdrawn. In this Owen turned the very desolation of desertion into an occasion for the highest exercise of faith, so that the darkest valley became the place where the believer's trust was most purely tested and most gloriously displayed.

Owen also brought his characteristic realism to the causes of desertion, refusing both the harshness that blames every darkness on the sufferer's sin and the sentimentality that denies any connection between the two. He acknowledged frankly that believers do sometimes provoke God to hide his face by carelessness, by cherishing some secret sin, by neglecting the means of grace, or by resting in their comforts rather than in Christ, and in such cases the withdrawal is a fatherly correction meant to bring the soul back.[3][4] But he insisted with equal firmness that the remedy even then is not despair but return, a fresh coming to the blood of Christ that cleanses from all sin, a renewed application of the gospel to the wounded conscience; and he was clear that God also hides his face from believers in whom no such particular provocation can be found, for wise and loving ends known to himself. The pastoral upshot of Owen's whole treatment is a soul taught to reason not from its feelings to its state but from the promise to its feelings, to say in the darkness not there is no forgiveness because I feel none, but there is forgiveness with God though I feel it not, and therefore I will wait. This is the reasoning of faith, and Owen made it the disciplined center of the deserted believer's response.

Thomas Brooks on Satan's Devices and the False Accusation of Abandonment

Thomas Brooks brought to the same subject a spiritual shrewdness about the tempter's tactics that has made his Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, published in 1652, one of the most enduringly useful books of practical divinity ever written, and much of its usefulness lies precisely in the way it exposes the strategies by which the enemy of souls exploits the experience of felt distance from God to drive believers toward despair. Brooks understood, as few writers have, that the darkness of desertion is a battlefield, and that the sufferer is not merely enduring the absence of comfort but is under active assault by an adversary who seizes upon that absence to whisper false conclusions. His method throughout the work is to name each device of Satan and then to marshal against it a set of remedies drawn from Scripture and sound theology, and among the devices he treats with the greatest care are those by which Satan labors to keep saints in a sad, doubting, questioning, and uncomfortable condition, persuading them that their darkness is proof of God's abandonment.[5]

The heart of Brooks's counsel here is the distinction, which he handles with great pastoral skill, between the accusations of Satan and the true voice of God, and between the loss of assurance and the loss of salvation. Satan's characteristic device, Brooks observed, is to argue from the believer's felt condition to a false conclusion about the believer's real standing, taking the very heaviness and darkness that God permits for gracious ends and twisting it into evidence of God's rejection. Where God would use the sense of sin to drive the soul to Christ, Satan uses it to drive the soul from Christ; where the darkness is meant to make the believer cling harder to the promise, Satan employs it to make the believer let go of the promise altogether.[5] Brooks taught the struggler to recognize the signature of the tempter in any suggestion that leads away from Christ, toward despair, toward the conclusion that grace is exhausted and mercy spent, for the Spirit of God, even when he wounds, always wounds toward healing and drives the soul homeward, whereas Satan, even when he speaks true things about our sin, aims them always at our destruction.

Brooks devoted particular attention to the relation between faith and assurance, and his treatment supplies one of the most liberating distinctions in the whole literature of desertion. Assurance, he taught, is a precious flower in the garden of a saint, infinitely sweet and more delightful to the soul than all outward comforts, and yet it is but a flower that is subject to fade, a blossom that may open in the warmth of communion and close again in the cold of desertion; but faith is the root, and the root may remain alive in the deepest winter when every flower has withered.[6] From this Brooks drew the conclusion that assurance may be lost while faith is not lost, that a believer may pass through long seasons in which the felt certainty of God's love is wholly absent and yet the saving trust that lays hold of Christ persists beneath the surface, so that the loss of the sweet sense of salvation is not the loss of salvation itself.[6] This distinction, which Brooks shared with the whole tradition and developed with special clarity in A Cabinet of Choice Jewels, allowed him to say to the doubting soul the thing it most needed to hear: that the very anxiety with which it fears losing God is itself the evidence of a faith that has not been lost, for the heart that did not truly believe would not so tremble at the thought of God's absence.

