especially in the realm of evangelism. There's one concept especially that is very little understood even by Edwardsian specialists and is of considerable interest to theologians, especially the Calvinistic variety of theologians, but it would be of equal interest to the Arminian even though it wouldn't naturally grow out of an Arminian pattern of thought as it does emerge as we'll try to show in a reformed mentality. So those of you who are Calvinistic in your persuasions, I think you'll find this almost parochial interest, intramural interest, whereas those of you who are not, but being evangelical persons concerned with the word of God and its proclamation, I think you will find it interesting to look from a somewhat more detached angle at this concept we call seeking. Now one word about the procedure for the three hours that I have the privilege of conversing and speaking to you. This may be called what you call dialecturing. I'll be dialoguing and lecturing. I'll be saying certain things by way of information and development of an idea. But with the understanding that you feel free to come in as we go along and not wait till the end of the period for ten minutes for open questions. I'll try. to have some open season on questions for you. And you may prefer it that way. You may just want to let me go ahead and talk on and stop in time to let you raise some general questions. But my point is, my personal preference, but don't try to accommodate me, is to have you bring in live questions while we're on the subject. So raise your hand or blurt it out or whatever as we go along in the study. Since there may be some of you here for whom Jonathan Edwards is not a household word, maybe I ought to take just the briefest moment to remind you of the man's life. I assume that there's one thing that everybody knows about Jonathan Edwards, and that is that he is the preacher of the famous sermon, probably the, certainly the most famous sermon ever delivered in the United States. Possibly the best known sermon delivered since biblical times, at least by Americans, and that's the Sermon Sinners. in the hands of an angry God. And the famous preaching of that was not its original deliverance in Edwards' own congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, but in Enfield, Connecticut, July the 8th, 1741, when the same sermon, which created no visible response in its original delivery in the preacher's own congregation, under God brought this tremendous reaction at this other congregation where Edwards was at the time itinerating. This is the story you hear of a people holding on to their seats and crying out for the minister to have mercy and he asking them to subside so that he could proceed with his sermon and so on. It was an awesome experience in the history of preaching. Anybody who's ever gone to college and taken freshman English has had some introduction to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God because it is usually considered not only typical of mid-18th century American preaching, but also it was extraordinarily powerful as a rhetorical communication. We have experts on literature who feel that this particular sermon of Jonathan Edwards, who was no mean man of letters, generally, was probably his finest literary expression. But I can't help but mention a rather amusing thing that happens in contemporary Edwardsian scholarship, and there is a great deal of contemporary studying of the great Edwards by people who are total strangers to the whole pattern of thought, and would look askance at anything called of Puritanism, but who were positively fascinated by Edwards. Probably the man who has drawn the attention of the scholarly world to Edwards in our time was himself a Harvard pagan, the late Perry Miller, who was positively captivated by Edwards, even though he realized that if what Edwards was saying, and sinners in the hands of an angry God, or in the burden of his whole message were true, there was absolutely no hope. for Perry Miller. One of the more vivid illustrations of that by a person you wouldn't know, whose name I won't mention, but who is a specialist in letters and is studying the sermons of Edwards from that standpoint particularly, was working one time at the Barneke Rare Book Room at Yale, where the major body of Edwardsian literature exists. And he was studying this particular sermon. He'd been surveying the sermons in general. Now he was getting on to what he called the biggies. the famous Edwardsian sermons, and he was working on the most famous, The Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Well, we were having lunch together, because I was doing some work on some sermons of Edwards on Romans at the time, and at lunch, this friend of mine, whose name I will not mention, was positively expressing to me how fascinated he was by the powerful metaphors of this sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. There's a picture of the archer with a drawn bow, the arrow aimed at the sinner's heart, Nothing holding it back but the sheer good pleasure of an angry God. There's a figure of the sinner sliding down, unable to grab hold of anything or keep himself from going into doom. That's the very text on which it's based. Their feet shall slide in due time. There's a figure of the onrushing flood before which the man is unable to protect himself and so on. A friend of mine who was working on this sermon, as I say, he was positively enraptured about the power of the metaphor. Now, I