A Sermon I’ve Never Wanted To Preach

Aside from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wonder if anyone here this morning can tell me what may have been the most famous sermon ever preached…

I don’t have any statistics to back me up, but I am certain that one of the top contenders has to be a sermon delivered to a congregation in Enfield, Connecticut, on hot July day in 1741. The preacher was Jonathan Edwards, a distinguished graduate of Yale University, who would later be appointed president of what was to become Princeton University. Along with the Anglican preacher George Whitefield he was one of the leaders of the remarkable spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening. It was a movement of the Holy Spirit that profoundly touched the hearts and changed the lives of thousands as it swept across New England in the mid-1700s—reaching as far as Nova Scotia!

The title Edwards gave to this particular sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. And if you find its title forbidding, its contents are nothing less than soul-shaking. By my estimate the sermon would have taken close to an hour and a half to preach. And it was around the mid-way point that Edwards thundered forth to the congregation with these words:

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is 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.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine the rest!

The reality of judgement

Now I have never been what you might call a hellfire and brimstone preacher. I am one of those who believe that the carrot is generally more effective than the stick, that the glories of heaven are far more inducive to faith than the threat of hell.

Yet I have to acknowledge that Jesus himself warned about the prospect of hell for those who turn their backs on God. He declared to the people of Capernaum, who refused to accept his message, that it would be more tolerable on the Day of Judgement for the inhabitants of Sodom than it would be for them (Matthew 11:23). He cautioned his followers, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).

Think too of his parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man ended up in flames and anguish, desperate that Lazarus might even dip the tip of his finger in water so that he might have a droplet to cool his tongue (Luke 16:19-31). And at the last supper Jesus warned his disciples, “If anyone does not remain in me, they are thrown away like a branch and wither; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned…” (John 15:6).

In fact it has been claimed (and not without merit) that Jesus had more to say about hell than anyone else in the Bible. So perhaps we should not be surprised when we come across it again in this morning’s verses from Hebrews. We read of “a fearful expectation of judgement”, and those chilling words at the conclusion of the passage: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

The word in both cases in the original Greek is foberon. It’s related to our English word phobia, hence words like acrophobia, the fear of heights, and arachnophobia, the fear of spiders. Or how about odontophobia, the fear of dentists!

It all reminds me of my days in elementary school back in the Dark Ages, when to be sent to the principal’s office was a punishment you sought to avoid at all costs. Who knew what penalty was going to be meted out behind that thick oak door? Well, at least you came back from the principal’s office. But here there is no coming back.

Now lest I leave you thinking that God is some kind of celestial killjoy, constantly on the lookout for people to punish, let me remind you that there is a whole other side to the coin. Ours is a God who cries aloud to his people, “As I live…, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.” And he pleads, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). And our Lord Jesus is the good shepherd, who seeks out his sheep that have strayed and brings them back into the fold. Yet there remains the tragic possibility of an eternity without him.