Brooks was especially penetrating in tracing the loss of assurance back to its true roots, and here he located it not in any actual change in God but in a defect of the believer's apprehension. The soul loses the sense of God's love, he argued, largely through ignorance, through a failure to grasp the richness, the freeness, the fullness, and the everlastingness of the love of God, through forgetting the sufficiency of Christ and the reality of its own union with him.[6] The remedy, then, is not to strive to work up warm feelings but to fill the mind afresh with the truth of what God is and what Christ has done, for the felt assurance follows the believed truth as warmth follows the return of the sun, and the soul that meditates deeply on the unchangeableness of God's love will find its darkness gradually giving way. Brooks offered the further and tender observation that God never gave a believer a new heart in order that it should always lie bleeding, always be rent and torn with discouragements; the wounding is for a season and toward a purpose, and God's design in permitting the darkness is never the perpetual misery of his child but its deeper joy and firmer establishment.[5] The Father does not delight in the tears of his children for their own sake but permits them for the harvest of peace they will yield.

The cumulative effect of Brooks's counsel is to arm the deserted soul for the spiritual conflict that desertion always involves, teaching it to distinguish the darkness itself from the false interpretations of the darkness that the enemy supplies. Feeling far from God is real and painful, Brooks conceded, but feeling far from God is not the same as being cast off by God, and the whole art of standing in this trial lies in refusing to let the tempter draw the false inference. Brooks would have the struggler answer every accusation of abandonment not with a denial of the felt distance, which would be dishonest, but with an appeal above the feeling to the unchanging fact, saying in effect, it is true that I feel forsaken, but my feeling is not the measure of God's heart; his love does not ebb and flow with my perception of it; Christ is sufficient though I feel my emptiness; and the very grief with which I mourn his absence is the pledge that he is still my life. In this way Brooks transformed the experience of desertion from a proof of rejection into an occasion for the exercise of a robust and reasoning faith that fights its way through the darkness by holding fast to what is true when nothing feels true.

Samuel Rutherford: Letters from the Dark

No Puritan wrote of the strange sweetness to be found in seasons of apparent absence with more lyrical intensity than Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish pastor whose letters, most of them composed during his enforced exile in Aberdeen between 1636 and 1638 when he was silenced and banished from his beloved parish of Anwoth for his refusal to conform, have been treasured by generations of Christians as among the most spiritually radiant documents the tradition has produced.[7][21] Rutherford's situation gave his reflections on divine withdrawal a peculiar authenticity, for he wrote not from the study but from the furnace, cut off from the pulpit ministry that was the joy of his life, separated from his people, uncertain whether he would ever preach again, and tempted at every turn to read his outward affliction and inward heaviness as signs that Christ had turned away from him. Out of this crucible came a body of writing that does not deny the pain of felt absence but transfigures it, finding in the very deprivation an occasion for a deeper discovery of Christ than ease had ever afforded.

The characteristic note of Rutherford's letters is his refusal to separate the cross from the sweetness of Christ, his insistence that the very afflictions that seemed to remove Christ were in fact the means by which Christ drew nearest. In one of his most celebrated passages he wrote that the cross of Christ was the sweetest burden he ever bore, that it was such a burden as wings are to a bird and sails are to a ship, to carry him forward to his harbor.[7] The image is exact and deliberate: a bird's wings and a ship's sails are weights of a sort, they add to the load, and yet they are the very means of flight and voyage, so that what appears to burden in fact bears onward. Rutherford applied this to the whole experience of affliction and felt desertion, arguing that the seasons which the believer counts as loss, the seasons of darkness and deprivation, are the very wind in the sails carrying the soul home, and that Christ is never truly absent in them but present in a hidden manner, weighting the soul with a burden that is secretly propelling it toward glory. To feel the weight of the cross, in Rutherford's vision, is not to feel Christ's absence but to feel the pressure of his purpose driving the soul forward.

Rutherford developed this insight into a whole spirituality of finding Christ in the dark, and one of his recurring themes is that grace grows best in winter, that the coldest and hardest seasons of the soul are often the seasons of its deepest growth.[7] He observed from his own experience that in the sunshine of ease and outward success he had known Christ less intimately than in the winter of exile and affliction, that the very removal of lesser comforts had made room for the discovery of Christ himself, and that the loss of the felt sweetness had driven him to a love for Christ that rested on Christ rather than on Christ's gifts. This is a profound refinement of the whole doctrine of desertion, for Rutherford saw that God sometimes withdraws the sense of his comfort precisely in order to purify the soul's love, to teach it to love the Bridegroom and not merely the wedding feast, to wean it from a mercenary attachment that would follow Christ only for the warmth he gives and to bring it to a love that would follow him into the dark. The winter is not the death of grace but the season of its deepest rooting, when the sap withdraws to the root and the tree, stripped of every leaf, grows downward into God.

