In a letter to his daughter, Lady Sophia
Lindsay, Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyle, Covenanter,
written on the day of his execution in
Edinburgh, wrote, What shall I say in this
great day of the Lord, wherein, in the
midst of a cloud, I have found a
fair sunshine?
I can wish no more for you, but
that the Lord may comfort you, and shine
upon you, as he does upon me, and
give you that same sense of his love
in staying in the world as I have
in going out of it.
Listen friends, when in a society the lines
of right and wrong become blurred, when evil
is called good and good evil, when sexual
perversion spills over a land, contaminating all it
touches, and when the streets of cities are
splashed red with spilt blood of senseless murders,
when an elected government fails to govern by
God's laws and legislates the law of God
out of the land, then it is a
stark signal that the nation drowns in a
flood of error, when the moral compass of
society breaks asunder and immorality becomes standard behavior,
then the people drown in a flood of
error, when the rising generation chooses atheism over
belief in the God of the Bible, then
that generation drowns in a flood of error,
when the churches of the land lose their
voice of authority through compromise of the gospel
and conformity to the world, then the nation
drowns in a flood of error, I believe
when Antichrist appears and is welcomed with open
arms by an apostate church, he will not
stand on dry ground, but he will get
his feet soaking wet by the flood of
error that washes over the land, but in
Great Britain and America today, the bane of
the church is self-preservation and compromise, the
gospel of the cross has been dulled by
ministers who fear man more than Almighty God
and care more about their own necks than
losing it, when the light goes out in
a nation, it's because its pulpits have become
darkened by error and restricted by fear, England's
pulpits were emptied of 2,000 of her
best ministers in the great ejection of 1662,
as they cared more about the word of
God than the dictates of man, in the
years 1684 through 1685, known as the Killing
Times, which was the period of hottest persecution,
when Scotland turned red with the blood of
the Covenanters, who would rather die for Christ
than compromise their beliefs in the gospel, would
it not be a greater blessing to a
people today to have their ministers cast out
from their churches, for not compromising the gospel
of the Son of God, and for holding
up a blood-stained savior from sin nailed
on a bloody cross, and warning men and
women and boys and girls to repent and
flee from the wrath to come, to avoid
being cast into a burning devil's hell?
As Christ prayed on Calvary for his tormentors,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do, we cannot plead ignorance today, this
side of the cross.
Other generations knew the sacrifice and cost of
following a crucified Christ in the days of
Archibald Campbell, bleached skulls hung on posts in
the grass market in Edinburgh as reminders of
the cost of a red-hot Christianity.
The blood of the martyrs cries out against
the deadness of dry bones that comprise the
self-absorbed church of this generation.