A Match Made In Heaven

A Match Made In Heaven

This match made in heaven had to wait until heaven.

DAVID BRAINERD was born in 1718 in Connecticut. He entered Yale in 1739, shortly after his conversion to Christ. During his second year George Whitefield brought the Great Awakening to Yale, and tensions arose between students who were awakened and faculty members who weren’t.

Jonathan Edwards was invited to preach at the 1741 commencement in hopes that he would dampen the students’ enthusiasm for the revival. But his sermon was not what the faculty wanted to hear. He sided with the students and argued that the Great Awakening was a genuine work of God. That very morning the trustees had voted that a student could be expelled for accusing a faculty member of being unconverted. In his address that afternoon Edwards stated, “It is no evidence that a work is not a work of God, if many that are subjects of it . . . are guilty of [so] great forwardness to censure others as unconverted.” This also was the first meeting of David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards, and they soon realized that they had much in common and saw each other often.

One wonders if Jonathan Edwards felt partly responsible when the following year David Brainerd, though first in his class, was expelled from Yale for being overheard saying that a certain tutor “had no more grace than a chair.”

Brainerd found his life calling as a missionary to the Indians. His first assignment was to work among the Mohican Indians at Kaunaumeek, Massachusetts, about twenty miles northwest of Stockbridge, where Jonathan Edwards later served as a missionary.

During this time Brainerd took many trips to Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards pastored. One of the benefits of visiting his mentor was getting to know Jerusha, Edwards’s second daughter. They fell in love and eventually became engaged. She sometimes accompanied him when he preached in New England churches, and they corresponded throughout his missionary work among the Indians.

After a year in Massachusetts, Brainerd was reassigned to work among the Indians of Crossweeksung, New Jersey. There Brainerd saw 130 Indians come to Christ. Stricken with tuberculosis, he finally became too weak to minister, and in May of 1747 Jonathan Edwards invited him to stay at his home. Jerusha served as his very attentive nurse. Brainerd wrote, “It is a little piece of heaven to be in her presence.”

On Sunday, October 4, 1747, Brainerd knew he was about to die. As Jerusha entered his room that morning he said, “Dear Jerusha, are you willing to part with me? I am willing to part with you; I am willing to part with all my friends; I am willing to part with my dear brother John. . . . I have committed him and all my friends to God and can leave them with God. Though, if I had thought I should not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part with you. But we shall spend a happy eternity together.”

Five days later David Brainerd was dead at the age of twenty-nine. Jerusha Edwards came down with tuberculosis as well and died the following Valentine’s Day at the age of eighteen, joining her beloved in eternity. Her family buried her next to David.

In 1749 Jonathan Edwards published the diaries of Brainerd, the one who was to have been his son-in-law. He called it The Life of Brainerd. It has been in print continuously to this day and has been used by God to shape the lives of John Wesley, Henry Martyn, William Carey, Robert Morrison, Robert Murray McCheyne, David Livingstone, Andrew Murray, Jim Elliot and tens of thousands of others.

David and Jerusha’s lives were brief, but their joy in heaven is great!

Reflection

David Brainerd hoped to marry Jerusha Edwards, but it was not part of God’s plan for them. Imagine Jerusha Edwards’s grief at his death. Yet God brought great glory to himself out of their short lives. When we experience intense disappointments in our lives, let us think of David and Jerusha and how God used their lives in a different way than they anticipated. They got to be together but not on this earth.

He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.

Revelation 21:4