Fire and Brimstone

My daughter's teachers email us with her assignments.  One of her assignments involved the following quote from Jonathan Edwards (from the 1700s):

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.

All this and witch hunts, too. What a lovely time period to not have lived in.

 

Comments

[Lorelei Leigh]

Oh, how true. Edwards' sermons weren't all fire and brimstone, though that's what gets most of the attention when he's studied. Still, I'm glad he's not my preacher, though I did attend a non-denomination Christian church for a while with a very Edwards-like pastor. Not at all a pleasant experience, in the long run, which is why I no longer attend there.

[AndyJ]

Too many people took those type of words as literal and real. That has never been my definition of religion... Were the sermon true, I would dive from the hand that held me into the flames...

There are worse things than death.