At the same time, Rutherford was no stranger to the genuine anguish of Christ's felt absence, and his letters are shot through with honest expressions of longing and heaviness that keep his spirituality from any facile triumphalism. He wrote often of his hunger for a nearer sense of Christ, of the pain of seeming to be shut out from the felt enjoyment of his Lord, of the way that even the memory of past communion could sharpen the ache of present darkness. Yet his consistent movement was from the ache to the assurance, from the felt absence to the remembered promise, from the winter to the confidence that spring would come, for he had learned to interpret the very intensity of his longing as itself a form of Christ's presence, since a soul cannot hunger for a Christ from whom it is wholly cut off. His longing was the tug of the anchor that was already fastened within the veil, the homesickness of a heart that had already been made a citizen of the country for which it wept. In this Rutherford exemplified the whole Puritan conviction that the deepest darkness of the believer is a darkness within relationship, a hiddenness within marriage, an absence that presupposes and is measured by an underlying presence.

The pastoral value of Rutherford for the soul that feels far from God lies above all in the way he holds together unflinching honesty about the pain of the experience with an almost extravagant confidence in the love and sufficiency of Christ within it. He never tells the sufferer that the darkness is not dark or that the absence is not felt; he grants the full weight of the affliction, having borne it himself, and then he shows that the affliction is the very chariot of grace, that Christ is nearer in the loss than he seemed in the having, that the winter is the growing season of the soul, and that the burden is the wind that bears the ship to harbor. Above all Rutherford directs the eye of the sufferer to the loveliness of Christ himself, to the beauty and worth of the Bridegroom whom the soul loves and by whom it is loved, teaching that the cure for the ache of his felt absence is not less love but more, a deeper gazing on the excellency of the One whose momentary hiding has made the heart cry out. For Rutherford the whole discipline of desertion was ordered toward this end, that the soul should come to prize Christ above his comforts and to trust the heart of the Bridegroom even when his face was hidden, and should learn in the dark to sing of a love that the darkness had proved rather than disproved.

Thomas Goodwin and William Bridge: Walking in Darkness and Trusting the Name of the Lord

Thomas Goodwin gave the Puritan treatment of felt distance from God its most sustained and systematic single treatise in A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, first published in 1636, a work built entirely upon the tenth verse of the fiftieth chapter of Isaiah, which asks who among us fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant, and yet walks in darkness and has no light, and answers that such a one should trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God.[8][9] The text is perfectly chosen for Goodwin's purpose, because it presents in a single sentence the whole paradox that the Puritans labored to explain: a person who genuinely fears the Lord, who truly obeys, who is by every mark a child of light, and who nevertheless walks in darkness and has no light. Goodwin seized on the fact that Scripture itself here joins these two things that the frightened conscience believes cannot coexist, a real fear of God and a real absence of felt comfort, and he built his entire consolation on the recognition that darkness of soul is not incompatible with being a true child of God, since the inspired text expressly describes a God-fearing believer walking in exactly that darkness.

Goodwin's treatise is organized around a careful analysis of the causes by which, the cases in which, and the ends for which God leaves his children in distress of conscience, and this threefold structure gave the tradition its most thorough taxonomy of the experience.[8] Among the causes he examined were both the believer's own failings, such as the neglect of duty or the harboring of sin, and God's sovereign and gracious purposes that operate independently of any particular fault; among the cases he distinguished the various forms the darkness may take, from the withdrawal of comfort to the assault of doubt to the affliction of the body that weighs upon the spirit; and among the ends he set forth the wise designs of God in permitting the darkness, to humble, to wean, to prove, to fit for usefulness, and to make the eventual return of light the sweeter. Throughout, Goodwin's aim was to persuade the walker in darkness that the darkness is neither meaningless nor final, that it lies within the compass of God's fatherly care, and that it has a purpose that will one day be revealed as merciful. He was insistent that a believer must not reason from present darkness to future doom, must not conclude that because there is no light now there will be no light ever, for the God who has appointed the night has also appointed the morning.

