They Cried To The Lord

HISTORY · DELIVERANCE

Eight deliverances, two defeats, and the God who hears

The papers before this one argued that deliverance comes from God, not from the ballot, and that a Christian’s part is to repent, pray, and be faithful in what he has been given. That is easy to affirm and hard to believe when the danger is real. This paper sets eight times that Christians in desperate straits called on God beside the answer they received, and two times the answer was no. The pattern is older than any of them, and it is the reason a man can trust the Lord in his own distress.

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01

The refrain

Psalm 106 in the Greek Old Testament tells four stories of men in trouble: wanderers in the desert, prisoners in chains, the sick near death, and sailors in a storm. Each story turns on the same line. “Then they cried to the Lord in their affliction, and he delivered them out of their distresses” (Ps. 106:6 [107:6]). The psalm says it four times because God did it four times. The book of Judges says it more often than that: “And the children of Israel cried to the Lord; and the Lord raised up a saviour to Israel, and he saved them” (Judg. 3:9).

The pattern did not end with the apostles. Christians have been besieged, outnumbered, and abandoned by their allies many times since, and many times they did what Israel did. What follows are eight of those times, taken from the sources nearest to the events, and two times the city fell anyway.

We quote the old sources and say who wrote them. We give the odds in the words of the men who were there or in the figures of careful historians, never in the inflated counts of medieval chroniclers, and where a story passes into legend, we say so. Several of these Christians prayed in ways many of our readers would not, before icons, at Mass, or to the saints. We report what they did without endorsing all of it. The God who answered them was not waiting for their theology to be perfect before He heard them, and one of the men below had no theology at all.

In every case below there were means: walls, armies, weather, and allies who came or failed to come. Scripture never sets those against God. “A horse is prepared for the day of battle; but help is of the Lord” (Prov. 21:31). The means are His, and the help is His.

None of these accounts puts God in debt. Prayer is not a technique, and the last sections of this paper say so plainly. But the refrain is true, and a reader who finishes these pages should know it is true for him.

02

Nisibis, fourth century

Nisibis sat on the frontier between Rome and Persia, and the Persian king Shapur besieged it more than once. Theodoret of Cyrus, writing in the next century, tells how the Persians dammed the river that ran through the city and loosed it against the walls, which gave way in two places. The bishop, James, did not man the breach. He prayed, and Theodoret credits the defense to him, won “by beseeching the Lord of all within the church.” By the time Shapur attacked, the breaches had been walled up again.

Ephrem, the deacon who became the great hymn-writer of the Syrian church, then begged the bishop to curse the enemy from the wall. James climbed a tower, looked at “the innumerable host,” and asked only that mosquitoes and gnats be sent against them. Theodoret records what followed: “On his prayer followed clouds of mosquitoes and gnats; they filled the hollow trunks of the elephants, and the ears and nostrils of horses and other animals.” The animals broke loose, the ranks dissolved, and “the Persians abandoned their camp and fled head-long.”

Historians think Theodoret joined events from more than one of Shapur’s sieges into a single story. His judgment about the outcome is plain either way. The enemy, he writes, were driven off “not by the Roman army, but by Him whom the pious in the Roman host worshipped as their God.”

Some glory in chariots, and some in horses: but we will glory in the name of the Lord our God.

PSALM 19:8 [20:7]

03

Tolbiac, about 496

Clovis, king of the Franks, was still a pagan when his army began to break before the Alamanni. His wife Clotilda was a Christian, and she had been urging her God on him for years. Gregory of Tours, writing within a century, records what the king did when he saw his army “in danger of destruction.” He raised his eyes to heaven and, “with remorse in his heart he burst into tears and cried: ‘Jesus Christ, whom Clotilda asserts to be the son of the living God, who art said to give aid to those in distress, and to bestow victory on those who hope in thee, I beseech the glory of thy aid.’” He vowed to believe and be baptized if Christ would rescue him, and he said why: “I have invoked my own gods but, as I find, they have withdrawn from aiding me.”

Gregory’s next sentence is the answer. “And when he said thus, the Alamanni turned their backs, and began to disperse in flight.” Clovis kept his vow and was baptized, and many of his warriors with him.

Clovis was not one of God’s people when he prayed, and that is why his story belongs here. If the Lord heard a pagan king calling on a God he knew only from his wife, no man reading this is too far away to be heard.

The Lord is near to all that call upon him,
to all that call upon him in truth.

PSALM 144:18 [145:18]

04

Edington, 878

In the winter of 878 a Danish army fell on Wessex without warning, at Chippenham, just after Twelfth Night. The last English kingdom still standing gave way in weeks. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the Danes riding over the land until the people were “subdued to their will; all but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods and fastnesses of the moors.”

