The Vast Chasm and David Brainerd

Between God and man is a vast, yawning qualitative difference.” Kierkegaard

The Secret Flame and the Source of Power
How is it that that a mere four years in the life of David Brainerd and three in the life of the Lord Jesus outweighs the 969 years of a Methuselah? Such lives are like laser beams with profound penetration rather than the soft glow of a night light, pleasantly revealing nothing.
As I was seeking to understand what created the consistent character, the consuming passion and the consummate power in the life of David Brainerd I believe I have found the answer.
The stammering, solitary shepherd on the backside of the desert discovers the burning bush, and in the Presence of the I AM removes his sandals, only to rise and confront the mightiest potentate on earth;
The tested Joshua, fully committed to the Word and the Sacraments (read of his thorough preparation), a tested warrior and servant was not ready for Jericho until he saw the “Unseen Captain” with upraised sword and discovered that all he could do on the sacred ground was to take off his handles. Then Jericho was his. The lesson here was sovereignty. Addressing the Colossus before him with a hopeful and arrogant question, “Whose side are you on?’ The answer is still the answer. The only answer: “I am not on anybody’s side. Take off your sandals.”
Job, a relatively perfect on the manward side, at the end of one hundred questions from the Creator of the universe could only fall down in abject penitence crying out, “O Lord, I heard Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now I have seen Thee with the seeing of mine eyes, and abhor myself, repenting in dust and ashes.” All the talk of Job and his friends amounted to nothing. Only then did he become a mighty intercessor, and discovered a double portion of restoration.
As for Peter, when he saw the sovereign of the sea in his wisdom, grace and power could only fall on his face in fear and fading petulance crying, “Get out of here, Lord, we cannot be in the same place.” Then the gracious hand and kind countenance speaks forth of grace and calling, “Get up, Simon! You have been catching fish, but from now on you shall catch men” So he got up and followed Jesus.
Perhaps the most sublime experience in all of scripture describing the place of man before God in that “qualitative difference” is the thrice holy vision of Isaiah. The trembling of the temple of God was mirrored in the trembling of the frail temple of man, and all he could do was cry out, “Woe is me, I am undone.” Never could a man utter more proper words before the divine majesty. Only the unfinished and undone man can be purged and pardoned man can present himself unconditionally to the Sovereign God. As Oswald Chambers points out, such a man needs no command from God, he merely overhears God and places all he is and has on the altar without reserve.
This is the secret of David Brainerd. God was in heaven and he was on earth. Hallowing His Name was a kingdom call to the purposes of God, doing his will whether by life or by death. For Brainerd, that later prospect came all too soon.
Take note of the mighty George Whitefield crossed the Atlantic nine times to preach from Savannah to Jonathan Edward’s England. Follow Francis Asbury riding 279,000 miles on horseback to every frontier, with twenty-nine visits to New Jersey and attendant revivals. These two had an eye on the Eternal and lived on the edge of eternity. With Edwards and his son-in-law to be, David Brainerd they preached the depths of man’s lostness and sin, for they, like Isaiah, Peter, Job, Joshua, and Moses, had discovered their own utter misery and alienation from God. They proclaimed the heights of holiness, for they saw themselves in the light of the blinding, transcendence, holiness of God which Paul too had discovered and so cries out, “Therefore, knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men . . . the love of Christ constrains us.”
The most brilliant young man in the Holy Roman Empire opened and Augustinian theological work called Calvin open his Institutes saying all of the above quite simple. Truly religion has two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Which comes first is difficult to discern. In beholding God, our eyes descend downward to ourselves. In seeing ourselves, we can only turn our eyes Godward, and in the blazing glory of God we are blinded, for thinking we could see all, we suddenly discover our eyes can see nothing, and we are nothing, and only God can make us something.
Daniel, who also had the ineffable experience, said that “Those who know (not know about) their God stand firm and do exploits.”
David Brainerd knew God, and he knew from the depths of his soul the heights of God’s grace. His solemn conviction before the judgment seat of Christ was demonstrated by his message in life and to the death. The only possible answer to the “vast, yawning” chasm between God and man is the Cross of the Lord Jesus, and be it as deep and wide at the Grand Canyon, that Cross alone makes the qualifying difference.
This writer is also gripped as with a vice with the Gospel, and in part it came through my father, Daniel Iverson, who in composing “Spirit of the Living God” saw the need of break me” before melt, mold, and fill me.” and through Robert Murray McCheyne, dying at a mere twenty-nine years of age. The shadow of that life looms larger and large over me. Then I came to know MCheyne’s secret—he nurtured his soul on the Diary of David Brainerd, published by Jonathan Edwards a hundred years earlier, who also died at twenty-nine in the arms of his beloved Jerusha Edwards, martyred by his own passion for the souls of his beloved Delaware Indians on the New Jersey border.
Think not that he died without any children. I am one of them. John Piper says that this small diary has sent more men and women into the mission field than any book ever written.
Would the reader desire such a passion so that with integral character and holy boldness he or she may proclaim the Cross of Jesus?
Seek the face of the God who is the Spirit, infinite in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth, and discovering yourself, you will die only to rise in the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus. Then the Cross will loom large in all of life, both now and forever.
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Observe the ancient apostle in a darkened cell with a young disciple Timothy, a faithful amanuensis, writing each dictated word in quiet reverence. Suddenly the bent figure rises up and snatches the quill from the youth and writes with glaucomic eyes “See with what large letters I write unto you . . . " “
“God forbid that I should boast, save in the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom I am crucified unto the world and the world unto me.” Galatians 6:14