Posted on 10/12/2003 9:35:25 AM PDT by CCWoody
Perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached in America was the one Jonathan Edwards delivered entitled "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God." Not only has the sermon been reproduced in countless catalogs of preaching but it is included in most anthologies of early American literature. So scandalous is this vivid portrayal of unconverted man's precarious state under the threat of hell that some modern analysts have called it utterly sadistic.
Edwards' sermon is filled with graphic images of the fury of divine wrath and the horror of the relentless punishment of the wicked in hell. Such sermons are out of vogue in our age and generally considered in poor taste and based on a preenlightened theology. Sermons stressing the fierce wrath of a holy God aimed at the impenitent hearts of men do not fit with the civic meeting hall atmosphere of the local church. Gone are the Gothic arches; gone are the stained-glass windows; gone are the sermons that stir the soul to moral anguish. Ours is an upbeat generation with the accent on self-improvement and a broad-minded view of sin.
Our thinking goes like this: If there is a God at all, He is certainly not holy. If He is perchance holy, He is not just. Even if He is both holy and just, we need not fear because His love and mercy override His holy justice. If we can stomach His holy and just character, we can rest in one thing: He cannot possess wrath.
If we think soberly for five seconds, we must see our error. If God is holy at all, if God has an ounce of justice in His character, indeed if God exists as God, how could He possibly be anything else but angry with us? We violate His holiness; we insult His justice; we make light of His grace. These things can hardly be pleasing to Him.
Edwards understood the nature of God's holiness. He perceived that unholy men have much to fear from such a God. Edwards had little need to justify a scare theology. His consuming need was to preach it; to preach it vividly, emphatically, convincingly, and powerfully. He did this not out of a sadistic delight in frightening people, but out of compassion. He loved his congregation enough to warn them of the dreadful consequences of facing the wrath of God. He was not concerned with laying a guilt trip on his people but with awakening them to the peril they faced if they remained unconverted.
Let us take a moment to peruse a section of the sermon to get but a taste of its flavor:
The God that holds yore over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider; or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet, it is nothing but his hand that holds you from filling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, fill of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment…
The pace of the sermon is relentless. Edwards strikes blow after blow to the conscience-stricken hearts of his congregation. He draws graphic images from the Bible, all designed to warn sinners of their peril. He tells them that they are walking on slippery places with the danger of falling from their own weight. He says that they are walking across the pit of hell on a wooden bridge supported by rotten planks that may break at any second. He speaks of invisible arrows, which like a pestilence, fly at noonday. He warns that God's bow is bent and that the arrows of His wrath arc aimed at their hearts. He describes the wrath of God that is like great waters rushing against the floodgates of a dam. If the dam should break, the sinners would be inundated by a deluge. He reminds his hearers that there is nothing between them and hell but air:
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf; and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a Spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.
In the application section of the sermon Edwards places great stress on the nature and severity of God's wrath. Central to his thinking is the clear notion that a holy God must also be a wrathful God. He lists several key points about the wrath of God that we dare not overlook.
1. Whose wrath it in The wrath of which Edwards preached was the wrath of an infinite God. He contrasts God's wrath with the anger of men or the wrath of a king for his subject. Human wrath terminates. It has an ending point. It is limited. God's wrath can go on forever.
2. The fierceness of God's wrath. The Bible repeatedly likens God's wrath to a winepress of fierceness. In hell there is no moderation or mercy given. God's anger is not mere annoyance or a mild displeasure. It is a consuming rage against the unrepentant.
3. It is an everlasting wrath. There is no end to the anger of God directed against those in hell. If we had any compassion for our fellow-men, we would wail at the thought of a single one of them falling into the pit of hell. We could not stand to hear the cries of the damned for five seconds. To be exposed to God's fury for a moment would be more than we could bear. To contemplate it for eternity is too awful to consider. With sermons like this we do not want to be awakened. We long for blissful slumber, for the repose of tranquil sleep.
