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English III – American Literature
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Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God
(From) Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
by
Jonathan Edwards
So that, thus is it that natural men are held in the hand of
God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already
sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards
them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness
of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or
abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them
up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the
flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and
swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break
out: and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach
that can be any security to them. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to
take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will,
and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an
incensed God.
The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this
congregation. This that you have heard is the case of every one of you that are
out of Christ. -- That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, is
extended abroad under you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of
the wrath of God; there is hell's wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing
to stand upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and
hell but the air; it is only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you
up.
You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept
out of hell, but do not see the hand of God in it; but look at other things, as
the good state of your bodily constitution, your care
of your own life, and the means you use for your own preservation. But indeed
these things are nothing; if God should withdraw his hand, they would avail no
more to keep you from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that is
suspended in it.
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…
The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for
the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an
outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty
is its course, when once it is let loose. It is true, that judgment against
your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God's vengeance
have been withheld; but your guilt in the mean time
is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the
waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is
nothing but the mere pleasure of God, that holds the waters back, that are
unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw
his hand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery
floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable
fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were
ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the
strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to
withstand or endure it.
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…
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