In the second quarter of the 1700’s the American Colonies experienced an unprecedented spiritual revival that has never been equaled in any part of our nation since. It began, as God was pleased to anoint with power His faithful servant Jonathan Edwards of North Hampton, MA, in a sermon entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The following is an excerpt from that sermon. My prayer is that God would be pleased to use it to the conviction and conversion of poor lost sinners. “God has laid Himself under no obligation, by any promise, to keep any natural man out of hell one moment. God certainly has made no promises either of eternal life, or of any deliverance or preservation from eternal death, but what are contained in the covenant of grace, the promises that are given in Christ, in whom the promises are all yea and amen. But surely they have no interest in the promises of the covenant of grace who are not the children of the covenant and have no interest in the Mediator of the covenant. “So that, whatever some have imagined and pretended about the promises made to natural man’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 obligation to keep him one 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. God is dreadfully provoked, His anger is as great toward them as to those who 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…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 any 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. You have no interest in the 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 can do to induce God to spare you one moment. “He that believeth not is condemned already” (John 3:36).” Someone has said and said rightly, “Those who want nothing more than a God of Justice get precisely what they ask; the Bible calls it hell.”
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