Jonathan Edwards' goal was to awaken people to what, to him, was the very real danger of continuing in their sin, to get them to repent and call on God for mercy. Though he intended to scare and sober his audience, his goal was not to drive them away, but ultimately to bring them to God.
Edwards preached the sermon in response to what he sensed was a complacent attitude in the town where he was preaching. People were professing Christians, but they assumed that by attending church, they had done all they needed to do. They were not thinking in terms of God as being a real entity whom they had wronged, and with whom they desperately needed to repair the relationship. Edwards sought to shake them out of their complacency by putting vividly before them just how ugly sin is in the sight of God, and how seriously God takes sin. Only then would they take their own sin equally seriously, enough to repent of it, actually stop doing it, and change their lifestyle while calling on God for help.
Thus, Edwards' use of the words "angry God" was not intended to tell his audience that God had rejected them forever. (Then they would give up, or lash out at God in reciprocal anger.) Rather, he was in essence saying, "Your attitude and lifestyle is angering God ... do something about it!" He points out that when people turn to God in repentance, God will quickly forgive.
Edwards' ideal response to such a sermon from his audience would be for them to repent, with genuine sorrow, over their sin; hate it, desire to leave it, and to beg with God to forgive them and draw them closer to Him, and to do all this, not in a "go-home-and-think-about-it" kind of way, but with a sense of urgency. This is exactly the response that many in the congregation had, even weeping and crying out in the middle of the service.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
What does Jonathan Edwards hope to accomplish with his message in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment