If you were at last Tuesday’s Bible Talk (or have listened online) you would have heard David make passing reference to a classic sermon entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God“. This was a sermon preached by Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s, during a time often called the Great Awakening, in order to awaken complacent hearers – people who had happily sat in church, had gone along with the crowd, were upstanding moral citizens, and were on the comfortable road to eternal condemnation because they had refused to come to God for forgiveness.
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“They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins. Divine justice says of the tree that brings forth such grapes of Sodom, “Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?“ Luke 13:7. The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God’s mere will, that holds it back.”
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Edwards didn’t hold back! But how seriously do we take sin today? As Christians, do we marginalise it, or do we take God’s mercy for granted?
These are questions worth asking, and worth pursuing because our God is a holy God. And not just holy, but holy, holy, holy!