The tragedy for us is that in spite of the clear warnings qf Scripture, and of the sober teaching of Jesus on this subject, we continue to be at ease in Zion with respect to the future punishment of the wicked. If God is to be believed at all we must face the awful truth that someday His furious wrath will be poured out.
Edwards observed:
Almost every natural man that hears of hell flatters himself that he shall escape it; he depends upon himself for his own security; he flatters himself in what he has done, in what be is now doing, or what he intends to do. Every one lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself and that his schemes will not fail
How do we react to Edwards' sermon? Does it provoke a sense of fear? Does it make us angry? Are we feeling like a multitude of people who have nothing but scorn for any ideas about hell and everlasting punishment? Do we consider the wrath of God as a primitive or obscene concept? Is the very notion of hell an insult to us? If so, it is clear that the God we worship is not a holy God: Indeed He is not a God at all. If we despise the justice of God, we are not Christians. We stand in a position which is every bit as precarious as the one which Edwards so graphically described. If we hate the wrath of God, it is because we hate God Himself. We may protest vehemently against these charges but our vehemence only confirms our hostility toward God. We may say emphatically, "No, it is not God I hate; it is Edwards that I hate. God is altogether sweet to me. My God is a God of love." But a God of love who has no wrath is no God. He is an idol of our own making as much as if we carved Him out of stone.
I believe Woody brought this point up in another thread that the disciple didn't leave until Jesus made this statement regarding Unconditional Election.....
John 6:65 And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father.John 6:66 From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.
The disciples stuck around after the bread/flesh metaphor. They left once Unconditional Election was taught.
No, thanks be to God! That - God's justice and man's depravity and inability - is the backdrop for the atonement. This is precisely why the spotless Lamb of God, Who kept the Law perfectly in thought, word, and deed, had to offer up Himself in the place of all who would be saved.
Jesus Christ paid the price for the sin of His people. His righteousness is credited to them. Their sin was put upon Him, Who became sin for them. To quantify his suffering (as though this were within human capacity), He suffered the equivalent of all of His people spending an eternity in Hell. He paid their way with His own suffering. The Paradox of History: History's greatest travesty of Justice is the sinner's greatest hope.
Only He could do this, being both man (and able to atone for the sins of man) and God (able to bear the awful burden of God's wrath).
This - the life, death, burial, and resurrection of the second Person of the Holy Trinity for poor, hellworthy sinners like you and me - is the Gospel.
The simple fact is this is the precedent-setting schism of the Jews mimicked by your 16th century protestant progenitors and you echo their oral traditions.
Jesus was simply indicating he had knowledge of their unbelieving carnal minds. As St. Augustine commented about this passage "Nondum traheris? Ora ut trahis. "Pray that the Father may draw you to his Son." (Isn't it odd that Augustine, putatively the proto-calvinist, didn't cite this as a proof text in support of Calvin's noveleties.) Once there, you STILL will have to choose to follow him or not.
Right now, y'all following Jean Cauvin and the oral traditions of the 16th century, innocently, it appears, unaware his opios contradicts all the early Christians.
St. Hilary of Potiers, among others, in 356 A.D., commenting on the Trinity sources those exact lines and has not a whit to say about Calvin's Dark Doctrines.
Same for Origen in 244 A.D. "Formerly there was Baptism, in an obscure way, in the cloud and the sea; now however, in full view, there is regeneration in water and the Holy Spirit. Formerly, in an obscure way, there was manna for food; now, howewver, in full view, there is the true food, the Flesh of the ord of God, as He Himeself says; "My Flesh is truly food, and My Blod is truly drink."
There is NO historical Ecclesiastical Exegesis, prior to the Dark Doctrines, that even hints those passages are about Unconditional election.
Y'all have itchy ears for the preaching of a New Gospel and y'all following the new gospel of Calvin, something the early Christians never heard of.