said to him at this point, I may explain to you, I don't go around making remarks like this to people at random, but this man I knew very well. And so I said to him, calling him by his first name, you know, it's an amazing thing to me that you are enraptured by these figures which Edwards used, and yet you know that if Edwards knew what he was saying, that arrow is aimed at your heart. Here you are, fascinated by the power of the imagery, and Edward says, that figure of the drawn bow and the arrow aimed at the sinner's heart, in Edward's opinion, is aimed at your heart! And you're standing there in amazement at the beauty of the metaphor! And he said, I know, he said, I know. And I said to him, you know, again calling him by first name, I sometimes wonder how you sleep at night. And he said, I don't always. and then there was silence between us for a minute or two and after a while he said but you know I am a seeker I smiled and I said when we go back to the rare book room after lunch let me get a section of a sermon on Edwards of Edwards that I was transcribing which defines and describes a seeker and when you go home tonight take a glance at it and tell me tomorrow when you come whether you're a seeker or not. And he did, because he knows the manuscript very well. He could have worked for the manuscript, but since I already had transcribed it, I just gave him my copy of it. He took it home, and he read it, and when he came to the library in the morning, he said, you're right. I'm not even a seeker. I'm not even a seeker. But in a certain sense, that man represents a picture of what is going on in Edwardian scholarship today which ought to be of vast interest and great prayer concern to every evangelical soul in this group here this afternoon. I can't, friends, think of a solitary thing which is going on in the academic world in the United States of America at this time that offers as much hope for the conversion of academic souls as the very intense scholarly study of this great divine who being dead yet speaketh. We'll come back to this concept of seeking, but as I mentioned there in my long digression, everybody knows the sinner is in the hands of an angry God. But very, very briefly, Edwards was born in 1703. He was a child prodigy. Some people have said that the philosophical knowledge that this young man had exhibited by the time he was 15 years of age is possibly without parallel in history. Paul Ramsey of Yale says of his work on the freedom of the will that that alone would establish him as the foremost philosopher-theologian ever to grace the American scene. But the point is, when he went at 13 years of age from a Connecticut congregational parsonage to the Yale University of the time, he immediately exhibited this prodigious intellectual power as reflected in work called The Mind and a little work Of Being. I have never seen such a teenage performance in my perusal of the literature of the human mind. A major dissertation on the nature of being from a kid who couldn't have been more than 15 or 16 at the time. Many people lament the fact that he hadn't turned his attention professionally and full-time to science or philosophy, but under God so fit to give his life to the ministry of the Word. And the rest of his life, after that promising academic beginning, was devoted to a meticulous study of the Word of God and an utterly, I would say, magnificent exposition of virtually every aspect of Biblical literature and Biblical doctrine. I am a professor of Church history. has been mentioned and I know something about the preaching of Augustine, I've read some of the other early fathers, I've read a great deal of Calvin's sermons and many of Luther's and I've read Spurgeon and I've read Moody and I've read a good many of the preachers of our history and many of the Puritan divine. I know no one who in my judgment can even touch Edwards as a profound expositor of the word and an utterly free and uninhibited preacher of the same. It's often said of people when they study Edwards closely that they can't seem to talk about him without seeming to be guilty of adulation. One man, Bishop Hall, went so far as to say he's probably the most Christ-like man who's lived since the Apostle Paul. Have you ever studied the man's life? There seems to be an incredible symmetry between this penetrating, powerful, prodigious genius of a brain with a heart which is equally aflame and in perfect harmony. It's an extraordinary combination. At any rate, most of his ministry was spent in Northampton, Massachusetts between 1727 when he began there and 1750 when he was dismissed from Northampton congregation because in spite of several major revivals including the beginning in New England of what we call the Great Awakening in 1734 and his participation with George Whitfield and so on in the later phase of it in 1740 and following, in spite of unparalleled success in evangelistic preaching and divine awakening, Edwards was dismissed from his congregation. There were various background reasons, but the fundamental foreground reason and probably the most basic one was that he insisted that if a person were to be admitted to the Lord's Supper, that individual should first of all give a credible profession of his or her faith. I'll say that again because I can't imagine, unless you're very knowledgeable about this period, that you can't, that you can't help being totally bewildered. As you say to yourself, why in the world would a man be dismissed from his