The Forty-Year Campaign of William Wilberforce

In 1787, a young British parliamentarian named William Wilberforce sat at his desk in a London study, reading testimony from the holds of slave ships. The accounts were almost unbearable — men and women chained in rows, children separated from mothers, human beings treated as cargo. Wilberforce was only twenty-eight years old, but he had recently come to faith in Christ, and something in those pages broke him open.

For the next forty-six years, Wilberforce leveraged every ounce of his political authority on behalf of people he would never meet. He introduced abolition bills that failed year after year. He was mocked, threatened, and told the economy would collapse without slave labor. But he kept standing in Parliament, kept speaking for those who had no voice in that chamber.

When the Slavery Abolition Act finally passed in 1833, three days before Wilberforce died, it freed over 800,000 enslaved people across the British Empire. He had used power exactly as the psalmist envisioned — to deliver the needy who cried out, to rescue the afflicted who had no helper.

Psalm 72 paints a portrait of authority wielded not for self-enrichment but for the flourishing of the vulnerable. "He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor." Every earthly ruler who bends power toward justice offers us a faint but beautiful echo of the coming King whose righteous reign will endure as long as the sun. Blessed be His glorious name forever.