Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Jonathan Edwards · FELIPE CHAVARRO POLANIA

2019年8月 · Chapel Library

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Preached at Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741, this is perhaps the greatest sermon ever preached in America—and is certainly among the most well known. Owing to its forthright dealing with God’s wrath and His intense hatred of sin and the sinner, it is also one of the most controversial. Indeed, for more than three-quarters of the sermon Edwards lays down a relentless stream of the most vivid and horrifying descriptions of the danger facing unregenerate men. While it is difficult to read such graphic language, there is abundant hope in the sermon’s conclusion. Edwards puts it this way, “And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open and stands calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners.”

While those who would rather ignore God’s justice in favor of His mercy condemn Edwards and his sermon, those who were present and actually heard him preach that day reacted in a decidedly different manner. According to the diary of Reverend Stephen Williams who attended the sermon, “Before the sermon was done there was a great moaning and crying through the whole House, ‘what shall I do to be saved; oh, I am going to hell, etc.’” The diary goes on to indicate that Edwards had to interrupt his sermon and come down to minister to those who were under such awful conviction. And so, in spite of what the scoffers might think or say, “the amazing and astonishing power of God” was manifested among the people that day—with many falling not into the hands of an angry God, but into the arms of a mighty Savior.

著者について

Few Christian leaders since the Reformation have been as gifted as Edwards, who was a man of intense personal devotion to Christ. He was a leader of both the Northampton revival of 1735 and the Great Awakening in New England of 1740 and later became known as the “Theologian of Revival.” After being dismissed from his church in Northampton after a controversy over the standards of church admission, he served as a missionary to Indians on the frontier of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He died a few weeks after beginning his work as the President of the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton. Edwards is perhaps the best-known of all the American preachers from the colonial days. Author of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, and numerous other titles. His writings live as classics which stir their readers to follow God with their whole hearts.