The pivot of Goodwin's whole argument is the counsel that the prophet gives to the child of light in the dark, that he should trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God, and Goodwin unfolds this direction with great care because it defines the proper activity of faith in the absence of felt assurance.[8][9] To trust in the name of the Lord, Goodwin explained, is to rest not upon any present evidence of God's favor drawn from one's own feelings or experiences, which in the dark are wholly wanting, but upon the revealed character of God himself, his name, that is, his declared nature as merciful, faithful, gracious, and unchanging. When the soul has no light of its own, no inward token of acceptance, no felt warmth to lean upon, it is to lean instead on what God has revealed himself to be and on what God has promised, staying itself upon his God as a man leans his whole weight upon a support he cannot see. This is faith reduced to its purest essence, faith with every prop of feeling removed, faith that trusts the naked promise and the bare name of God in the total absence of confirming experience, and Goodwin regarded it as among the noblest exercises of the Christian life, since it honors God by trusting him for himself when he has taken away every other reason for trust.

William Bridge, Goodwin's contemporary and fellow member of the Westminster Assembly, brought the same convictions to bear from a slightly different angle in A Lifting Up for the Downcast, a series of sermons published in 1648 that address themselves to the many varieties of spiritual discouragement to which believers are subject.[10] Bridge's special contribution is his patient, case-by-case attention to the particular forms that discouragement takes, and his tender insistence that no form of it need drive the believer to despair. He worked through the discouragements that arise from the sense of great sins, from the weakness of grace, from the want of assurance, from temptation, from desertion, and from affliction and outward troubles, and in each case his method was to grant the reality of the trouble, to expose the faulty reasoning by which the downcast soul aggravates it, and to lift the eyes to the sufficiency of Christ and the faithfulness of God. His governing theme is that discouragement, however natural, is never warranted by the gospel, for the God of the gospel has provided in Christ an answer to every ground of discouragement, so that the believer's dejection, though understandable, always rests upon a failure to reckon with the fullness of what is his in Christ.

Bridge was notably wise about the ways in which bodily and natural causes contribute to spiritual heaviness, and this dimension of his counsel deserves particular emphasis for its humanity and its enduring relevance. He recognized that some downcastness arises not from any spiritual cause at all but from the frame of the body, from melancholy, from grief, from sickness and weariness, and he warned the sufferer against the error of interpreting every low mood as a sign of God's displeasure or reasoning from the state of the animal spirits to the state of the soul.[10] A Christian weighed down by natural sorrow or bodily distress, Bridge counseled, must be careful not to add to that burden the false and crushing conclusion that God has therefore cast him off, and must be gentle with himself as God is gentle, treating the causes that call for treatment and refusing to lay upon the conscience a weight that belongs to the body. This recognition, that not all darkness is spiritual desertion and that some of it calls for the ordinary means of care and comfort suited to our creaturely frailty, marks Bridge and the wider tradition at their most compassionate, and it opens directly onto the pastoral counsel, to which we now turn, that seeking help for the heaviness of the soul is an act not of weak faith but of wisdom.

Comparative Analysis: Felt Absence, Covenant Presence, and the Means of Recovery

Setting these six voices alongside one another reveals a remarkable convergence beneath their varied idioms and emphases, for although Sibbes speaks in images of tenderness, Owen in precise theological distinctions, Brooks in the language of spiritual warfare, Rutherford in lyrical rapture, and Goodwin and Bridge in patient case-divinity, they are all expounding a single pastoral structure that may be summarized as the distinction between felt absence and covenant presence. Every one of them begins by taking with full seriousness the reality and pain of the experience of feeling far from God, refusing the false comfort that would deny or minimize the darkness; and every one of them then relocates the ground of the believer's security away from the fluctuating experience and onto the unchanging fact of God's covenant love secured in Christ. The felt absence is real as an experience but false as an interpretation; the covenant presence is unfelt in the darkness but true as a reality; and the whole labor of Puritan consolation is to teach the soul to believe the reality it cannot feel rather than the interpretation it cannot help feeling. This is the shared spine of their counsel, and it accounts for both their unflinching honesty and their unquenchable hope.