congregation because as a pastor he insisted that no one should be admitted to the Lord's Supper unless that individual previously They have a credible profession of faith. You do it all the time, I hope. I've never met a Baptist who would admit people to the Lord's Supper who haven't previously professed their trust in Jesus Christ as their only Lord and Savior. Are there any running Lutherans? I've never heard of any. I've never heard of a Presbyterian who professes to do that sort of thing. It's standard with every Lutheran. It's standard with the Protestant Church. But there has been a development before this that I won't go into unless some of you should happen to bring it up, called a halfway covenant, the converting ordinances, and that sort of thing. which had brought the Northampton congregation and a number of others to the point where they were admitting people to the Lord's Supper partly because they couldn't determine the difference between a converted and an unconverted person and partly because they hoped that if these individuals were admitted to the Lord's Supper who made at least an outward orthodox affirmation of belief in Christ even if they couldn't claim a experience, a saving experience of Jesus Christ. The hope was that these people, if they were admitted to the table rather than disbarred from it, they might be converted in the reception of the sacrament. That's the reason this was called the Converting Orders. But because Edwards believed that that was contrary to Scripture, and that no one should be admitted to the Lord's Supper unless that individual first made a credible profession of his or her faith, he was ultimately dismissed from his church, and then with a family of about 11 children at that time. He had to look for another calling. He had some invitations from Scotland and one from Virginia and so on, but to move that large family of his to that distance was too much for him to consider. So he accepted a little mission charge 50 miles west of that, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And there, until his call to Princeton, which he accepted and shortly after died before his ministry really began there, for the next seven years, in that little outpost of civilization, with the Stockbridge Indians as his main congregation and a few white settlers as well. He not only continued his ministry, but produced his Freedom of the Will, his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, his Nature of True Virtue, and God's Last Stand in the Creation of the World. His four major theological products during those last few years in virtual isolation, but that's the fundamental outline of the man's life. Now, let me pause just a moment before I move into this concept of seeking that I just alluded to in this story about the man who was fascinated by Edwards even while he realized that if Edwards were true, he, the man who was fascinated by Edwards, was damned and that he wouldn't even meet the qualifications of being a seeker in Edwards' use of the term. After that allusion to it, I want to focus on that concept and get it before you in this very first period before we take a break and then we'll discuss it in more detail when you come back. But before I move into that, let me pause now to give you any opportunity you might want to raise a question either about the man's biography or about some aspect of him other than seeking or something like that. Does anyone care to raise a question at this particular point? I'd be very glad to pause for a moment and take it up if you want to. Is his biography by Perry Miller reliable? Yes and no. One critic has said, I knew Perry Miller, he was an awfully nice guy, and an honest man, as well as a very learned man. What I call a pleasing pagan. He never gave any evidence of being an evangelical person, but he was positively fascinated by Edwards, and he tried to tell it like it is, in that sense of the word. That's the yes part of it. The no part of it is, to quote somebody else, you read Perry Miller's Edwards, he said, this other critic. You learn more about Perry Miller than you do about Jonathan Edwards. There's a great deal of truth in that. It's not because Perry Miller's trying to falsify the record or trying to read Edwards in Miller's terms and so on. That's just the way he sees him. It's partly because he's fascinated by certain aspects, Perry Miller. Let me say for the benefit of those of you, Perry Miller was professor of American literature at Harvard University. He died of cirrhosis of the liver. I think most of you know what that is. He had a problem with drinks. He was a secular man, but he was a prodigious scholar. And of course you had this fascinating picture of a Harvard sophisticate fascinated by a Puritan fundamentalist. You know, that makes racy reading. That's exciting. For me to be interested in that, would you expect that thing? But for Perry Miller to be interested in that, that's something else again. But, of course, these secular historians recognize a significant figure such as Spurgeon, even though he represents something. You know, Keillich is writing about Spurgeon, you know. He waxes rhapsodical about Spurgeon, but I don't think Spurgeon would share his moment with him if he were around at this day. And so, I mean, no question about the genuineness of Keillich's interest in Spurgeon. No question about the genuineness of this Harvard professor in Perry Miller. But I think that he... misunderstands him in so many ways. I couldn't