What John Bunyan Knew

In November 1660 John Bunyan was arrested and later sentenced to prison where he would spend the next 12 years of his life. His crime? He was preaching the gospel “without a license” — a punishable offense under the religious tyranny of King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud. His original sentencing was three months, but Bunyan refused to not preach once free, and so he remained a jailed man … for 12 years.

His first biographer, Charles Doe, a friend and editor to Bunyan, recounts that Bunyan’s experience in prison was both excruciating and wonderful. It was excruciating, primarily, because he was separated from his family. Doe first met Bunyan and became acquainted with him in prison, and he says that at times the thought of Bunyan’s wife and children would break his heart. Though he was able to work and provide some income while in prison, the separation from his family and knowledge of their hardship was like “the pulling off his Flesh from his Bones.” 

But also, during his imprisonment, Bunyan stayed constant in reading and writing. He authored several books, including starting his work on The Pilgrim’s Progress. For his reading, he only had a Bible and a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and so imagine how often he would have those pages over and over again!

In Doe’s first publication of Bunyan’s biography, in 1698, he said of Bunyan:

He professed he never had so great an Inlet, in all his Life, into the Word of God as then [during his imprisonment]. Those Scriptures that he saw nothing in before, were, when in Prison, made to shine upon him. Jesus Christ also was never more real and apparent to him than then. … 

There is was that God gave him sweet and precious Sights of the Forgiveness of his Sin, and of his being with Jesus in another World. 

Two things stand out to me in this testimony: the realness of Jesus and the gift of assurance.

Bunyan, no doubt through his regular imbibing of Scripture, had a deeper sense of ultimate reality. “Jesus Christ was never more real.” This reminds me of Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 4:17. Though also imprisoned, and even abandoned by his friends, Paul writes, “But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” There is a kind of realness that God seems only to grant in the midst of suffering, when all hope is lost except in Jesus alone. There are places that none of us desire to go, travails that we’d never want to cross, but if we were to ever be there, beneath God’s providence, we should ask for what Bunyan and Paul knew.

Secondly, that phrase, “sweet and precious Sights of the Forgiveness of his Sin,” is another way, I think, to say that Bunyan was given the gift of assurance. As Bunyan’s contemporary Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) put it, assurance is not just to have grace, but to know that you have grace. It’s the experience of not only being forgiven, but of knowing that you are forgiven — that Jesus truly, actually, really paid it all … for you. 

Church, do we know how loved we are? How truly free? How secure? Would that God give us such “sweet and precious sights” like he did for Bunyan!