The convergence extends to their shared diagnosis of what actually goes wrong in the experience of desertion, which none of them locates in a real withdrawal of God's love but all of them locate in some combination of the withdrawal of God's felt communications and the soul's misreading of that withdrawal. Owen's distinction between the substance and the sense of grace, Brooks's distinction between the root of faith and the flower of assurance, Sibbes's distinction between the fire and the smoke, Goodwin's distinction between the child of light and the darkness in which he walks, all express the same fundamental insight, that the thing lost in desertion is the conscious enjoyment of a relationship that itself remains intact. God does not stop being the believer's God when the believer stops feeling that he is; the sun does not go out when it passes behind a cloud; the marriage is not dissolved when the husband turns his face for a season. The Puritans multiplied these images because they understood that the frightened conscience needs to hear the same liberating truth in many forms, and that a soul which cannot grasp the abstract distinction between substance and sense may yet be caught by the picture of the sun behind the cloud or the smoking wick that Christ will not quench.

They converge likewise in their understanding of the purposes for which God permits desertion, and here their agreement transforms the experience from a mere affliction to be endured into a discipline to be received. All of them teach that God withdraws the sense of his comfort for the good of the soul, and their catalogues of divine ends overlap substantially: to humble the believer and empty him of self-confidence, to wean him from resting in the gift rather than the Giver, to purify his love so that he loves Christ for himself and not merely for the sweetness Christ bestows, to deepen his sympathy and fit him to comfort others who walk in darkness, to make him long more ardently for the unclouded vision of heaven where the sun will never set, and to display that grace stands by God's faithful power and not by the strength of the believer's feelings. Rutherford's insight that grace grows best in winter, Goodwin's analysis of the ends for which God leaves his children in darkness, Owen's account of the purifying of faith through waiting, all express this shared conviction that the darkness is fruitful, that God is doing in the night a work he could not do in the day, and that the believer who submits to the discipline will find it yielding, in the language of the epistle, the peaceable fruit of righteousness.

Where the six voices differ is chiefly in emphasis and in the particular remedy each foregrounds, and these differences are complementary rather than contradictory, together supplying a fuller pastoral toolkit than any one alone could offer. Sibbes foregrounds the disposition of Christ, teaching the soul to look away from its own weakness to the tenderness of the Saviour who will not quench the smoking flax, and his remedy is essentially the contemplation of Christ's gentle heart. Owen foregrounds the discipline of faith, teaching the soul to reason from the promise to its feelings rather than from its feelings to its state, and his remedy is the active waiting upon God that trusts the objective word in the absence of subjective evidence. Brooks foregrounds the spiritual conflict, teaching the soul to detect and refuse the false inferences by which Satan exploits the darkness, and his remedy is the vigilant distinguishing of the tempter's accusations from the truth of the gospel. Rutherford foregrounds the loveliness of Christ and the strange sweetness of the cross, teaching the soul to find in the very affliction the wind that bears it home, and his remedy is a deeper love for the Bridegroom that outlasts the withdrawal of his felt embrace. Goodwin and Bridge foreground the analysis of the experience itself and the counsel to trust the name of the Lord, teaching the soul to stay upon God when it has no light of its own, and their remedy is the naked faith that leans its whole weight on the revealed character of God.

Taken together, these emphases yield a coherent account of the means of recovery from felt distance from God, an account that is neither passive nor frantic but disciplined and hopeful. The Puritans counseled the deserted soul to do several things at once: to hold fast to the objective promises of the gospel and to reason from them rather than from its feelings, following Owen; to fix its gaze upon the tender disposition of Christ toward the weak, following Sibbes; to detect and refuse the false conclusions of the tempter, following Brooks; to continue steadfastly in the ordinary means of grace, the reading and hearing of the word, prayer, the fellowship of the saints, the sacraments, even when they yield no felt sweetness, trusting that grace flows through appointed channels whether or not the soul perceives the flow; to wait patiently for the return of light, as one watches for the morning, believing that the God who appointed the night has appointed also its end; and to remember and rehearse past experiences of God's faithfulness as evidence that the present darkness is not the whole story. Above all they counseled the soul to trust the name of the Lord, to stay itself upon its God, to believe against feeling that the covenant holds, that the love is unchanged, that the sun is behind the cloud and not gone out, and that the same Christ who seems absent is at that very moment tending the smoking wick with his own breath, purposing to blow it into flame.

