By Geoffrey Botkin, posted on 9 August, 2011

When the Great Fire of London swept through the city in the fall of 1666, it destroyed an estimated 87% of the homes in the central city. A young minister was asked why God would do such a thing. His answer was not the typical pietistic response of the day. He did not try to invent imaginary characteristics of an imaginary god. He let God speak for himself, but few appreciated hearing the words of the Bible found in the Psalms, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and the prophets.

If the people of London, Vincent asked, refused to worship God in their homes, why would it be a strange thing if God “burned down those houses wherein the inhabitants would not worship him?”

Such an opinion would be ridiculed today as insensitive or cruel because “a loving God” would never intervene in the modern world with correction or punishment. Or would He?

Thomas Vincent had been giving serious thought to the question of judgment for over a year. Just the previous summer, the Great Plague of London had swept over the city, killing people faster than they could be buried. Vincent buried many of the 100,000 people who died, and kept careful records of their names and circumstances. After the plague subsided, Vincent sat down to write an account of what he had seen and how the people had died. Christians died with a quiet confidence in their Redeemer. But disbelievers fought and raged against the will of God, screaming and cursing until death closed their throats.

Thomas Vincent’s account has survived, known today as the book God’s Terrible Voice in the City. He says he wrote it “to keep alive in myself and others, the memory of the judgment.” Vincent’s memory was sharp, and his outlook remarkably honest. He catalogued more than two dozen specific sins shared by both Christians and non-Christians, and reminded his readers that God means what he says when he threatens to chastise a city or a nation that hates the law of God and the kind governance of God.

Here are five sins from his astute observation: slighting of the Gospel, lack of family worship, a toleration of the sins of the time, and a “neglect of family reformation.”

“How few,” he lamented, “did labour to instruct their families, catechise their children and servants; to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Vincent also listed the “profane scoffing at God’s people.” Vincent remained in the city through the darkest moments of plague’s fury, sharing the Gospel, comforting the sick, burying the dead and urging people to repent of their willful blindness. He was astounded that the people of London refused to believe that God might have been trying to get their attention. Even Christians who survived the ravages of the plague made no effort to improve their habits or their way of thinking. Vincent was thus not surprised to see the fire that consumed the city a year later.

I just a received a letter from a young resident of the UK who is not surprised to see the current symptoms of judgment being focused again on London, for reasons he details in his letter, which reminds me much of Thomas Vincent’s candor and humility.

“Dear Mr. Botkin,” he writes,

I close with the wisdom of my friend William Einwechter, who understands why simple truths from scripture, like “the judgment of God,” are such foreign concepts in the modern English mind and the modern American mind. He comments on Proverbs 29:18. Without a vision the people perish. “In Scripture,” notes Einwechter, “the absence of the Word of God is often due to God's judgment for apostasy and a refusal to hear God's Word (Isa. 29:10-11 a sealed book; Amos 8:11-12 a famine of hearing the words of the Lord). There is no revelation from God because the people would rather listen to false prophets (cf. Jer. 5:31). In other words, the people without a vision are not victims, but rebels. In contrast, the people who keep God's law do so by the mercy and grace of God.”

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