Saturday, January 03, 2009

An Angry God

Psalms 7:11-13
(11) God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.
(12) If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow;
(13) he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts.


Many today reject the teaching of Jonathan Edwards' classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." But look at how this paragraph:

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. Thus all you that 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. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

Flows so naturally from the text I quoted. Edwards didn't pull his view of God out of thin air. Rather, he pulled it from the text of the Bible.

So where do we get the current vision of God as one of nothing but love and hold the wrath? What happened to God's justice and wrath? Without it we have no need for the gospel. We may as well go to Dr. Phil as well as the Bible if all the gospel is for is self-improvement.

No comments: