Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Their foot shall slide in due time. DEUTERONOMY 32:35

On the eighth of July, 1741, Edwards rode to Enfield, a town that had so far been untouched by the awakening spreading through the valley, and preached the sermon everyone remembers. He did not shout it. By all accounts he read it in a level voice from a manuscript held close to his short-sighted eyes, with little gesture. The congregation began crying out before he had finished, and he had to pause. The power was not in the delivery.

What he actually argued

The doctrine drawn from the text is a single sentence: there is nothing keeping wicked men out of hell at any moment except the mere pleasure of God. Everything else in the sermon is an unfolding of that. The unconverted are not safe because they are healthy, because they are respectable, because they intend to repent later, or because nothing has happened to them yet. They are suspended over destruction by nothing but the will of the God they have offended. The images are famous and they are relentless. A bow bent, the arrow on the string. Waters dammed and rising. A spider held over a flame. Rotten ground underfoot that gives way without warning.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. HEBREWS 10:31

Modern readers find this intolerable, and it is worth asking honestly why. Part of the reason is that we have lost any strong sense that sin is an outrage against an infinitely worthy God. Edwards’s logic here follows directly from his first principle: if God’s worth is infinite, then contempt for Him is infinitely serious, and the punishment is not disproportionate at all.

The half nobody quotes

What is almost never quoted is where the sermon goes. Having spent the doctrine section establishing the danger, Edwards turns to the application, and the application is not condemnation. It is invitation. He tells his hearers that this is an extraordinary opportunity — a day when Christ has flung the door of mercy wide open and stands calling. He points to others already coming in. He urges them not to be the ones who miss it. The sermon is not designed to make people despair. It is designed to make them run. Every terror in it exists to move a congregation towards a door that Edwards insists is open.

Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:11

That is precisely the structure: terror, and therefore persuasion.

How to read it, and how not to

Three cautions are necessary, and Edwards’s own body of work supplies all of them. First, this sermon is not representative. Roughly twelve hundred of his sermons survive, and the great majority are about the excellency of Christ, the beauty of holiness, the love of God and the joys of heaven. He preached far more on heaven than on hell. To take this one as the summary of his ministry is like judging a composer by four bars. Second, the terror is never freestanding. It rests on the glory of God, and it is always aimed at mercy. Preaching that reproduces the imagery without the theology — that uses fear as a technique to produce responses — is not following Edwards. It is borrowing his most quotable paragraph and discarding his argument. Third, and this must be said plainly: this material has done real harm when misapplied. Used on children, on the tender-conscienced, on the mentally fragile, or on believers already crushed, it produces terror without hope and damage that can last a lifetime. Edwards was preaching to a specific congregation of self-satisfied and largely unconverted townspeople. That is not every congregation, and it is not most individuals in pastoral distress. Scripture itself distinguishes: of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear (Jude 22– 23).

There remains something here the modern church badly needs, and it would be cowardly to end the chapter without saying it. We have very largely stopped believing that anything is at stake. We speak of faith as a source of meaning, community and peace — all of which it is — and we have quietly dropped the possibility that a person might be lost. Edwards believed the danger was real, and his urgency followed from it. If he was wrong, he wasted a great deal of passion. If he was right, our composure is difficult to justify.

I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. LUKE 13:3

Wrath and love in one God

The modern difficulty with this sermon is not really about its imagery. It is that we cannot see how a God of wrath and a God of love can be the same God, and so we quietly keep one and discard the other. Edwards held both, and the way he held them is instructive. He did not regard wrath as an emotion God has, still less as divine irritability. Wrath is the settled and appropriate response of a holy God to what is genuinely evil. A judge who felt nothing at cruelty would not be more loving than one who did; he would be defective. Indifference to evil is not a virtue in anyone, and we do not admire it in human beings. So the wrath of God is not the opposite of His love. It is what His love looks like when it confronts what destroys the beloved.

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him. JOHN 3:36

That verse comes a few lines after the best-known statement of God’s love in the Bible, in the same chapter, from the same speaker. Whoever wrote John 3:16 saw no contradiction. And the resolution is not a compromise between the two. It is the cross.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. ROMANS 5:8–9

At Calvary the wrath is not waived, minimised or explained away. It falls — and it falls on God Himself, in the person of His Son, so that it need not fall on those He came to save. Edwards’s whole point in the Enfield sermon is that there is a place where this wrath has already been exhausted, and that the door to it stands open. Which means the sermon is finally about the cross, even where it never mentions it. Every terror in it presupposes a refuge, and the refuge is the reason the terror is being described at all. A gospel with no wrath has nothing to be saved from, and a gospel with no cross has nowhere to run. Edwards preached both, and the second was always the point.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask whether you actually believe anyone is in danger. Your evangelistic urgency will never exceed your honest answer.

2. If you preach or teach, examine whether you use fear as a technique. Terror that is not aimed at an open door is manipulation. 3. Consider whom you are speaking to. Scripture requires different treatment for the hardened and the fragile. 4. Read one of Edwards’s sermons on heaven or the love of Christ this month, so that this one sits in its proper proportion. 5. Name one person for whom you have grown comfortable with their being unconverted. Repent of the comfort.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I have made my peace with things You have not made Your peace with.

I have believed in Your love and quietly stopped believing in Your judgment, and my urgency has drained away accordingly.

Restore to me a right sense of what is at stake — not a fear that paralyses, but a seriousness that moves me towards the people around me.

And keep me from cruelty. Let me never use terror as a tool, or press upon a bruised soul what belongs to the hardened. Give me the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.