Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

“The observation from the words that I would now insist upon is this. ‘There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.’” 

This observation forms the “doctrine” of the sermon, which the following sections will prove by logical analysis, supported by scriptural citation. Edwards emphasizes the absolute sovereignty of God’s will, which is restrained by no obligation toward the unregenerate sinner and can cast him effortlessly into hell in an instant if it pleases Him. The wicked are in constant, immediate danger of the eternal torments of hell and can do nothing to secure their safety, other than fully accepting Christ as their only means of salvation. Edwards will hammer this point home relentlessly in the following “Reasons,” or proofs of his observation.

“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.” 

After establishing in the first proof that humankind is helpless before the awesome omnipotence of God, Edwards pivots from the irresistible power of the Deity to the culpability of fallen man. Divine justice demands the eternal and infinite punishment of sin. The highest principle of justice, the immutable law of God’s righteousness, of which earthly justice is a pale and hopelessly flawed imitation, abhors the constant offense of wickedness remaining unpunished. It is only the arbitrary mercy of God that holds back the sword of divine justice from instantly striking down the sinner, over whom it hangs at every moment.

“They are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God that is expressed in the torments of hell […]. Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth; yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, that it may be are at ease and quiet, than He is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell.” 

In the fourth proof, Edwards compares the unconverted in the Enfield congregation with the condemned in hell to the express disadvantage of the former. The easy conscience with which sinners may live their lives will not absolve them from God’s wrath, which grows continually more incensed towards them. Edwards’s rhetorical strategy is subtle and cumulative, implicating the unregenerate in his audience in a tightening noose of culpability. Directly indicting the unconverted in his audience with an offense greater than that for which millions are already experiencing eternal damnation intensifies the emotional terror he aims to produce in his auditors. He also jars them with a striking disjunction between their facile complacency and the mounting fury of God aroused by their lack of repentance.

“The devil stands ready to fall upon [sinners], and seize them as his own, at what moment God shall permit him. […] If God should withdraw His hand, by which [the devils] are restrained, they would in one moment fly upon their poor souls. The old serpent is gaping for them; hell opens it mouth wide to receive them; and if God should permit it, they would be hastily swallowed up and lost.”

In the fifth proof, Edwards intensifies the terrifying effect of his description of sudden damnation by turning from the horror of God’s unbearable wrath to the fury of the Satanic host, which stands in wait to fall upon the sinner. The wicked have already been condemned and given to Satan; his legion of demons is prevented from seizing the sinner only by God’s merciful forbearance, which could be withdrawn at any instant. The forces of both celestial good and supernatural evil are arrayed against the unrepentant; danger surrounds him literally and figuratively from all sides, and there is no escape.

“The corruption of the heart of man is a thing that is immoderate and boundless in its fury; and while wicked men live here, it is like fire pent up by God’s restraints, when as if it were let loose, it would set on fire the course of nature; and as the heart is now a sink of sin, so, if sin was not restrain’d, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, or a furnace of fire and brimstone.” 

Not only are God and Satan arrayed against the unconverted sinner, but also his own fallen nature harbors hellish principles that would burst into destructive flame were it not for God’s mercy, which temporarily restrains them. Tainted by the deadly legacy of original sin, fallen (or “natural”) man is thoroughly polluted by its corrupting effects, which would drown his soul in misery and suffering without God’s intervention. Sin is a natural power of destruction lodged within the unregenerate individual, an enemy from within that would consume the soul in hellfire without God’s willing restraint.

“Unconverted men walk over the pit of hill on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they won’t bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight can’t discern them. God has so many different unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out of the world and sending ’em to hell, that [He can] destroy any wicked man, at any moment.” 

Another proof Edwards offers in support of the sermon’s doctrine is that the sinner’s sense of security is illusory. Edwards employs two memorable images in the quotation suggesting the suddenness and unforeseeable quality of death: falling through rotten flooring into the flames of hell, and being struck by an invisible arrow at midday, in the full light of the sun, or, more figuratively, at the peak of one’s life. The graphic images emphasize the unbearable weight of sin, which seeks its element in hell below like a solid body obeying the universal force of gravity, and the moral blindness of the sinner who cannot recognize the arrows of God silently aimed at him.

“So that thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, His anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of His wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold of them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their hearts is struggling to break out: and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them.” 

Edwards concludes his proofs with a powerful summation of his preceding argument. This quotation is a classic example of the rhetorical device of accumulatio, forcefully and concisely recapitulating the 10 points Edwards has made in support of his claim that nothing keeps the wicked out of hell at any moment but the arbitrary pleasure of God. The sentence also employs the devices of polysyndeton and asyndeton (the amassing of conjunctions and the omission of conjunctions) alternately to create a sense of overwhelming logic, amplitude, and breathless urgency.

“The use may be of awakening to unconverted persons in this congregation. This that you have heard is the case of every one of you that are out of Christ. That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone is extended abroad under you.” 