It is worth observing that the Puritans held all of this within a robustly Trinitarian and Christ-centered frame, so that their consolation was never merely a technique of thought but a resting in a Person. The unchanging love they bid the soul trust is the love of the Father set upon it before the foundation of the world; the finished work on which its security rests is the once-for-all sacrifice of the Son, whose blood speaks a better word than all its guilt; and the comfort withdrawn and to be restored is the ministry of the Spirit, who even in the withdrawal continues his hidden work of preserving faith and stirring the very longing by which the soul reaches after the God it cannot feel. This is why the Puritan doctrine of desertion, for all its rigorous distinctions, never becomes cold, for at its center stands not a formula but the face of Christ, hidden for a moment behind the cloud, yet turned in unchanging love toward the child who weeps for him in the dark. And it is why, however far into the analysis they went, they always came back to the simplest of assurances, that the God who feels absent is present, that the darkness is not forever, and that morning is on its way.

The Wisdom of Seeking Help When the Darkness Is Heavy

The Puritan tradition, at its wisest and most humane, made a place for the recognition that not all heaviness of soul is spiritual desertion in the strict theological sense, and that some of what feels like distance from God has causes that lie in the body, in circumstance, in grief, exhaustion, and the ordinary frailty of our creaturely frame, and this recognition opens directly onto a word of counsel that the reader carrying a heavy darkness needs to hear plainly. Bridge in particular understood that the frame of the body affects the frame of the soul, that melancholy and sickness and weariness can press upon the spirit in ways that no amount of theological reasoning by itself will lift, and he warned tenderly against the error of interpreting every low season as a sign of God's displeasure or of reasoning from a troubled body to a rejected soul.[10] Goodwin too, in distinguishing the various cases and causes of the darkness in which a child of light may walk, made room for forms of distress that call for gentleness and for means suited to their true causes rather than for the harsh self-judgment that only deepens the wound.[8] These pastors would have us know that to be weighed down is not necessarily to be forsaken, and that the heaviness which will not lift by resolve alone is not therefore proof of a hardened heart or an absent God.

From this pastoral realism flows a gentle and important encouragement for anyone whose darkness is heavy and prolonged: that seeking the help of others is not a failure of faith but a faithful part of God's care for you. The God who made us body and soul together, who knit us in intricate dependence upon one another, and who has given the church its pastors, the world its physicians, and every life its trusted friends, has provided help through human hands as truly as through direct comfort, and there is no shame and no unbelief in reaching for that help. If the darkness presses long and hard, if the heaviness does not lift, if the mind turns against itself or the body will not rest, it is wise and good to speak with a trusted pastor who can pray with you and remind you of the promises, and it is equally wise and good to speak with a counselor or a doctor who can attend to the ways that body and mind bear upon the spirit. To do so is not to doubt God's sufficiency but to honor the ordinary means through which God so often chooses to work, just as we do not doubt God's provision when we eat bread or take rest. The Puritans themselves urged the downcast to use every appointed means and not to despise the help of others, and they would say to you now what they said then, that you were not made to carry this alone and that God's care for you includes the people he has placed within your reach.

Let this be said with all tenderness and without any intrusion into matters that belong to those trained to give particular counsel and care: this report offers no diagnosis and no instruction about your body or your condition, and it would be a failure of love to pretend that words on a page could take the place of the personal attention of those who can sit with you and know you. What it offers instead is a blessing upon the seeking of help, a clear and warm assurance that to reach for a pastor, a counselor, a physician, or a trusted friend when the darkness is heavy is a wise, faithful, and God-honoring thing to do, fully at home in a life of trust in Christ. You are not a problem to be solved but a beloved person to be cared for, and the God who loves you delights to bring his comfort to you through the presence and skill and kindness of others. If you are in that heavy place now, let this be a permission and an encouragement to reach out, and let the reaching itself be an act of the very faith that trusts God to meet you, believing that he often comes near through the hands of those he sends. The seeking of help is not the abandonment of hope in God; it is one of the shapes that hope in God takes.

