The Storm That Washed a Slaver Clean

On March 21, 1748, a violent storm nearly swallowed the merchant ship Greyhound in the North Atlantic. John Newton, a twenty-three-year-old slave trader hardened by years of cruelty and blasphemy, found himself lashed to the helm for eleven desperate hours as waves crashed over the deck and the hull splintered around him. Seawater poured into the hold faster than the crew could pump it out. Newton had mocked God for years. Now, chest-deep in freezing water, he cried out to the Almighty for mercy he knew he did not deserve.

The ship limped into an Irish port. Newton survived. But something had passed through him in those waters — not just fear, but the first stirring of a conscience long dead. He later wrote that the storm was the moment God began to drag him from spiritual death into life. Over the following years, that seed grew until Newton left the slave trade entirely, was ordained, and penned the words to Amazing Grace.

Peter tells us that water symbolizes the baptism that saves — not as a washing of the body, but as the pledge of a clear conscience toward God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Newton understood. The Righteous One had suffered for the unrighteous to bring him to God. The same waters that should have destroyed him became the passage to new life — just as they did for Noah, just as they do for every soul that passes through death into the risen Christ.