"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 . . .
"Let everyone who is out of Christ, now awaken and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great number of you. Let everyone fly out of Sodom:
Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed (Genesis 19:17)."
-- Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God
3 comments:
Just read this sermon for the first time last night and that first paragraph grabbed me too.
It seems surprising that his sermon focuses so much on the depravity of man and the wrath of God that people would respond to the message. He over and over again points to the fact that it is the pleasure of God that holds us from wrath, but maybe people were different back then and focusing on how terrible people are was the message people longed to hear.
People don't like that message today, which might be the reason we need to hear it all the more. Although he does say "everyone lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation" which seems pretty bang on for today as well. Why is it that the Holy Spirit doesn't seem to lead preachers to this message as much any more. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he does, but outside a select few, I don't hear it much.
Anyways, thanks for this.
Yes I definitely agree with you. Those who are living in darkness will taste the wrath of God and they will feel the pain and suffering. Come out from the dark and surrender to the Lord. It is never too late.
As I read this, by itself, lifted out of the context of the sermon, I find that my own tendency toward making religion, my own leanings toward idolatry, are thrown into sharp relief. When I read this, my mind naturally wants to interpret this that I must try harder, work more, put in greater effort to be saved -- in essence I need to build a better spider web.
I have not read the whole sermon, yet I hope that Edwards is clear that Jesus is the one to whom we must flee. Our flight is not by the strength of our own legs, but He gives us the strength of faith and carries us to himself.
I say this because I am certainly a dead man. I have found that no matter where I turn, I am too slow, too weak, to confused to run in the right direction. If my salvation depends on my running, I am sunk.
Jesus help me.
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