Those words, however, in which He says, "How often would I have gathered your children together, but you would not" make clear the ancient law of human liberty; for God made man free from the beginning, so that he possessed his own power just as his own soul, to follow God's will freely, not being compelled by God. For with God there is no coercion; but a good will is present with Him always. He, therefore, gives good counsel to all. In man as well as in angels - for angels are rational - He has placed a power of choice, so that those who obeyed might justly possess the good things whoch, indeed, God gives, but whichthey themsleves must preserve...God therefore has given good...and they who work with it will receive glory and honor, becuase they have done good when they were able to do otherwise. But those who do not do it will receive God's just judgement, because they did not do good when they were able to do it."
Wonderful YOPIOS! Try verse 61.
This bothers you, doesn't it? It bothered me, too, when I first heard it. It goes against our grain, as humans and especially as Americans (and Europeans, to a lesser extent). That grain is that we are important, our wants and desires we are accustomed to having fulfulled, and we generally get what we want. In short, we are little gods. We have things pretty easy in the 21st century; it's difficult to believe the Bible, that our hearts are "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" (Jer. 17:9).
No, your beliefs don't "bother me". I'm just pointing out to you how wrong they are. I can only shake my head in disbelief at how muddle headed they make you folks.
They think He died only for the elect, and loves only the elect, which they self-define as themselves.
God knows His own. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. No one can come to Him unless the Father draws him.
Yawn. I've heard this a zillion times. Christ shed his blood for all men, but not all men have their sins forgiven by this, because some do not want them forgiven.
Regarding your clause, "which they self-define as themselves", this is not accurate. Not all Calvinists presumptionists. I know of a church with over 1,000 souls in which most of them believe they are yet unsaved (and I suspect many of those really are saved). Moreover, I know of souls who think they are saved and whose lives brings forth only bad fruit. We all know of such; all we have to do, each one of us, is look into the mirror.
Good. At least they recognize they can still sin and be judged for it.
As to the rest, God hates them and can barely restrain Himself from His punishing them forthwith.
Ask yourself this: How could God damn one he loves to the Lake of Fire?
Because the damned have chosen that state. Out of love, God lets them live apart from Him in torment. Its what they wanted.
We all take it for granted that we're worth a great deal - and we are; God sent His only begotten Son to die for man, indeed, for ALL mankind.
If He died for all, He loves all.
God hates sin. He hates sinners as well (yes, the Bible contradicts the popular saying). Each and every one of us is a sinner.
Again, God does not hate. Sin and evil are forms of non-existence. The absence of God's love would mean an end to the existence of that thing.
There is no reason any of us deserve to go to Heaven. No, it is not fair that God would only choose some and not others.
Some of us deserve heaven because we cooperate with God's grace. By doing so we really merit eternal life as a gift from God. And sure as heck it is fair. The others chose to reject God. He just gives them what they want, which was not eternal life with Him.
If it were fair, we'd all be in Hell, and the Son of God would have been spared unspeakable torment.
What you describe is not "fair" but "perfection".
And no, it would not be "fair" to send everyone to Hell, nor is it possible that God could allow His creation to come to that, because God is Love. His Love and Justice would not permit Him to sit idly by and allow His good creation to be given over to the Devil without any hope of salvation. God did not create us for the eternal fire, but for eternal life.
Again, that some are lost is from their own choice. Its not a "failure" on the part of God.
You nullify God's Grace with statements like this. Does Righteousness come by the Law?
Do you get private audiences alot... and do you get them specifically so you can taunt other Christians with an "I'm right and you're wrong -- nana boo" attitude?
Inquiring minds want to know.
You nullify God's Grace with statements like this. Does Righteousness come by the Law?
Please show me where the word "Law" enters into what I said above, or where I said Righteousness comes from it.
and the Lord takes me off for a private audience and gives me yet another verse which proves that your interpretations of the Bible are not correct.
Do you get private audiences alot... and do you get them specifically so you can taunt other Christians with an "I'm right and you're wrong -- nana nana boo boo" attitude?
Inquiring minds want to know.
There, much better...
I don't think I quoted you as saying "Law" in that post. In past posts on this thread you have talked about the importance of following the Law and being Just because of it. So I asked you if Righteousness can come by following the Law.
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