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Sinners Of An Angry God By Jonathan Edwards

486 Words2 Pages

A picture is worth a thousand words. In “Sinners of an Angry God”, Jonathan Edwards captures an image of hell in the Puritan’s mind. Creating a sense of fear during the Great Awakening, Edwards urges the parishioners to accept God as their Savior and avoid sinful behavior. Edwards passionately tries to persuade the Puritans to realize their eternal danger of sin by using fiery diction that creates a fear of hell, and dramatizing human weakness through a primal human fear. Edwards begins his sermon with the use of imagery to create for the audience an image of hell as “someone’s foot sliding” and a “fiery oven”. The use of imagery in the sermon relates it to the reader, creates a fear amongst the parishioners, and adds suspense to the sermon. The use of Bible quotations demonstrates the credibility of the sermon and gives it an authoritative tone. Edwards creates a image of hell “...gaping for them the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up”. Making the Puritans believe that they are one step away from hell. The intent of the sermon was to make the Puritans fearful of their worst fear, hell, and by using this imagery allows their fear to grow inside the sinner to induce action to change their ways. …show more content…

This human weakness is further enforced by using a primal human fear of spiders as a metaphor “a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock”. A comparison to the wrath of god and the force of the water, stating that “The wrath of God is like great waters that are damned for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given...when once it is let loose”. Edwards intent of the metaphor is that all the sins build over time and it will break like a dam releasing God’s wrath on the people. He uses these metaphors to show God’s grace is the only way to save

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In order to emphasize God’s contempt for the audience, Jonathan Edwards utilizes inflammatory diction and comparisons of God’s anger to a bow and arrow and “black clouds” to instill fear in the audience so that they will accept God as their savior, provoking a religious revival. Throughout the sermon, Edwards utilizes “fiery” phrases such as “furnace of wrath”, “wrath…burns like fire”, and “glowing flames of the wrath of God” in order to establish a connection between God’s fury and a burning fire, reaffirming the reality of going to hell, as hell is commonly associated with fire. Because fires are also very devastating and unpredictable, Edwards emphasizes the power and degree of God’s disdain and his ability to cause drastic change at unexpected times, making God’s patience seem fragile.

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Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan Minister, in his popular sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), convinces the Puritan congregation that God was wrathful and warns them of the dangers of sinning and being sent to hell. Edwards reinforces these claims by applying repetition, imagery, and metaphors to reach his goal of making the congregation fearful of being sent to hell. Edwards employs repetition to help get his point across about how God has no mercy and once someone is condemned to hell, there is no going back. The word “wrath” is repeated throughout the sermon to demonstrate God’s fury and violence.

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Edwards uses this illustration to convey the power of God to the people, many who were incapable of understanding complex imagery. Through the effective use of metaphors along with gripping imagery, Edwards made comparisons to peoples’ everyday lives. He preached that their state of wickedness was as “heavy as lead” and therefore, pulling them down straight toward Hell. This excerpt has a negative connotation in the eyes of the reader. Because society generally dislikes being classified as immoral, the following excerpt also greatly supports Edwards taunting tactics by implementing a sense of guilt with the strategic use of the word “sinner”; "O sinner!

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This interpretation of God becomes the reference point for the rest of the sermon. All of the commands and accusations in the sermon rely on Edwards' portrait of God as an angry, all-powerful being that has no obligation to have mercy upon his creations. By convincing his congregation of God's wrathful character, Edwards is then able to convince the congregation that they are in danger of damnation and severe punishment at the hand of this wrathful God. Edwards characterizes God as a being that "abhors" mortal men and "looks upon [them] as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire" (200). Edwards then uses scriptural references to support his claims about the nature of God.

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The majority of this sermon is dedicated to the audience whom Edwards views with repulsion. He uses imagery to describe the awful Hell that he believes the people in the congregation will end up in and calls it a “great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath” (Paragraph 8). He illustrates the never ending state of Hell in order to frighten everyone in the audience. He sees each and every person as damned and honestly believes they deserve be sent to Hell to burn for all eternity. He feels no sympathy for them because they are completely free to do what they want and he knows that what they do with their free will is commit sin.

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