From a stronghold on the island of Athelney, in the Somerset marshes, Alfred raided the Danes through the spring. In the seventh week after Easter he rode to a place called Egbert’s Stone, and the men of three shires came out to meet him. His biographer Asser, a bishop who knew him, describes their joy at seeing the king “restored alive, as it were, after such great tribulation.” Two days later at Edington, Alfred fought the whole Danish army “by means of a close shield-wall,” and Asser gives the result to its author: “with the divine help, he defeated with great slaughter.”

The deliverance did not end in slaughter. Three weeks later the Danish king Guthrum came to Alfred at Aller, near Athelney, and Alfred, in Asser’s words, “receiving him as a son by adoption, raised him up from the holy font of baptism.” The oldest sources do not record the prayers Alfred prayed in the marsh. Later writers filled that silence with a vision of St. Cuthbert, which we set aside. What the old sources do record is enough: a king reduced to a little band, a victory credited to God, and an enemy made a son.

For the Lord is not straitened to save by many or by few.

1 KINGDOMS 14:6 [1 SAMUEL 14:6]

05

Lechfeld, 955

For half a century Magyar horsemen had raided German lands almost at will. In the summer of 955 they came in force and besieged Augsburg, whose bishop, Ulrich, held the walls. King Otto marched to meet them. The Saxon chronicler Widukind records what the army did on the eve of battle: “After a fast had been observed in the camp the order was given that on the following day all should be ready for battle.” Otto made a vow as well. The chronicler Thietmar, later bishop of Merseburg, records that the king promised God a bishopric at Merseburg in honor of St. Lawrence, on whose feast day, August 10, the battle was fought.

The Magyars were broken. The raids that had terrorized Europe for two generations ended, and less than half a century later the Magyars had a Christian king of their own, Stephen, crowned in the year 1000. Otto kept his vow. The see of Merseburg was founded in 968, a standing thank-offering for the day God answered.

And call upon me in the day of affliction; and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.

PSALM 49:15 [50:15]

06

Belgrade, 1456

Three years after Constantinople fell, Sultan Mehmed II brought the army and the guns that had taken it to Belgrade, the gate of Hungary. The siege began on July 4. On June 29 Pope Callixtus III had already ordered the bells of every church rung at noon, so that Christians everywhere would stop and pray for the defenders. Across Europe, at midday, people prayed for a city most of them would never see.

John Hunyadi broke the Ottoman blockade on the Danube on July 14 and got into the city. The friar John of Capistrano had preached a crusade through the countryside, and his recruits were mostly peasants, poorly armed and barely trained. On July 21 the sultan threw everything at the breached walls, and the defenders held through the night. The next day Capistrano’s peasants, without orders, poured out of the fortress against the Ottoman lines. Hunyadi joined the attack, the Ottoman camp was overrun, the sultan was wounded, and the army that had taken Constantinople withdrew.

In many places the pope’s order and the news of the victory arrived together, and the bell that had been rung to ask for deliverance was rung to give thanks for it. Callixtus let the new meaning stand, and many churches still ring it at noon.

Then they cried to the Lord in their affliction,
and he saved them out of their distresses.

PSALM 106:13 [107:13]

07

The Ugra, 1480

For more than two centuries the princes of Russia had paid tribute to the Horde. When Ivan III of Moscow stopped paying, Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde marched on him, counting on the king of Poland-Lithuania to join him. In October 1480 the two armies met across the Ugra River, within striking distance of Moscow. After days of fighting at the fords, they stood and faced each other across the water.

Ivan wavered. He sent his family and his treasury to safety, and some of his counselors urged him to fall back. The archbishop of Rostov, Vassian, wrote him a letter now known as the Epistle to the Ugra. It urged the prince to repent of his sins, to trust God as Israel’s judges had, and not to think of his wife, his children, and his wealth the way a man does when he is looking for a way to run. In Moscow the people kept up their prayers.

The Lithuanian army never came. The river began to freeze. Ivan pulled his army back to better ground, and Akhmat, fearing a trap, turned for home. There was no great battle. The Horde left, and it never ruled Moscow again. Later writers made the stand into more than it was, and Vassian’s letter was the first to try. The plain facts are enough: the prince was urged to stand and trust God, he stood, and the danger withdrew.

Be of good courage: stand and see the salvation which is from the Lord.

EXODUS 14:13

08

Malta, 1565

By 1565 Suleiman the Magnificent had resolved to finish the Knights of St. John, whom he had already driven from Rhodes. His armada arrived off Malta on May 18. The Maltese historian Victor Mallia-Milanes counts some 23,000 to 25,000 Turks landing against 500 knights and some 8,000 men. The Grand Master, Jean de Valette, had appealed to the powers of Europe. Only the king of Spain and the pope answered, and Spain’s relief would not come for months.

According to the order’s historians, Valette told his knights that the war was a contest between the Gospel and the Koran, and they received Holy Communion together and vowed their lives to the defense of the faith. Then they held. Fort St. Elmo fell on June 23, after a month of bombardment, its garrison killed almost to the last man. The main forts held through the summer, under assaults that broke inside the walls. Francisco Balbi, a soldier in the garrison, kept a diary of the siege, and he records Valette, past seventy, going into a breach himself.

