Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a sermon Jonathan Edwards preached at Enfield, Connecticut, on 8 July 1741, at the height of the Great Awakening. It is the most famous sermon ever preached in America, and probably the most misunderstood. Most people meet it in a school anthology as an example of Puritan terror, and come away thinking Edwards was a ranter who enjoyed frightening farmers. He was not. He read the sermon in a level voice from a manuscript, and its purpose, stated in its own closing pages, was to bring people to a door of mercy that he believed was standing open.
Here is what actually happened that day, what the sermon argues step by step, what people get wrong about it, what it says to a reader now, and how to read it well. The full text is free in the Ochorus library.
What happened at Enfield
By the summer of 1741 revival had been spreading through the towns of the Connecticut River valley for several months. George Whitefield had passed through the year before; churches that had been formal and quiet were full of people asking what they must do to be saved. Enfield was an exception. The town had stayed cold, and ministers from neighbouring parishes had gathered to pray for it. Edwards, the minister at Northampton, was invited to preach.
He brought a sermon he had already preached at home, to little effect. He was thirty-seven, tall, thin, and by every account a poor performer: he spoke quietly, kept his eyes on his manuscript or on the bell rope at the back of the church, and made almost no gestures. He was a scholar who had been reading Newton and Locke since his teens. Nothing about the man in the pulpit explains what happened next.
Before he was far into the application, people began to cry out. One witness, the minister Stephen Williams, wrote in his diary that there was a great moaning and crying through the whole house, and that Edwards had to stop and ask for silence so that he could be heard. People clung to the pillars and the backs of the pews as if they were afraid of sliding into the pit. The sermon was printed within weeks and has never been out of print since.
The text and the doctrine
The sermon is built the way every Puritan sermon was built: a text, a doctrine drawn from it, reasons for the doctrine, and then application. The text is Deuteronomy 32:35, and specifically five words of it: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” Edwards observes that the verse is about people who had every privilege — God’s visible people, under his means of grace — and yet remained unrepentant, and that four things are implied: they are always exposed to destruction, as one standing on slippery ground; it may come suddenly; it comes of itself, without anyone having to push; and the only reason it has not come yet is that the appointed time has not arrived.
From this he draws the doctrine, and it is the sentence the whole sermon hangs on:
There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Notice what that sentence does not say. It does not say that God is eager to send anyone to hell. It says the opposite: that the only thing holding anyone back from the consequence of their sin is God’s own choice to hold them. The doctrine is about restraint, not about rage.
Edwards then gives ten considerations in support, and they are worth reading slowly because they are the part everyone skips. God has the power to do it at any moment. Sinners deserve it; justice calls for it. They are already under sentence, as John 3:18 says — condemned already. God is angry with them now, as Psalm 7:11 says, every day. The devil stands ready. The seeds of hell are in their own hearts and would flame out if not restrained. Their confidence in their own health and prudence is groundless. Their schemes to escape are vain. God is under no obligation to keep them a moment longer. Every one of the ten is an argument that the present safety of an unrepentant person is borrowed, not owned.
The application, and the images
Then Edwards turns to the congregation, and here come the images that made the sermon famous. The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string. The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present and rise higher every hour. And the picture that every anthology quotes:
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.
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Read in isolation this is horrifying, and it is meant to be. But read where Edwards put it, it is still an image of a hand that holds. The spider has not been dropped. The whole force of the passage is that the person listening is, right now, being held, and that the holding is not owed.
And then the sermon ends where almost no anthology follows it. Edwards says that the congregation has an extraordinary opportunity:
A day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners.
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
He describes people flocking to Christ from every quarter, the revival going on around them, and asks whether they will be left behind while their neighbours feast. The last words are Genesis 19:17, the angel’s words to Lot: haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed. The sermon is an evacuation order, not an execution.
What people get wrong
That Edwards was a shouter. He was the reverse. His delivery was so undramatic that his admirers apologised for it. The effect at Enfield came from the content and from the Spirit of God, not from theatre, and Edwards himself insisted on that distinction all his life.
That this is typical Edwards. It is not even typical of Edwards’s sermons. He preached far more often about the beauty of God, the sweetness of Christ, and the joy of the redeemed than about hell. His sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, preached seven years earlier, is about the sense of God’s loveliness that the Spirit gives to the soul, and it is much closer to the centre of his thought. He wrote Religious Affections precisely to distinguish the real work of grace from mere fright. If Sinners is the only Edwards you read, you have read the one sermon he would least want to be judged by.
That the anger is arbitrary. Edwards is careful throughout to ground God’s anger in justice, not temper. God is angry because sin is what it is, and the hearers are what they are. Romans 2:5 speaks of treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath; Edwards is describing that treasury. He never suggests that God is capricious, only that he is holy.
That the sermon is about hell. It is about time. The word that recurs is now: now you are held, now the door is open, now is the accepted time. 2 Corinthians 6:2 is its real text, though Edwards never cites it. The urgency is about the present opportunity, and the terror is there to make the opportunity felt.
That Edwards was unusual for his age. Every preacher in New England believed what he preached. What was unusual was that he made it vivid enough to be felt. The scandal of the sermon is not that it says what it says but that it was believed.
What it says to us
A modern reader has to decide what to do with a sermon like this, and there are two easy answers and one hard one.
The first easy answer is to dismiss it as a relic of a crueller time. The second is to embrace it as the one true way to preach. The hard answer is to ask whether Edwards was right, and the honest place to start is the Bible he was preaching from. Jesus talked about hell more than anyone else in Scripture. Luke 13:3 has him saying, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Hebrews 10:31 says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and that verse, not any invention of Edwards, is where his title came from. If Scripture is true, then the danger Edwards described is real, and a preacher who never mentions it is not being kind.
But the same Bible gives the rest of what Edwards preached. Ezekiel 33:11 has God swearing that he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn and live. Romans 5:8–9 says that God commended his love toward us while we were yet sinners, and that being justified by Christ’s blood we shall be saved from wrath through him. 1 Thessalonians 1:10 describes Jesus as the one who delivers us from the wrath to come. The wrath is real, and so is the deliverance. Edwards preached both, on the same afternoon, and the second was the point of the first.
What the sermon still does, for anyone who lets it, is take away the sense that there is plenty of time. That is its gift, and it is the same gift as Isaiah 55:6: seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. The most dangerous belief in the world is that later will do. Edwards spent an afternoon in 1741 taking that belief away from a room full of people, and many of them thanked him for the rest of their lives.
How to read it
Read the whole thing. The anthologies print the spider and stop. The doctrine section and the closing invitation are where the sermon’s meaning is, and they take twenty minutes.
Read it as a hearer, not a critic. Edwards was not describing other people. Let the sermon ask its question of you, and answer it, and then read the last pages as addressed to you as well.
Read A Divine and Supernatural Light next. It is the other half of Edwards, and the half he cared about more: what God gives, not only what he withholds.
Then read Religious Affections. Edwards watched what happened after Enfield, and saw that some of the people who cried out were truly changed and some were only frightened. That book is his careful, patient answer to the question of how to tell the difference. Nobody who wants to understand the Awakening, or their own heart, should skip it.
Edwards ended his sermon with an open door. That is how it should be read: not as a picture of a God who wants to drop you, but as the last plain warning of a God who is holding on, and asking, while there is still time, to be trusted.