Learning From Jonathan Edwards

Transcription

1 Learning From Jonathan Edwards Fun Facts about Edwards He was born in 1703 in East Windsor Connecticut. His father was a pastor there and he had ten sisters (no other sons). His father supplemented his meager salary by tutoring boys for college. His mother was the daughter of Rev. Solomon Stoddard, the long term pastor His sisters tutored him in Latin and his parents encouraged his voracious reading. He entered Yale University when he was still 12 years old and graduated at the head of his class (valedictorian) four years later. He stayed on and completed his Master s Thesis. Edwards was fascinated in science and natural philosophy and history. He studied the works of Isaac Newton and other scientists of that era. Before taking on full time ministry in Northampton, he wrote on flying spiders (an essay when he was still 17), light and optics. After completing his Master s course work but before writing his thesis he was called to supply the pulpit of a Presbyterian church in New York City (for 8 months) near Broad and Wall Streets. They asked him to stay but he declined, finished his thesis and stayed on at Yale as one of the two tutors. He earned the name of a pillar tutor for his loyalty to the school and its orthodox teaching. At the age of 24 (1727) Edwards was ordained at Northampton and became an assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard (who pastored for 62 years). His position was that of scholar- pastor and his rule was to study 13 hours a day. His grandfather was known as Pope of the Connecticut River Valley and only Boston had a larger colonial church. He married Sarah Pierpont that same year when she was 17. She was from a well- known clergy family in New England and he was the great- great- granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, a Puritan and the founder of the Colony of Connecticut. The family was prominent in England back to King Henry VIII and probably related to Richard Hooker, who with Thomas Cranmer and John jewel were the founders of Anglican theological thought. Sarah had made an impression on Edwards when she was only 13 because of her spiritual devotion and relationship with God. Together they also had 11 children (only one son also), all surviving to adulthood. When only 18, their daughter Jerusha, cared for a dying David Brainerd and contracted tuberculosis and died only four months after him. Edwards was asked to preach at the commencement of Harvard four years after his ordination, but it is his most famous sermon, called, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God that is used as an example in college rhetoric classes for it s use of imagery and metaphors. Edwards preached his last sermon to a band of Mohican and Mohawk Indians and a handful of English settlers in the western Massachusetts frontier town of Stockbridge in January of He had pastored them for 7 years after being fired from the pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts, one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the colony, where he had been the pastor for 23 years. He died less than three months later as the president of Princeton University after holding the office for only six weeks. He died from a smallpox inoculation. Edwards was the grandfather of Aaron Burr, the third VP of the United States. Edwards is widely acknowledged as America s most important and original philosophical theologian and one of its greatest intellectuals. He ranks as one of America s finest thinkers in his or any age. And his was a style of thinking rooted in worship and suffused with deep devotion, combining the old Puritan s regard for doctrine with the new revivalists passion for deep experience. (Os Guiness in Fit Bodies Fat Minds ).

2 Memorable Quotes by Edwards "You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept out of Hell, but don t see the Hand of God in it, but look at other Things, as the good State of your bodily Constitution, your Care of your own Life, and the Means you use for your own Preservation. But indeed these Things are nothing; if God should withdraw his Hand, they would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin Air to hold up a Person that is suspended in it. 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. Were it not that so is the sovereign Pleasure of God, the Earth would not bear you one Moment; for you are a Burden to it; the Creation groans with you; the Creation is made Subject to the Bondage of your Corruption, not willingly; the Sun don t willingly shine upon you to give you Light to serve Sin and Satan; the Earth don t willingly yield her Increase to satisfy your Lusts; nor is it willingly a Stage for your Wickedness to be acted upon; the Air don t willing serve you for Breath to maintain the Flame of Life in your Vitals, while you spend your Life in the Service of God s Enemies. The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome In- sect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: and yet tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every 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 meer 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." (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God) God himself is the great good which [the redeemed] are brought to the possession of and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest good and the sum of all good which Christ purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor and glory. "All gracious affections that are a sweet odor to Christ, and that fill the soul of a Christian with a heavenly sweetness and fragrancy, are brokenhearted affections. A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble brokenhearted love. The desires of the saints, how- ever earnest, are humble desires: their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable, and full of glory, is a humble brokenhearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behavior. All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God s works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God.... The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair. 52. I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live if they were to live their lives over again. Resolved, that I will live just so I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age.