call it a really reliable thing, but it is without question the most influential book ever written about Jonathan Innes. It has stirred the interest in it more than anything it's ever written. And there are some profound insights, but the main problem with a man like Miller is he was brilliant in his own sense. Usually it's better for a brilliant man to have a rather pedestrian scholar write him up. Well, you have a brilliant man written by a brilliant man. It's sometimes very difficult for the original brilliance to get through the second level of the brilliance, you know. And Miller comes through. Miller gets fascinated with certain aspects of Edwards, you see. And that's, he's quoting all the time, you'd think that was all that Edwards ever delivered. And there's a certain aspect of those sermons that interest him. Such as the experiential element, you know. That he ever gets the forensic concept in imputation. It's hard to see. Now, see me slipping into the academic, and I see some of you here who are probably laymen. Did I get away from you when I said the forensic element? Did I, where am I? You're going to have to be my guide here. Am I, am I taking, assuming to make... Now let me watch, I'm going to try to talk to all of you. I'm not just trying to talk to the theologians around here. But the forensic, that refers to the fact that a fundamental idea in the Christian view of salvation is that Christ bore the wrath of God on the sinner's behalf. And we are justified when pleading the merits of Christ before the great judge of heaven and earth, he reckons Christ's righteousness to us. That's a courtroom transaction. That's what the word forensic refers to. I'm guilty. I come before my judge who finds me guilty as accused and with no possible way of escape, but Jesus offers his own blood and God accepts that intercessory offer and accredits it to me. That's law. A courtroom transaction, yet that's the heart of the gospel. You know that, and I know that. I just don't, you may not recognize it as a name, forensic. Well, getting back to Perry Miller, he didn't understand that sort of thing at all. But he was intrigued by Edwards' idea of union with Christ, and experience of Christ, and especially a divine and supernatural light that would come to a person in conversion and so on. I just let it go that way. May I tell one anecdote about Perry Miller, and then I'll let Perry Miller go. This is not just interesting, I think, about Perry Miller, but it's characteristic, I think, of the contemporary interest among the sophisticated secularists in a man like Edward, but especially Perry Miller, who died a few years ago. Miller was down there at Yale. Miller taught at Harvard, but he came to Yale. This is a part of the background, incidentally, on it. He used to chide his friends at Yale for having this magnificence. body of manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards that they weren't publishing. He'd ride them hard on that. So they got even with him by promising to publish them as long as he was the general editor of the publication of them. And so at one time, he was down from Harvard to New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is, and they were talking over certain things. Well, I'd been doing some work on Romans, so they'd asked me to come in to give a few opinions on some subjects. Well, before they got started with the bourbon on the rocks and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and all that sort of thing, the free flow of language and Miller was sort of unlimbering a little, you know, and chatting a bit with the boys and all. He told how he'd listened to a Boston colleague of his on the Harvard Divinity Faculty. I won't mention his name. He had been giving a series of lectures in Newton, Massachusetts that Miller, for some reason or other, had heard. And Miller was saying to the group around the table there, and I was sitting in on it, that he was pretty well-disgusted. Now, why was he disgusted with these series of lectures on Christianity by the Divinity School professor? Well, because, as he said, when dear old so-and-so was finished, we were all Christians. Now, that's disgusting, Barry Miller. I had just come up from doing these sermons on Romans of Edwards, and I piped in at that particular point, after Miller had said, by the time so-and-so finishes, we're all Christians. I said, you read these sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and you wonder whether anybody's a Christian. That's right, Gerstner, that's right, Gerstner. That's what he liked about it. Edward told it like it is. I mean, Miller was a bright man. He knew full well if Jonathan Edward knew what he was talking about, there was no hope for Barry Miller. But nevertheless, that's the way it was. And Miller wasn't going to pretend otherwise, and Miller liked that about him, see. And so on. Any other questions before we get into the seeking concept yet, please? A little louder, please, sir. not so much overemphasize it as that he did kind of distort it a little bit by making the subjective more significant. The Edwards, he's a kind of sensational preacher in the same way that John Locke believed, and they say for the benefit of all of you, that this great English philosopher who died in 1704, just a year after Edwards was born, had this prodigious influence on Jonathan Edwards. And the thing that seems to have influenced him particularly was that John Locke had said, as of course you know very well, I'm