Bruce Baber (5
July 2013)
"Sermon delivered on
July 8th, 1741"
Jonathan Edwards delivered this fiery sermon, Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God, on July 8th, 1741. Here is an
excerpt which contains what I think is the most famous
passage. If it was relevant to Edward’s generation, what
would he have said to our own?
YbiC
Bruce Baber
The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the
string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains
the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and
that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all,
that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your
blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of
heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls;
all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and
raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before
altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an
angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many
things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a
form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house
of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from
being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction.
However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you
hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that
are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that
it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of
them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were
saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on
which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin
air and empty shadows.
The God that holds you 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
falling 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 was 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, full 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.