After presenting a series of scripturally supported proofs that establish the validity of his claim that nothing keeps the sinner out of hell at any moment but the arbitrary mercy of an angry God, Edwards shifts to the doctrine’s urgent meaning for the Enfield congregation. The rhetorical device of apostrophe (direct address) puts Edwards’s auditors imaginatively in the desperate situation of the unconverted sinner he has just described. After portraying the helplessness and inexorable fate of the sinner in several powerful images, he alternately threatens, cajoles, and implores his auditors to repent and accept Christ as their only means of salvation. Puritan sermons typically feature two “uses,” one addressed to the converted saints in the congregation, the other to the unconverted. In Sinners, Edwards omits the former, directing his attention solely to the unregenerate.

“Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend & plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock.” 

The combination of several literary effects—syntactical structure, amplification, polysyndeton, imagery, simile—give this quotation its rhetorical power. The amplification achieved by polysyndeton (“you would immediately sink, and swiftly descend and plunge”) creates a sense of suddenness and suspension, as the repetition of verbs prolongs the terrifying flight of the sinner’s precipitous fall into hell. Similarly, the list of his auditors’ rationalizations (“I am healthy”; “I will arrange things prudently”; “I am morally upright”) incrementally builds up a false sense of security that is abruptly demolished with one blow, in the image of the rock falling through a spider’s web that concludes the sentence. The sentence’s syntax mirrors the psychological and spiritual catastrophe it depicts: The flimsiness of the sinner’s carefully constructed web of rationalizations and misguided thoughts is shattered by the blunt, undeniable reality of his sin, as factually solid and unredeemed as a rock. Edwards employs the image of the spider several times in the sermon; here the emphasis is on the utter insubstantiality of mankind’s defenses and good intentions against the radical obduracy of sin.

“The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, & rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given, and the longer the stream is stop’d, the more rapid and mighty is its course when once it is let loose. ‘Tis true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the meantime is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are continually rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward[.]”

In this simile, Edwards develops another image of a powerful natural force under restraint to depict God’s increasing anger with the unrepentant sinner. Like the leaden weight of sin, the rising flood waters of divine wrath are a tactile image of intense physical pressure and potential energy. Edwards weaves parataxis and hypotaxis together to contrast the impending danger of God’s constantly augmenting wrath with the mercy that temporarily restrains it. Just as the sinner’s corrupt nature seeks hell, the waters of God’s righteous wrath press furiously against restraint, obeying the law of divine justice; it is only owing to the pleasure of God that they are not yet released. Edwards’s metaphor dovetails material and financial accumulation; the flood waters constantly rise as the unconverted sinner daily, even hourly, compounds the wages of his sin. Rather than amassing wealth that provides a false sense of economic security and comfort, he is accumulating the wrath of his Maker by his rejection of Christ.

“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 made drunk with your blood.” 

The metaphor of the angry God as an archer echoes Edwards’s previous observation that “the arrows of death fly unseen at noonday” (629). The image is both tactile and gustatory; the tension of the drawn bow and the lust of the arrow after the sinner’s blood alike depict the tension of potential energy seeking release. Such images of dynamically repressed power, emphasizing the unnatural—yet merciful—restraint of God’s divine justice create an effect of suspension that heightens the emotional tension. Edwards again employs amplification to compound the inexorability of divine justice and the inconceivable paradox of God’s mercy and fury, intensifying the effect of terror and remorse he wishes to elicit.

“O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: ‘Tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell: You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.”

In the sermon’s most widely quoted passage, Edwards compares the unrepentant sinner to a spider hanging from a thread by the hand of God over the pit of hell, utterly helpless to forestall the eternal horror of damnation. The passage’s rhetorical power derives from the orchestration of many literary devices: apostrophe, repetition, metaphor, personification, paratactical syntax, parallelism, antithesis, and negation. The image of the spider dangled over the fiery pit echoes Edwards’s earlier comparison of God’s power to human weakness, which notes how “easy [it is] for us to cut or singe a slender thread that any thing hangs by; thus easy is it for God when he pleases to cast His enemies down to hell” (626).

“When the great and angry God hath risen up and executed His awful vengeance on the poor sinner; and the wretch is actually suffering the infinite weight and power of His indignation, then will God call upon the whole universe to behold that awful majesty, and mighty power that is to be seen in it.”

The agony of the condemned sinner, which is both a physical and a spiritual anguish, is compounded by God making a spectacle of it. The iniquity and unworthiness that the sinner most wishes to hide is made visible to the entire universe; he is naked in his sin and torment, just as Adam and Eve discovered themselves shamefully naked before God after they had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. The experience of God’s awesome power evokes the idea of the sublime as developed in 18th-century aesthetic philosophy; in the encounter with the numinous, the individual feels naked and exposed, at the mercy of a dynamic objective power that threatens to swamp and annihilate the self. The prospect of being watched and judged by the entire creation during the eternal punishment for one’s sin makes the torment of damnation more psychologically dreadful.