just explaining for the benefit of those who don't, that all our knowledge comes through the senses. And Perry Miller, coming on the scene later, and noticing that Jonathan Edwards had picked up that idea from Locke with great enthusiasm, and all our knowledge, in the first instance, comes through sensory experience, Edwards, the preacher, had used that, and it had a very profound effect on his preaching. Part of the reason he's so vivid with this arrow drawn and this fire being heated, first one degree, then two degrees, then ten degrees, and all that vivid, what we today call sensationalism, was simply because he believed John Locke was right. Our ideas, spiritual ideas, eternal ideas, come in the first place through the senses. And so he utilized that in his preaching. And at that particular point, Miller's very emphatic, There could be something to what he calls the rhetoric of sensation, the sense of the heart in Edwards. The thing that he doesn't do justice to, while he focuses on a point like that, is the rational over-structure of theological thought in Edwards. But that rhetorical point, yes, I think that he thinks comes from Locke. He also thinks it has a good deal to do with Edwards' philosophy, his metaphysics, and so on. And I think, if I may say one word, because I may get away from some people on a point like this, May I say this one word without elaborating? The fact that Edwards... Here's John Locke saying, all our knowledge comes through the senses. And then we have ideas of these sensory experiences. Now what lies behind the idea? Je ne sais quoi. I do not know what, says John Locke. At this particular point, Jonathan Edwards enters the scene and he says, I know what and I'll tell you. It's God. It's God who's behind your ideas. This is where the idealism of Jonathan... Edward comes in, and Perry Miller recognized that. Prior to Perry Miller, the feeling had been that he might, Edward might have been influenced by the British idealist, Bishop Barclay. There's no evidence of that. Their minds ran the same channel. But not that there was any mutual influence. But he probably moved into his idealism through John Locke. Let me move into this concept of speaking. At least get it over to you before we break up and then examine it later on. The first thing you have to recognize about this is it's not the usual usage of the word. It's in a sense a very unfortunate usage, but it is characteristic of Puritanism. It's no monopoly of Jonathan Edwards. It's not in any sense an innovation of his. It's a characteristic of his Puritan tradition. And if you think of Matthew 7, seek and ye shall find, or Romans 3, there is none that seeks, no, not one, and so on. Or the prophet, if with all your heart you truly seek me, ye shall truly find me. This is the way the word seek is normally used in the Bible, and normally used in our ordinary conversation. That's not what's meant here. It's a very different concept. It's an unfortunate term. But let me see if I can get over to you. Having alerted you to the fact, It's not what you usually think. Let's get that clear in mind. I'll try to explain what it is, but let me take you off from what it is not. It's not what you normally think of by the term seeking. And in a certain sense, you either have to be a Calvinist or at least put yourself where the Calvinists are to grasp the idea. Maybe the best way I can get it over to you is in terms of an experience I had with some Calvinists in Grand Rapids, Michigan some years ago. summer institute of their ministers. I was lecturing on Edwards, and I was very anxious, particularly there with a formal lecture and so on, and then about an hour of cross-examination by those very accomplished theologians of the Performed Church there. I don't know what I can think of. Let me tell you what happened. Eckert met me on this. We were going through the cafeteria line, And a man coming behind me was one of the Christian Reformed ministers. And he said, I'm puzzled and not too enthusiastic about this Edwardian notion of speaking. And I said to him, well, you tell me one thing. When you preach to people, what do you ask them to do in response to the gospel you preach? And he said, I ask them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's what we say. I said, Tom, Jonathan Edwards said the same thing, and believed exactly the same way. He, too, called upon people to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and not to be saved. But then I said to this picture before a minute or two, suppose the person for whom you say, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, responds by saying, I don't find it in my heart to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. What do you say to him then? Now, I repeat that, so you're all with me. The man says, I tell people, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, that's what he said. I say, right, agreed, that's exactly what I'm going to do. But then I said to a sister of mine, I said, suppose the person to whom you say, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's what he said, says that I don't have it in my heart to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And you're a thousandth now, which means that you won't get it in your heart and let God give it to you. Remember, those of you who are not Calvinists got to follow this point here. According to the Calvinists, it doesn't come into the heart, except by works from above. Now, if the person says, when he's