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e. Evangelistic Hellfire Preaching
Although sometimes using imagery similar to Dante, Milton, and the earlier Tours of
Hell, Edwards was more restrained and less speculative. For example, he warned that the
clothing coveted by many will become cloaks of fire in Hell.
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This warning led to an urgent
appeal to repent, turning to Jesus Christ.
Edwards was so convinced of the reality of Hell that he considered it essential as well as
logical that he should warn people against it. In defending his approach he wrote:
Some talk of it as an unreasonable thing to fright persons to heaven, but I think it is a
reasonable thing to endeavor to fright persons away from hell. They stayed upon its brink,
and are just ready to fall into it, and are senseless of their danger. Is it not a reasonable
thing to fright a person out of a house on fire?
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Edwards preaching was often intense, being more personalized than the Tour writers. In an
effort to alert the lost to their dire dangers to which they are oblivious, he wrote:
The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is
prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames
do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath
opened its mouth under them.
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In his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards vividly portrayed sinners as
dangling over Hell, protected only by God who was already angry with them:
O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in. It is a great furnace of wrath, and 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, nothing that you have ever done, nothing that
you can do to induce God to spare you one moment.
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With such picturesque imagery Edwards sought to make each individual feel that he was the one
in this precarious predicament so close to disaster. He warned that even within his congregation
there were those who were about to suffer that dreadful endless torment that he had depicted. His
goal was to shatter their delusions of well-being in order to help them to perceive their imminent
danger of ultimate doom. Facing that threat clearly, they would, hopefully, repent, placing their
faith in the only One capable of saving them from that horrifying doom: the Lord Jesus Christ.
Edwards testified that during the Great Awakening his converts had differing testimonies, but
that the common thread running through all of them was their fear of eternal damnation.
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Thus
for him evangelistic outreach was a logical and natural consequence of his keen awareness of the
endless torment of the damned.