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Examples Of Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God

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“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 fallen rock…” This passage, on page 88 of the American Literature textbook, volume one, is taken from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. In this sermon, Edwards underlines the terror of damnation and how inescapable it is unless one repents toward God and renews themselves as a Christian. Constitution refers to the physical make-up of a person, a sermon is a speech to persuade or inform, orthodoxy …show more content…

He achieves this by expressing the wrath of God. One way is by comparing their plight and God’s rage to many unstoppable and destructive works of nature, such as floods and storms. He also compares his contempt to holding an insect over a fire, as well as the image of a taught bow and arrow. These images clearly convey the hopelessness of their situation, the ineffectiveness of pleading, the anger of God, and the terror accompanied by suffering of hell. He also shows how terrible this wrath and suffering is with much expressive language, as well as comparing the joy of Heaven to the misery of Hell with the gloating and watching of those in Heaven. With these ideas and images, he means to perturb his audience, stirring them up emotionally and causing them to be afraid and discontent, desperate for a way out and a way to redeem themselves in the sight of their angry God. Much of this technique is shown throughout the sermon, clearly designed to evoke terror in the …show more content…

This he does by stressing that the time of mercy is short, but there is time still left. He demonstrates how indifferent God is to the pleas of those he casts into Hell, because it is too late for them, so they fall into the pit of Hell. However, Edwards also notes that “God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy…” (page 89, last paragraph) He stresses that once you are dead, and your judgment day has come, however, that it is too late to repent and no mercy shall be shown. With this, he is able to instill a desperate urgency in his listeners so that they might try to redeem themselves through Christ and behave and become better

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