asked, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and be prayed, but I don't really believe in Christ. I could say it, I can sign a card, I can go down an aisle, I can join a church, I can do all sorts of things, but if you ask me, sincerely, come to Christ, because you love him, I will separate from him, and give your life entirely to him. I don't have it in my heart to do that. If I said I did, I'd only add hypocrisy to all my sins. Is that the situation? Then I'll say to that person, this minister, if the person is in that situation, what do you say to him? The person will say, but I don't have it in my heart, sincerely, to say to Jesus, I believe. I love you. for you all to follow just as I will follow. I can tell the world, I don't have it in my heart, I can tell the world that this is happening. What do you do to a sinner in that condition? I just think there are four more things I can tell you. Believe it. Now, this is the point at which these chauvinistic theories would enter this doctrine of teaching. that you were under conviction, knew the need of Christ, but knew your own heart also, that you didn't fully love Christ, and any gesture in that direction would be hypocrisy rather than real faith. The thing for you to do is to just sit there and wait for the Spirit, God, to give you a new heart. There's something you can do, even when through faith. is not present in your soul. That's what they meant by seeking. In that way, to seek God by acknowledging at the outset this dreadful situation that you find yourself. A person who is a sinner, guilty, knew that Christ was the Savior of the world, but couldn't really love him and couldn't sincerely say he believed in him and couldn't do anything that was truly acceptable to him. The things he should do in all the things that, in his natural strength, he was capable of doing. This would be about what it amounts to. He's thinking, he's doing, the sinners, the awoken sinners, something like this, the awoken, this is an offhand definition, but the awoken sinners doing everything outwardly righteous which was in his natural power, something like that. Outwardly that natural, which WC, which was in his natural, that is, unconverted power. You get the idea? I am a member of Edward's congregation. I'm unconverted. And I am convinced, as what the great divine is saying, that the Bible is the word of God, that the doctrine pre-proclaimed is a pure exposition of the Word of God, that I am under the righteous judgment of God, that my heart is altogether wicked, I do not have it in me at all, sincerely to be inclined toward God, and I never will, unless I'm born from a God which is a sovereign act of divine grace. And he preaches those to me in a state like that, don't pretend, acknowledge you are what you are, And then, now that you're awakened, you know you're a sinner, and you know you're under divine judgment, this is what you can and you should do. Everything outwardly righteous which is in your natural power. I can read the Bible. I can go to church. I can speak my noble story. I can be faithful to my wife. I can pay my taxes to my government. I can do all sorts of things, such as that. While it's not virtuous, it's not as simple as if I didn't have to do those things. If it's my duty to keep the Sabbath, for example, it's better for me to abstain from plowing on the Sabbath afternoon than to plow. Though the plowing or the non-plowing of a wicked is good. I have no illusions. I'm not doing anything virtuous, but I'm doing something which would be less simple than otherwise. And if I come to church, for example, I don't pretend to like it. That would be pure hypocrisy. But I come to listen, to hear if this guy, this God, will use this word as he's going to do to my conversion. You get the idea? As I say, it's a rather unique notion, and we don't hear much about it today. And as I say, even the Edwardian scholars hardly grasp the idea. But yet, in the Puritan mentality, their form of very optimistic Calvinism, it was a central evangelistic concept. Now, let's take a few minutes here to make sure we've got the concept. Yes, please. Please. Talk a little louder than you normally would, because I can't quite get everything. But if it's all you have to fully teach me. You so surely find me? Yes. Now see, that is not what, I'm glad you brought that up, because I referred to it and then didn't really come back to it. If a person really, with all his heart, seeks a person, seek God. He's already found him. It reminds you of Augustine saying, Satan, I called upon thee, O Lord, the Lord's office already calls upon me. If you really seek God, because you love him, You see, you are a new preacher in Christ Jesus according to the reformed understanding of the Bible. This is not that kind of preaching. That's the reason I say it's a downright misleading thing, to suppose that. But if it's in all your hearts if you're a new preacher, that means that he has changed your heart. But this is something you do before he's changed your heart. While you're still conscious of the fact that you are dead in Christ Jesus in faith. You've been persuaded of that by the preacher, you see, expounding the Word of God. And that's where you are. So, speaking, as it's normally used, means genuine speaking of God because you love Him. Now, this is exactly the opposite concept. You don't love Him. Men hate God. In the natural state, He's their enemy. And they're His enemies. They're speaking Him, not because they love