The Miraculous Workings of God

What I am about to describe are not exactly miracles, but they are evidence of an amazing pattern in the way God intercedes in the world. As I grew up with an atheist Jewish mother and an agnostic Christian father, I thought I was alone in the world in my struggles with faith. Over the years, however, the Holy Spirit has led me to see that among my own ancestors were some who were faithful to Him under the Old Covenant, or who were among His faithful remnant under the New. The anecdotes that follow about three such ancestors—an Orthodox Jew, an Anglican clergyman, and a Presbyterian hymnodist—and are no testimonial to my own sinful nature, but rather to the amazing trans-generational ways in which God sometimes works.

The Inheritance

As I've mentioned before, Jews trace Jewishness matrilineally. The last matrilineal ancestor to have any kind of faith in God was my great grandmother, who passed away a decade before I was born. She was, so far as I know, an Orthodox Jew—to exactly what degree she was Torah observant, I'm not entirely sure, but at the very least, she kept kosher. When I heard my pastor preach on Paul's olive tree metaphor in Romans 11 and specifically on God's promise through Paul to believing Jews (Paul himself being one such) in Romans 11:23, I immediately thought of my great grandmother, with whom the family faith had died. By saving me, God in his sovereign will restored me in my ancestral faith, albeit with fulfilment in Christ as the final, perfect sacrificial atonement for our sins. I had yearned for years to restore whatever was lost when my great grandmother had passed away, and God had indeed restored it, but under the Covenant of Grace as fully revealed finally in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. What I received when I was born again was, by God's grace, a spiritual inheritance from my great grandmother.

I surrendered to Christ on a Thursday night, and received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit the next night. Nine days later—a week after the following Sunday—my wife and I went to visit my mother. I was not yet ready to tell her the wonderful news of what had happened—and in my shame, I must admit that I still haven't told her, although I haven't yet set aside a time to be with her and tell her in person what's happened. At the time, I was still trying to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened—after all those many years of searching and striving and wondering, all without fulfilment—and still not 100% sure if I had really been born again. Practically all my life, I had so mistrusted and misunderstood the concept of being "born again," that I was still in disbelief that it had happened to me! I needed confirmation from the Lord, for I was not yet tutored in the concept of assurance of salvation.

We are not a wealthy family, and as far as I knew, my mother doesn't even own anything that goes back further than her own parents, except for some old photographs. I had long been very curious about my great grandmother, not least because in the absence of tangible relics from her life, she was highly enigmatic to me. What happened that evening at my mother's place was just as much a shock as my rebirth in Christ had been just barely a week earlier. We had finished dinner, and my mother said she had something for my wife. Out of the blue, she produced a gold bracelet. Now, it wasn't any old gold bracelet: it was one from my great grandmother, the person from whom I thought we had no heirlooms, and yet the very same person from whom I'd inherited the faith of my ancestors. I was gobsmacked! The Lord in His sovereign Will and inimitable style—working through my mother who has never known God and yet in this was an agent of His Will—confirmed the validity of my spiritual inheritance from my great grandmother with the small but meaningful symbol of my wife's material inheritance from the self-same person! When it comes time to sit down with my mother and tell her the Gospel, this story will be Exhibit Number One.

The Hebrew Scholar

My passion for Bible scholarship—which preceded my rebirth in Christ by many years—may have come from one of my great grandfathers—my father's mother's father—who also passed away before I was born. Charles Alexander Brodie Brockwell immigrated from England to Canada in 1906 to teach Hebrew and Semitic languages at McGill University in Montreal, where he would teach until 1937. He was an Anglican clergyman by background, and came to be an outspoken Canadian supporter—along with a number of North American evangelists—for the formation of a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land. He would sometimes speak publicly in Hebrew and encouraged "both Christians and Jews to study Jewish culture and the Hebrew language" (source). He was also an eccentric: according to my father, he claimed to be able to "prove" that any word in the English language derived ultimately from Hebrew.

But here's the kicker: he himself just might have been part Jewish. I don't know the fully family history yet, but he's probably related to the Scottish Clan Brodie. More remarkable yet, however, is that the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth from 1948 to 1965 was a gentleman by the name of Sir Israel Brodie—is Brodie some kind of Judeo-Scottish family name!? Could there be any relation—no matter how distant—between my Hebraicist, Anglican, Anglo-Scottish great grandfather and the former Chief Rabbi!? That's a mystery I will have to investigate in the years to come.

The Reformed Hymnodist

I suspect my great grandfather might have been a Dispensationalist, but fortunately, my father has some ancestors with more soundly Reformed tendencies, or at least sympathies. Before today, I only knew that Henry Thomas Smart was the nephew of Sir George Thomas Smart, an English conductor and friend of Beethoven and Weber, who was born in 1776 (the year of American independence) and died in 1867 (the year of Canadian confederation). Unlike his uncle, Henry Thomas was not a friend of famous composers, but he did his work for God. He was the organist at St Luke's Old Street for many years, then at St Pancras—both in London, and both Anglican churches. He may, nevertheless, have been himself Reformed, for apart from his tentmaking worship ministries, he was heavily involved for many years with Presbyterian hymnody. According to one website:

He edited The Presbyterian Hymnal, 1875, and the Chorale Book, 1856, which was later considered the standard for hymn-tune harmonization. Lightwood regards this work as instrumental in determining the harmonic structure of English hymn-tunes just as Bach's harmonizations did for the German chorale. He was also the music editor for [the English Presbyterian hymnbook] Psalms and Hymns for Divine Worship, 1867, and the hymn book of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. He also contributed tunes to Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1861, and to Psalms and Hymns, 1867.

Frankly, I myself am not so thoroughly versed in church hymns that I immediately recognize any of the hymns he scored, but he wrote the tune for Lead On, O King Eternal and the tune Regent Square, which is used in a number of hymns and which was named for Regent Square Presbyterian Church in London, whose pastor, a Dr. Hamilton, was the chief editor of Psalms and Hymns for Divine Worship. He also wrote Misericordia, an alternate arrangement for Just As I Am, the usual preferred scorings being Woodworth or Saffron Walden.

Anyhow, this concludes today's excursus. The purpose of today's post was not boastfulness—how can I boast in three such unknown people, two of whom might have been somewhat well known in their time but are certainly not famous today?—but to try to dig a bit deeper at why God called me. Why did He call me? I have no idea. None of us can know why he calls some and not others. It's certainly not due to any meritorious qualities of my own, and definitely in spite of my own sinful obstinacy, stubbornness, and selfishness. Who knows why He chooses any of us, but for His own glorification? But maybe, just maybe, He had let enough generations in my mother's and father's families lapse into faithlessness, that it was time to reignite in my generation the spark of faith of my ancestors—both Jewish and Gentile.