Jonathan Edwards
(1703-1758)
Enfield, Connecticut
July 8, 1741
--Their
foot shall slide in due time.--
Deuteronomy
32:35
In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the
wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God's visible people, and who lived
under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works
towards them, remained (as vers 28.) void of counsel, having no understanding
in them. Under all the cultivations of heaven, they brought forth bitter and
poisonous fruit; as in the two verses next preceding the text. -- The
expression I have chosen for my text, their foot shall slide in due time,
seems to imply the following things, relating to the punishment and destruction
to which these wicked Israelites were exposed.
The observation from the words that I would now insist upon
is this. -- "There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out
of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." -- By the mere pleasure of
God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no
obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else
but God's mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any
hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment. -- The truth of this
observation may appear by the following considerations.
So that it is not because God is unmindful of their
wickedness, and does not resent it, that he does not let loose his hand and cut
them off. God is not altogether such an one as themselves, though they may
imagine him to be so. The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does
not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now
hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering
sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under
them.
But the foolish children of men miserably delude
themselves in their own schemes, and in confidence in their own strength and
wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow. The greater part of those who
heretofore have lived under the same means of grace, and are now dead, are undoubtedly
gone to hell; and it was not because they were not as wise as those who are now
alive: it was not because they did not lay out matters as well for themselves
to secure their own escape. If we could speak with them, and inquire of them,
one by one, whether they expected, when alive, and when they used to hear about
hell, ever to be the subjects of misery: we doubtless, should hear one and
another reply, "No, I never intended to come here: I had laid out matters
otherwise in my mind; I thought I should contrive well for myself -- I thought
my scheme good. I intended to take effectual care; but it came upon me
unexpected; I did not look for it at that time, and in that manner; it came as
a thief -- Death outwitted me: God's wrath was too quick for me. Oh, my cursed
foolishness! I was flattering myself, and pleasing myself with vain dreams of
what I would do hereafter; and when I was saying, Peace and safety, then sudden
destruction came upon me."
So that, whatever some have imagined and pretended about
promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and
manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers
he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to
keep him a moment from eternal destruction.
So that, thus it is 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 take
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. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear
you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the
creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the
sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan;
the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is
it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not
willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals,
while you spend your life in the service of God's enemies. God's creatures are
good, and were made for men to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to
any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary
to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the
sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope. There are the black clouds
of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful
storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God,
it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for
the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your
destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff on the
summer threshing floor.
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. -- And consider here
more particularly,
Consider this, you that are here present, that yet
remain in an unregenerate state. That God will execute the fierceness of his
anger, implies, that he will inflict wrath without any pity. When God beholds
the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be so vastly
disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed, and
sinks down, as it were, into an infinite gloom; he will have no compassion upon
you, he will not forbear the executions of his wrath, or in the least lighten
his hand; there shall be no moderation or mercy, nor will God then at all stay
his rough wind; he will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful
lest you should suffer too much in any other sense, than only that you shall not
suffer beyond what strict justice requires. Nothing shall be withheld,
because it is so hard for you to bear. Ezek. 8:18. "Therefore will I
also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and
though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet I will not hear them."
Now God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with
some encouragement of obtaining mercy. But when once the day of mercy is past,
your most lamentable and dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; you will
be wholly lost and thrown away of God, as to any regard to your welfare. God
will have no other use to put you to, but to suffer misery; you shall be
continued in being to no other end; for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted to
destruction; and there will be no other use of this vessel, but to be filled
full of wrath. God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him, that it
is said he will only "laugh and mock," Prov. 1:25,26,&c.
How awful are those words, Isa. 63:3, which are the
words of the great God. "I will tread them in mine anger, and will
trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments,
and I will stain all my raiment." It is perhaps impossible to conceive
of words that carry in them greater manifestations of these three things, viz.
contempt, and hatred, and fierceness of indignation. If you cry to God to pity
you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful case, or showing you the
least regard or favour, that instead of that, he will only tread you under
foot. And though he will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence
treading upon you, yet he will not regard that, but he will crush you under his
feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall
be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only
hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt: no place shall be
thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the
streets.
Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted
state, if you continue in it; the infinite might, and majesty, and terribleness
of the omnipotent God shall be magnified upon you, in the ineffable strength of
your torments. You shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and
in the presence of the Lamb; and when you shall be in this state of suffering,
the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful
spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is;
and when they have seen it, they will fall down and adore that great power and
majesty. Isa. 66:23,24. "And it shall come to pass, that from one new
moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to
worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the
carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall
not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring
unto all flesh."