Him, but they are in a way of speaking, a way of preparation, to cause, to use, one that is less offensive to God, and grossly violated, as laws would be. And secondly, because if a person is going to be given a new heart, more of a way God does it in the context of persons doing what is in their natural power. You get the idea? I'll just say it's a subtle thing there. Say it once again. The seeking that the Bible uses is a genuine seeking out of a genuine desire for the object of your search, namely God. Now this is a seeking without a love of God. You're motivated mainly by fear. Listen, you wonder why some of these people think of them like pillars in the hands of an angry god. And why so much of them use them the other way. Edwards isn't the only one. He warns people about hell, you know. After all, if it's the truth of scripture, we ought all to be doing that. But Edwards had no monopoly on it. He was more persuasive, I suppose, in it. But the main reason he stressed that more than he stressed, for example, the attractive aspects of God. Because, as he said, it's God who's on the ground, he says. When people really do become concerned about God, it's not because of a desire for Him, but a desire to avoid the punishment from Him. As a simple matter of fact, what galvanizes most sinners into action is not the possibility of missing out on heaven, but the possibility of not missing out on hell. To essentially move more to avoid pain than they are to have pleasure. As a simple matter of fact, heaven seems to be very, very moving. on things such as religion, something like that, I wish I could get the exact part of it, religion, worthwhile for the sheer pleasure of it, or something like that. That sort of thing is in that. If you get the drill of the picture of heaven, you get a horrible picture of hell. But a rigid theory. Most people, when they began to take the rigid theory of things, it was because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't. And these theories were realistic. They knew for a while you were appealing to self-interest. They met you in the rain of spikes and said, what's the time for the rain? Let's just hold dirty. What's the time for the rain? We'll drain the whole world. And leave if you fall asleep. I can't think of anything more up to date. And I flew into America, and now, you know I'm no problem around the nation. And people are apathetic. Not only because, you know, they put the fires of hell out so long ago, they don't have anything to fear. And they think that anybody who ever crosses Jonathan Edwards today must be out of his cotton-picking mind. And they're not about to listen to it. And as long as that's the case, they're going to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow's... I don't know when it's going to come, but not hell. And so on. But in 18th century New England, it's a different story. The truth is still the same. Life is always just as much of a threat now, more of a threat now, than it was then. But people don't realize it now. And everyone is treated as much as they realize. But now, at the same time, you've got a lot at stake in Georgia. And people will immediately say, this is scare people, scare theology. You're frightening people into the kingdom of God. You're appealing to their basest desires to avoid pain. There isn't anything spiritual in it at all, they say. Edwards would be delighted, I'd say. I'm selling out the cynicism right now. I'm trying to scare people into the kingdom of God. Now, follow me closely here. He had no illusion, whatever, about the possibility of scaring anybody into heaven. He made it very plain that if anybody forced faith in Christ, because he was afraid if he didn't, he was going to the pit. But that was a statistical case. That wasn't through belief. And that only stoked the fires of Baltimore. because you are adding hypocrisy in the most perfect possible transaction between God and man. You were pretending to love Jesus, but as a matter of fact, all you did was love yourself. You weren't coming to Jesus, you were losing Jesus. You were becoming a picket out of hell. You couldn't care less about Jesus Christ. All you're concerned about is God, and you're mentioning the magic name because you don't want to perish. That's not faith, is it, Edward? That's dreadful hypocrisy, and so far from escaping hell by that, you only come under a worse judgment of hell by such hypocrisy. And I wanted to say, if this is fair theology, if every Christian is trying to frighten people into heaven, and frighten them away from hell, what is the purpose of all the terror? What do you mean by saying, knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men? Well, let me put this aside for the tale. This tale is called The Great Awakening. to these Saudi sinners, so much like the typical rank-and-file Americans. These Saudi sinners are so smart in their evil ways, and so good, there is no danger except the loss of their jobs, or their food, or something like that, but no danger from God either in this world or the next, but I'm sure they are sick and tired of that sin there. and realize that, as a matter of fact, there is nothing that keeps them out of hell any moment except the fear, the pleasure, and the thought of them being around you again. They're not going to be really concerned. But when they hear this message, then they become awakened. They become frightened. And Jonathan Evans is referring to them as a servant-carer, a very sort of thing John the