Deliverance

Robinson Crusoe is, of course, a classic work of fiction. Few, I suspect, think of it as a work of Christian fiction. The illustration is by N.C. Wyeth, followed by a commentary on quotations from the book.

Three times a verse of Scripture comes to Robinson Crusoe in an hour of special need.

The first came in a spell of sickness. Recalling that the Brazilians used tobacco as a medicine, he searched in one of the chests for a roll of tobacco — and found a Bible. This he opened casually, and the first words that came to him were, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." (Psalm 50:15).

"The words," he wrote in his diary, "were very apt to my case, and made some impression on my thoughts at the time…though not so much as they did afterwards. .... Before I lay down I did what I had never done in all my life: I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me."

The second occasion was during a sense of sin. Recovered from his sickness, he began reading in the New Testament with the not uncommon result that he had found himself more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of his past life. "Now," he records, "I began to construe the words mentioned above, 'Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,' in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of anything being called deliverance, but my being delivered from the captivity I was in…the island was certainly a prison to me…but now I learned to take it in another sense.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort…. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction." .... (more)

"Robinson Crusoe and the Bible"