The preacher was Jonathan Edwards, pastor of the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, and a future president of Princeton College. The date was Saturday, July 8, 1741, and the place was Enfield, Connecticut, where Edwards had been invited to speak.
Enfield was not a religious place. The Great Awakening had touched surrounding towns but not Enfield. In fact, Christians nearby feared that God would pass them by because of the lethargy of the folk of Enfield. As the crowd entered the meetinghouse to hear Edwards speak, it was with curiosity and nonchalance.
Then Edwards began to speak. He did not sound like the evangelists of today. He wrote out his sermons word for word and then usually read them. Listening to Edwards was like listening to a lecturer who made his case in an even-tempered, intellectually demanding style in which he
tried to develop each step of his argument logically.
The title of the sermon? "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." His text was Deuteronomy 32:35: "Their foot shall slide in due time." "As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once without warning. Which also is expressed in Psalm 73:18, 19. "Surely You set them in slippery places; You cast them down in destruction. How are they brought into desolation as in a moment . . ." The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being drunk with your blood. Thus all you that have never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new. and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God . . . 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; a day wherein many are coming from the east, west, north, and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God."
As Edwards preached, members of the audience cried out, ' What shall I do to be saved? O, I am going to hell!' Some crowded toward the pulpit begging him to stop. At one point during the sermon there was so much noise that Edwards asked everyone to be quiet so that he could be heard. He ended the sermon by saying, 'Let everyone that is out of Christ now awake and fly from the wrath to come! The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let everyone fly out of Sodom: Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed."
The little town of Enfield was never the same.
from THE ONE YEAR BOOK OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY by Michael and Sharon Rusten
published by Tyndale House.
What a great message that needs to be proclaimed from the pulpits of America on this July 4, 2005. May God bless America! May God bring revival to America.
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