Deep unto Deep
Oil on canvas 5' x 7'

The details and quotes contained in the following story are recorded on pages 246-249 of The History of the sufferings of the Church of Scotland, by Robert Wodrow.

During the 1600's, the Church of Scotland was challenged by King James II of England to recognize his authority as their highest spiritual head. Birthed as they were from the Protestant reformation of Europe, the young Scottish church was establishing a faith built on the foundation of scripture and the headship of Christ alone. They refused to accept the English king as the supreme head of their church. They refused to take the obligatory oath declaring him as their spiritual head. And they would not surrender to him the right to decide how they would worship God. 

The Scottish cry for religious liberty (led by a group called Covenanters) was met with almost a century of persecution. The struggle escalated and in 1662 over 300 Scottish ministers were forced out of their pulpits into hiding. Their churches were chained shut. Preaching in fields followed, until new laws were written in 1670 that made meeting in fields treasonable and attending such meetings punishable by death.

17 year-old Margaret Wilson and her 13 year-old sister were firm followers of the teachings of the Covenant preachers. With their leaders forced into hiding, they hid as well in the forest and caves to escape persecution. As winter came on, the girls were returning home for extra clothing and food when they were betrayed by a friend, captured and imprisoned in the notorious "thieves hole" jail for 6 weeks. Their father was able to raise enough money to pay for the release of the younger Wilson daughter; but due to her unswerving faith, Margaret, along with a 63 year-old woman, was sentenced to death by drowning.

On May 11, 1685, these two women were taken to the mouth of the Bladnoch River, which takes in a great deal of water at high tide. While the tide was out, stakes were driven deeply into the sand and the women were bound to the stakes. In an attempt to wring a change of mind from the younger woman, the English soldiers tied the older woman to the stake farthest out, forcing young Margaret to watch the older woman's drowning. As death took the oldest, Margaret said to the soldiers, "Think you that we are the sufferers? No, it is Christ in us, for He sends none a warfare upon their own charges."

Turning then to the crowd that had gathered, she opened her bible and read aloud the 8th chapter of Romans, until the tide rose too high for her to continue reading, She then tossed her scriptures up on the shore and began to sing the 25th Psalm in the Scottish metrical version. As the waves eventually closed over her mouth and nose, the soldiers came out to her in a boat, united her, pulled her from the waters and revived her. When she could speak again, they asked her again to take an oath of allegiance to the King as her spiritual head. 

"Pray for the King!" the soldiers shouted. 

"I wish for the salvation of all and the damnation of none," was her reply; "God save the King, if He will," she continued, "for it is his salvation I desire." 

They then tried again to get her to renounce her covenant beliefs by saying an oath stating that the King was her true spiritual head. 

"I will make no oath", was her final, courageous reply: "Let me go – I am Christ's child." 

At this they plunged her back into the deep waters to her post in the sand, where it is recorded that "with joy" she surrendered her life into the hands of her King

Peculiar Graces: Deep unto Deep.  By Margaret’s own declaration, a child’s grace from God is peculiar to this story.  Margaret was wholly adopted in mind, body, emotions to one Father, her King - and to His holy Son, her Savior.  She knew her place within the family of God. She knew also that very real kingdom. In choosing Romans 8 as her departing declaration in scripture, she revealed this very truth. She knew the King over all kings and Lord over all lords.  She was in this world, but not of it. She had ascended into eternal realities and as a child of God, born in her spirit into His family by His Spirit through faith. She was living out all of these spiritual realities here on earth, praying, as the Lord had instructed His followers (His ‘children’, as she put it) to pray, that things would be here ‘as they are in heaven’.   The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.