Saturday, May 4, 2013

In John Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon, why does Edwards want his listeners to feel or experience what eternity is?

Edwards
uses vivid descriptive language so that his listeners will carry images of eternityor more
specifically, hellwith them long after his sermon has ended.


"Eternity" is an abstract word: what, after all, does "eternity"
look or feel like? It is easy not to think about something so amorphous (not concrete or visual)
while going about our day-to-day lives.

But Edwards wants his listeners to
have a strong image of eternity they can't easily shake out of their minds.
Therefore, he paints a picture of the present day lives of non-Christian people lead as similar
to walking across a rickety bridge with rotting planks that you could easily fall through
at any moment into a never-ending pit of fire. This is a frightening visual
people can understand and relate to. As Edwards puts it:


Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are
innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these
places are not seen.

Edwards does this...

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