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By: Mark Dever | 10/5/2003
Mark Dever preaches Jonathan Edward's famous sermon, originally preached in Enfield, Connecticut July 8, 1741.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Speaker: Mark Dever
Date: 10/5/2003
References: Deuteronomy 32:35
Today [October 5th, 2003] is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Edwards. Along with George Whitfield, Edwards' is the name usually associated with the Great Awakening that swept through the British colonies in America in the 1740's. One of the pivotal events in that awakening was the preaching of the sermon that I intend to deliver again this morning. On Wednesday, July 8, 1741, Edwards went with other ministers to help the church in Enfield (on the MASS-CT border). There he preached his famous (and in some circles "infamous") sermon "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God." As best we can tell, the response to Edwards' sermon was electrifying. The verbal expressions of conviction for sin became so loud, in fact, that it seems that Edwards was not able to complete the sermon. Why the response of wails and cries? It wasn't because of his verbal style-which was quite staid, and certainly far less dramatic than George Whitfield's. It was because of the content. In this sermon, Edwards took a text from the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, and he had just one point-his hearers were not in hell that very moment only because of God's grace. He meditated on the inevitability of the fall of the wicked, the suddenness of that fall-that is, it will be unexpected-and what they fall into-Hell. He talked at some length of people being held out of hell only by God's mere grace, or as Edwards put it, "pleasure". He assumed that motivating his hearers by fear was legitimate, if the fears were well-founded, and the motivation charitable.
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