16
years past, almost all of you would surely have gone to hell in a little time.
Fearfulness would have surprised you, and you would have been cast into that
devouring fire and everlasting [burning]. But, in infinite mercy, God gives another
opportunity: and blessed are your eyes that they see it, if you did but know your
own opportunity. You have had your life preserved through this past six years to
this very time, to another time of the pouring out of the Spirit. What would you
have done if you had died before it came? How doleful would your case have
been? But you have reason to bless God it was not so, but you are yet alive, and
now see a blessed day of grace again. And will you not improve it? Have you not
so much love to your own soul as to improve an opportunity as this? Some, there
is reason to think, have lately fled for refuge to Christ: and will you be willing to
stay behind, still a poor miserable captive condemned to suffer forever in the lake
of fire?
Yet Edwards knows that not everyone will hear and respond to the grace of God.
Some will continue to reject it. Some will continue to be sinners in Zion. He explains:
"There are doubtless some now hearing this sermon that the rest of the congregation will,
at the day of judgment, see among the devils at the left hand. They will see their frighted
ghostly countenances. They will see 'em wring their hands, and gnashing their teeth, and
shrieking and crying out. We now don't know their names. We don't know what seats
they sit in, where to look for 'em, or who to pitch upon. But God knows their names, and
now sees and knows what they think, and how much regard they pay the warnings that
Some will remain untouched by this appeal and any other that their pastor could
provide. Some will never take the threat seriously and for them, the fearfulness of their
destruction will strike them by surprise. "'Tis not to be supposed that there are some here
that won't be in earnest. Let them have never so good an opportunity to obtain heaven,
they won't thoroughly improve it. Tell 'em of hell as often as you will, and set it out in as
lively colors as you will, they will be slack and slothful. And they never will be like to
51
"Sinners in Zion," 281.
52
"Sinners in Zion," 282.