Conclusion: The Sun Behind the Cloud

We have traced through six of the greatest pastors of the Puritan age a single, steady conviction offered to every soul that has ever felt far from God, and it is fitting to gather it now and to speak it directly and tenderly to the reader who may be walking in that darkness even as these words are read. The conviction is this: that the God who feels absent has not moved, that his love has not cooled by so much as a degree, and that the very distance you feel is not the withdrawal of his heart but at most the hiding of his face for a moment, permitted in wisdom, bounded by mercy, and ordered toward a good you cannot yet see. Sibbes has shown you a Christ who will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax, who is drawn to your weakness as a mother is drawn to the cry of her frailest child, and who counts the least spark of true grace in you more precious than you can imagine, so that your very sense of dimness is the object of his tenderest care. Owen has taught you to distinguish the substance of grace from the sense of it, to know that your forgiveness stands sure even when you cannot feel it, and to wait upon the Lord in the dark as one who watches for the morning, believing the promise against the testimony of your feelings. This is not denial of your pain; it is the anchor that holds beneath it.

Brooks has armed you against the accuser who would take the darkness God permits and twist it into a lie about God's heart, teaching you that assurance is a flower that may fade while faith is a root that lives through every winter, and that the very anxiety with which you fear losing God is itself the pledge that you have not lost him, for the heart that did not love him would not so tremble at his absence. Rutherford, writing from his own exile, has shown you that the cross which seems to bear Christ away is in truth the wind that bears you home, that grace grows best in the winter of the soul, and that Christ is often nearest in the very seasons when he seems most hidden, weaning your love from his gifts so that you may come to love the Giver himself. Goodwin and Bridge have named your experience exactly, the child of light who walks in darkness and has no light, and have set before you the one thing needful in that hour, to trust in the name of the Lord and to stay upon your God, leaning your whole weight upon what he has revealed himself to be when you have no light of your own to see by. And all of them together have blessed the seeking of help when the darkness is heavy, assuring you that to reach for a pastor, a friend, a counselor, or a physician is no failure of faith but one of the faithful shapes that trust in God takes.

If you feel far from God today, hear then the united testimony of these faithful witnesses, and hear behind it the testimony of Scripture itself and of the Christ to whom they all point. The darkness is real, and your pain is real, and you are not required to pretend otherwise; the Puritans never asked the sufferer to deny the night. But the darkness is not the last word, and it is not the deepest truth about you. The deepest truth is that you were loved before the foundation of the world by a Father whose love does not rise and fall with your feelings, that you were bought at infinite cost by a Son who cried out in a darkness deeper than yours, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, so that you might never be finally forsaken, and that you are indwelt even now by a Spirit who is at this moment stirring in you the very longing by which you reach after the God you cannot feel. The face you cannot see is turned toward you in unchanging love. The sun that has slipped behind the cloud has not gone out and will not fail to rise. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning, and the same Christ who seems hidden is tending the smoking wick of your faith with his own breath, purposing to blow it into flame, and he will not rest until he has brought you into the country where the Lord God is the light and there is no night at all. Until that morning, trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon your God, for he who has hidden his face for a small moment will gather you with everlasting kindness, and all shall be well.

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References

[1] Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630).

[2] Isaiah 42:1-3; Matthew 12:18-21 (the prophecy of the Servant who will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax).

[3] John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (1657).

[4] John Owen, A Practical Exposition upon the Hundred and Thirtieth Psalm (1668).

[5] Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices (1652).

[6] Thomas Brooks, A Cabinet of Choice Jewels; or, A Box of Precious Ointment (1669), on the nature and recovery of assurance.

[7] Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford (written chiefly from Aberdeen, 1636-1638; collected edition ed. Andrew A. Bonar).

[8] Thomas Goodwin, A Child of Light Walking in Darkness (1636).

[9] Isaiah 50:10-11 (the God-fearing believer who walks in darkness and has no light, counseled to trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God).

[10] William Bridge, A Lifting Up for the Downcast (sermons, published 1648).

[11] Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapters XI (Of Justification), XVII (Of the Perseverance of the Saints), and XVIII (Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation).

[12] Psalm 30:5, 7 ("weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning"; "thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled").

[16] Isaiah 54:7-8 ("For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee").

[20] Romans 8:35-39 (nothing shall separate the believer from the love of God in Christ Jesus).

[21] Andrew A. Bonar, biographical sketch and notes in his edition of Letters of Samuel Rutherford (nineteenth-century standard edition).