Relief landed in September. On the eighth, the feast the island already kept, the Ottomans gave up the siege and sailed away. Malta has kept September 8 as its day of thanksgiving ever since.

God is our refuge and strength, a help in the afflictions that have come heavily upon us.

PSALM 45:2 [46:1]

09

Vienna, 1683

In July 1683 the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa laid siege to Vienna with an army far larger than its garrison. The emperor had left the city. For two months the defenders held while Ottoman miners tunneled under the walls and blew breaches in them. By September the city was near the end.

Relief came under Jan Sobieski, king of Poland, with imperial and German troops. For years before the siege, the Capuchin friar Marco d’Aviano had preached repentance through the empire, warning that God would chastise a careless people. On the morning of September 12, on the Kahlenberg above the city, he said Mass for the army, and Sobieski heard it. That afternoon the relief army came down the hills, the Polish cavalry charged into the Ottoman camp, and by evening the siege was broken.

Sobieski sent a captured Ottoman banner to the pope, and tradition gives his report in three words that turn Caesar’s boast inside out. Caesar wrote, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Sobieski wrote, “Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit”: we came, we saw, God conquered. Pope John Paul II repeated the words on the Kahlenberg three centuries later. Whether or not the king wrote them in exactly that form, they say what the victors believed, and what God required of Gideon’s army: that no man should boast, “My hand has saved me” (Judg. 7:2).

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to thy name give glory.

PSALM 113:9 [115:1]

10

But if not

The refrain is true. It is not a formula, and two defeats show the difference.

Hattin, 1187. In July 1187 the army of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem marched against Saladin carrying its most precious relic, a piece of the True Cross, as it had carried it into battle before. At the Horns of Hattin, parched and surrounded, the army was destroyed and the Cross was taken. Jerusalem surrendered that autumn. The relic had been carried as a guarantee, and God is not bound by guarantees. The lesson of Hattin is not that God failed. It is that an object carried as a charm is not a cry.

Constantinople, 1453. Constantinople is harder. In the spring of 1453 the city prayed and held processions, and on the night before the final assault Greeks and Latins gathered together for a last service in Hagia Sophia. On May 29 the walls were breached, the city fell, and its emperor died in the fighting. Nothing in the record suggests the prayers were false. The answer was no.

Scripture has room for both answers. The three Hebrews told the king, “For our God whom we serve is in the heavens, able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will rescue us from thy hands, O king. But if not, be it known to thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods” (Dan. 3:17–18). They believed God would save them, and they had already decided what they would do if He did not. Hebrews praises the saints who “turned to flight the armies of the aliens,” and in the next breath those who “were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection” (Heb. 11:34–35). It commends them all.

11

Call upon Him

Why should a man believe the refrain for himself? Because the same God keeps it. The psalm that says “a king is not saved by reason of a great host” goes on: “Behold, the eyes of the Lord are on them that fear him, those that hope in his mercy; to deliver their souls from death” (Ps. 32:16, 18–19 [33:16, 18–19]).

Most of our readers will never command an army or defend a city. Their sieges are smaller: a failing business, a sick child, a marriage in trouble, a debt, a fear that wakes them at night. The Lord who heard Clovis in the middle of a lost battle hears a man alone in his truck in a parking lot. It is the same God, the same cry, and the same promise. Paul, who had once despaired of his own life, drew the conclusion we want every reader to draw: “we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead: Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us” (2 Cor. 1:9–10).

He delivered. He does deliver. He will yet deliver. And if in some trial He does not, the answer is the one the three Hebrews gave, and it is still His to honor. Call on Him.

SOURCES

Texts and histories

SCRIPTURE

Old Testament: The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844), with English Bible references in brackets where the numbering differs.

New Testament: The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611).

PRIMARY

Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History II.26, trans. Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 3 (1892).

Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II.30, trans. Ernest Brehaut (1916).

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 878, trans. James Ingram (1823).

Asser, Life of King Alfred, chs. 55–56, trans. Albert S. Cook (1906).

Widukind of Corvey, Deeds of the Saxons III.44 (Internet Medieval Sourcebook).

Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, book II.

Callixtus III, bull of 29 June 1456, ordering the noon bell.

Vassian Rylo, archbishop of Rostov, Epistle to the Ugra (1480).

Francisco Balbi di Correggio, diary of the siege of Malta (Spanish edition, 1568).

John Paul II, address on the Kahlenberg, Vienna (13 September 1983).

SECONDARY

Victor Mallia-Milanes, “The Siege of Malta, 1565, Revisited.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), “Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem.”

Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament quotations follow Brenton’s Septuagint and New Testament quotations the King James Version. Where an account passes into legend, the text says so. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com