How dreadful is the state of those that are daily and hourly
in the danger of this great wrath and infinite misery! But this is the dismal
case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however
moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Oh that you would
consider it, whether you be young or old! There is reason to think, that there
are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will actually be
the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. We know not who they are, or
in what seats they sit, or what thoughts they now have. It may be they are now
at ease, and hear all these things without much disturbance, and are now
flattering themselves that they are not the persons, promising themselves that
they shall escape. If we knew that there was one person, and but one, in the
whole congregation, that was to be the subject of this misery, what an awful
thing would it be to think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight would
it be to see such a person! How might all the rest of the congregation lift up
a lamentable and bitter cry over him! But, alas! instead of one, how many is it
likely will remember this discourse in hell? And it would be a wonder, if some
that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, even before
this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons, that now sit here,
in some seats of this meeting-house, in health, quiet and secure, should be
there before tomorrow morning. Those of you that finally continue in a natural
condition, that shall keep out of hell longest will be there in a little time!
your damnation does not slumber; it will come swiftly, and, in all probability,
very suddenly upon many of you. You have reason to wonder that you are not
already in hell. It is doubtless the case of some whom you have seen and known,
that never deserved hell more than you, and that heretofore appeared as likely
to have been now alive as you. Their case is past all hope; they are crying in
extreme misery and perfect despair; but here you are in the land of the living
and in the house of God, and have an opportunity to obtain salvation. What
would not those poor damned hopeless souls give for one day's opportunity such
as you now enjoy!
And now you have 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; a day wherein many are flocking to him, and
pressing into the kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west,
north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that
you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him
who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and
rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful is it to be left behind at
such a day! To see so many others feasting, while you are pining and perishing!
To see so many rejoicing and singing for joy of heart, while you have cause to
mourn for sorrow of heart, and howl for vexation of spirit! How can you rest
one moment in such a condition? Are not your souls as precious as the souls of
the people at Suffield, where they are flocking from day to day to Christ?
Are there not many here who have lived long in the world, and are not to
this day born again? and so are aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and
have done nothing ever since they have lived, but treasure up wrath against the
day of wrath? Oh, sirs, your case, in an especial manner, is extremely
dangerous. Your guilt and hardness of heart is extremely great. Do you not see
how generality persons of your years are passed over and left, in the present
remarkable and wonderful dispensation of God's mercy? You had need to consider
yourselves, and awake thoroughly out of sleep. You cannot bear the fierceness
and wrath of the infinite God. -- And you, young men, and young women, will you
neglect this precious season which you now enjoy, when so many others of your
age are renouncing all youthful vanities, and flocking to Christ? You
especially have now an extraordinary opportunity; but if you neglect it, it
will soon be with you as with those persons who spent all the precious days of
youth in sin, and are now come to such a dreadful pass in blindness and
hardness. -- And you, children, who are unconverted, do not you know that you
are going down to hell, to bear the dreadful wrath of that God, who is now
angry with you every day and every night? Will you be content to be the
children of the devil, when so many other children in the land are converted,
and are become the holy and happy children of the King of kings?
And let every one that is yet out of Christ, and hanging over the pit of
hell, whether they be old men and women, or middle aged, or young people, or
little children, now hearken to the loud calls of God's word and providence.
This acceptable year of the Lord, a day of such great favour to some, will
doubtless be a day of as remarkable vengeance to others. Men's hearts harden,
and their guilt increases apace at such a day as this, if they neglect their
souls; and never was there so great danger of such persons being given up to
hardness of heart and blindness of mind. God seems now to be hastily gathering
in his elect in all parts of the land; and probably the greater part of adult
persons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in a little time, and
that it will be as it was on the great out-pouring of the Spirit upon the Jews
in the apostles' days; the election will obtain, and the rest will be blinded.
If this should be the case with you, you will eternally curse this day, and will
curse the day that ever you was born, to see such a season of the pouring out
of God's Spirit, and will wish that you had died and gone to hell before you
had seen it. Now undoubtedly it is, as it was in the days of John the Baptist,
the axe is in an extraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that every
tree which brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down and cast into the
fire.
Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the
wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a
great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: "Haste
and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest
you be consumed."