Winthrop wanted the Christian commonwealth in Massachusetts to be a beacon for Christ and to differ from the rest of the world. He wanted the people to keep covenant with God, lest His wrath break out on them for breaching that covenant.

Many Europeans who fled religious persecution in the old country came to the new world in order to rightly serve and worship Christ. The pilgrims and Puritans wanted to be a community set apart for God and his purposes. Thus they often saw biblical passages as being relevant to their new start in the new land.

There would be many examples of this, but one of the more famous ones comes in the form of a short message from the English lawyer and Puritan leader John Winthrop (1588-1649). He sailed to America in 1630 along with some 700 other Puritans on several ships.

He served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 until his death. Just before making the trip to North America, or while en route, he delivered his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it is found the famous phrase, “a city upon a hill”.

That of course is a reference to Matthew 5:14 in which Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Winthrop wanted the Christian commonwealth in Massachusetts to be a beacon for Christ and to differ from the rest of the world.

He wanted the people to keep covenant with God, lest his wrath break out on them for breaching that covenant. As he said in the second half of his message:

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.

Note how so much of this draws upon Deuteronomy 30:15-20:

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