It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:31
Perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached in North America was by the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Entitled ‘Sinners in the hands of an Angry God’, the message was first delivered at Edwards’ home church in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1741, after Edwards spent several days in in isolation, praying in his own bedroom. Delivered in a monotone with Edwards not looking at his audience but at the back wall, the sermon had such an effect that many in the audience were moved to tears and more than a few cried out in anguish for God to save them. Here is a brief excerpt from that sermon: ‘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.’ Many souls were saved as a result of Edwards’ faithfulness in presenting his listeners with biblical images of God’s righteous wrath so as to drive them to repentance and faith in Christ. Edwards delivered his solemn message with great love for the lost souls to whom he spoke. It is also with love that we deliver today’s text with the same message.
We read of the Lord Jesus as seeing people as sheep having no shepherd (Matthew 9:36). Do we, as we seek to present the Gospel, see people in the lost and perilous condition that they are in? If we fail to understand how lost they are, and how hopeless they are, and how dreadful their punishment, we will lack the incentive to urge them to flee from the wrath to come. We must understand this before we can convey it to them. And we must convey it to them before they will ever feel impelled to seek salvation. We do people no favours to ignore or downplay God’s judgment against sin. It is true that it is the love of God to which sinners must respond. But they will never respond to it unless they know they are in peril of God’s judgment. Here is what Edwards himself had to say about that in a later essay: ‘If I am in danger of going to hell, I should be glad to know as much as possibly I can of the dreadfulness of it: if I am very prone to neglect due care to avoid it, he does me the best kindness, that does most to represent to me the truth of the case, that sets forth my misery and danger in the liveliest manner.’
The powerful images of judgment that Edwards conveyed to his audiences helped to bring about repentance among his hearers. The soft words of today’s sermons may well produce church members, but do they result in true repentance from sin? If not, they produce only false professions whose holders cannot escape the damnation of hell.
Let us never lose sight of the awfulness of God’s righteous judgment against sin. We see this as we climb Mount Calvary to behold the love of God to us in pouring out His wrath in infinite judgment against His own Son. It is only because the Lord Jesus fell into the hands of the living God that we have a Gospel to preach today. – Jim MacIntosh