3 The 70 Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Edwards became dutifully focused on his life's purpose before his 20th birthday, and thus penned 70 commitment statements. His initial 34 Resolutions were written in only 2 sittings, some time before December 18, His other 36 Resolutions were each written on brief occasions, through the summer of He went on to read these 70 Resolutions once each week, for 35 years, more than 1,800 times before his death in This is what he wrote at the beginning: Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God s help, I do humbly entreat Him by His grace to enable me to keep these resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to His will, for Christ s sake. Remember to read over these resolutions once a week. The Impact of David Brainderd This is Edwards description of the impact of David Brainerd s life on him and his family when he died in his house at the age of 29: I would not conclude my observations on the merciful circumstances of Mr. Brainerd s death without acknowledging with thankfulness the gracious dispensation of Providence to me and my family in so ordering that he... should be cast hither to my house, in his last sickness, and should die here: So that we had opportunity for much acquaintance and conversation with him, and to show him kindness in such circumstances, and to see his dying behavior, to hear his dying speeches, to receive his dying counsel, and to have the benefit of his dying prayers. Edwards said this even though he must have known it probably cost him the life of his eighteen- year- old daughter to have had Brainerd in his house with that terrible disease. Jerusha had tended Brainerd as a nurse for the last nineteen weeks of his life, and four months after he died she died of the same affliction on February 14, Edwards wrote, It has pleased a holy and sovereign God, to take away this my dear child by death, on the 14th of February after a short illness of five days, in the 18th year of her age. She was a person of much the same spirit with Brainerd. She had constantly taken care of and attended him in this sickness, for nineteen weeks before his death; devoting herself to it with great delight, because she looked on him as an eminent servant of Jesus Christ. So Edwards really meant what he said, that it was a gracious dispensation of Providence that Brainerd came to his house to die. He said it with full awareness of the cost. On Being A Pastor And On Revivals And Missions After the apostolic age and the Reformation, the revival of the Great Awakening ( ) is arguably the most powerful movement of God in the history of the church. In that time over 50,000 people, one tenth of the total population of the colonies converted to faith in Christ. And at the center of it all was Jonathan Edwards! Through out that time Edwards remained at Northampton. In 1733, a revival broke out at Northampton and reached such intensity that it threatened the business of the town and in six months 300 were admitted to the church. Edwards says: Our public assemblies were then beautiful, the congregation was then alive in God s service, everyone earnestly intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time in tears while the Word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.

4 Edwards studied the effect and results of that revival with the keen eye of a scientific observer and with psychological detail and was wary of the emotional elements of it. In the next two years other revivals popped up around the area but so did a dark side. There were a number of suicides from spiritual distress including one from Edwards church, his uncle. Edwards also go to know George Whitefield who travel in the colonies on a revival tour in and he preached in Edwards church. Coming under fire from Congregationalist ministers Edwards published two apologetical works in his defense, which are classics in the study of revivals. Edwards had great successes and frustrating disappointments in the pulpit. Eventually he was voted out of the church in Northampton. This trouble even followed him to the edge of civilization in the frontier town of Stockbridge. There he was accused and acquitted of embezzlement by a family member of one of the influential families that caused him so much trouble in Northampton. While there, Edwards wrote and published some of his greatest philosophical and theological works: Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, The Nature of True Virtue and Concerning the End for Which God Created the World. He had had offers to go to large metropolitan churches (like in Boston) after being fired but, possibly because of the impact of Brainerd s life on Edwards and his family, he chose instead to go to Stockbridge. When Edwards edited and publish the biography of David Brainerd, he accidentally became arguably the father of the modern missions movement from William Carey to Jim Elliot. Edward s Clear Vision Of God (Piper) What Edwards saw in God and in the universe because of God, through the lens of Scripture, was breathtaking. To read him, after you catch your breath, is to breathe the uncommon air of the Himalayas of revelation. And the refreshment that you get from this high, clear, God- entranced air does not take out the valleys of suffering in this world, but fits you to spend your life there for the sake of love with invincible and worshipful joy. In 1735 Edwards preached a sermon on Psalm 46:10, Be still, and know that I am God. From the text he developed the following doctrine: Hence, the bare consideration that God is God, may well be sufficient to still all objections and opposition against the divine sovereign dispensations. When Jonathan Edwards became still and contemplated the great truth that God is God, he saw a majestic Being whose sheer, absolute, uncaused, ever- being existence implied infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite holiness. And so he went on to argue like this: It is most evident by the Works of God, that his understanding and power are infinite.... Being thus infinite in understanding and power, he must also be perfectly holy; for unholiness always argues some defect, some blindness. Where there is no darkness or delusion, there can be no unholiness.... God being infinite in power and knowledge, he must be self- sufficient and all- sufficient; therefore it is impossible that he should be under any temptation to do any thing amiss; for he can have no end in doing it.... So God is essentially holy, and nothing is more impossible than that God should do amiss. When Jonathan Edwards became still and knew that God is God, the vision before his eyes was of an absolutely sovereign God, self- sufficient in himself and all- sufficient for his creatures, infinite in holiness, and there- fore perfectly glorious that is, infinitely beautiful in all his perfections. God s actions therefore are never motivated by the need to meet his deficiencies (since he has none), but are always motivated by the passion to display his glorious sufficiency (which is infinite). He does everything that he does absolutely everything for the sake of displaying his glory.

5 Our duty and privilege, therefore, is to conform to this divine purpose in creation and history and redemption namely, to reflect the value of God s glory to think and feel and do whatever we must to make much of God. Our reason for being, our calling, our joy is to render visible the glory of God. Edwards writes: All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God s works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God.... The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair. Edward s Clear Understanding For Man s Priority Edwards claimed that we are never to set up any bounds to our spiritual and gracious appetites. He says we should: be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement.... There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting. He is also clear what our goals must be in pursuing God: I must leave it to everyone to judge for himself concerning mankind, how little there is of this disinterested love to God, this pure divine affection, in the world. There is no other love so much above the selfish principle as Christian love is; no love that is so free and disinterested, and in the exercise of which God is so loved for himself and his own sake. But the key to understanding his meaning is found in that last quote. Disinterested love to God is loving God for himself and his own sake. In other words, Edwards used the term disinterested love to designate love that delights in God for his own greatness and beauty, and to distinguish it from love that delights only in God s gifts. Disinterested love is not love without pleasure. It is love whose pleasure is in God himself. In his own words, this is what Edwards says of his own preaching and the goals of his ministry efforts: I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.