Baptist said, let us cause you to flee, and the wrath which is to come. Why are you fleeing? You bring forth your loot to your party. If you go by your life, then you're not just terrified. that they're here doing the things that are really pleasing to God. Now, this preaching just awakens these individuals. Why? So that in their terror of time and age, they'll join a strike? No, no, no! You wonder about that every moment they talk about awakening. The purpose of the awakening is to say that they're mainly under God by the power of the Lord. The purpose of that is to get people to think differently about their soul and their relation to God. Let's give them so they wouldn't do it. The only thing they really care about is whether a nuclear bomb is going to take us into eternity, whether we're going to have a job, or whether our job is going to pay for inflation. Those are the things we're really concerned about to this day. And because we don't really have things in focus, but now we have them in focus, now we are prepared to think seriously about God. He's not going to become our fringe interest. He's not going to be in the background somewhere. He's going to be front and center. And what He is going to be saying to us is, earn a way for your sin with real power of it, and believe, come to me in genuine faith, and ensure it not repented. And until that faith came about, you were not in any way in Christ Jesus. But you see, the first action is not to frighten anybody into the kingdom, but to frighten them so that they think about things religious, and about their relationship to God. And as soon as they started to think about it, as if you were standing there warning them, don't start making a professional faith because you're scared. Start thinking about this, because it's good. You're no longer shuffling it off as a matter of unconcern. But remember, think about it properly, and remember who Jesus Christ is. And remember me, all of you that labor and are heavy laden. You who have a real burden to your sins. Know that you can't carry that load. Know that Jesus Christ in love offers you his salvation. You really desire that, now that you're thinking about it. He comes, and he'll receive you. That'll be an evidence, of course, that God has made him over again. I'd like to take a time for us to take a break. I think you've got the idea, haven't you? We'll weigh it more as we come back, but here's the keeping concept. What does a Calvinistic witness, what does a Calvinistic witness, to say otherwise, say to a person who is convinced there is a God, who has revealed himself in Scripture, who is warning us that unless we repent, we shall surely perish, and who reveals us to show dead incestuousness and sins that we have no inclination toward him, and that if we profess in that state to believe in him, we are mere hypocrites, that what we should do under such awoken circumstances, convicted by the Holy Spirit, is to put ourselves in the place where he is most likely, if in his sovereign grace, as Jesus agreed so, God's sovereignty is always maintained, where he is most likely to convert a person. That's the triple spirit and concept, or merging concept, take it over a little bit and when we come back we can weigh it a little more thoroughly. I better repeat the question. I was asking if Edwards is saying that these natural abilities that we have are not to be duplicated or supported by something new in regeneration, but to be used, reacted, or resounded yet. And if you have a capacity for faith, in your unregenerate state, you have a faculty for it. You have a mind which can understand it's right to be born again of God, that He's delivered up for our offenses and raised again for our justification. You don't get that by the second birth. That comes at the first birth. And, but the trouble is you don't have any information for it. And when you do, I've given that, I've told you Edward, in the new birth, then you use your mind properly. And you use your will properly. You're not given a new mind. You're not given a new will. You're given a new disposition to use the old capacity that you've always had in the way that you never did before. That OK? That's cool? Are we closing the world of prayer before we break the, you know, that picture? of thinking about thy word and about its relationship to us. And as you turn the clock back for a few hours here and live again in the teaching of a man who labored so industriously and so peacefully in the proclamation of the word of his time, grant me favor that we may learn from him, that we may trust all that he said about the word in the light of the word as we read it and ponder it on whatever is good, and we may adhere to it and practice it in their own time. If we see anything amiss, it's contrary to that word, that it is said of every good self, we may turn away from it, that we may be thy servants and thine only, benefited by our fathers in the faith insofar and only insofar as they seem to be true and loyal to thy holy word. That we can't be, O God, the way thou hast spoken through thy servants in the past, and by the heritage they've betrothed us and able us for better to serve thee in the present. We ask it specially as we wrestle with this rather fresh novel idea, very infrequently occurring in the history of evangelism, and yet based on a very profound probing of the Word of God in a very excited, revivalistic, and awakening context. Help us hope that, to come to this and understand and to choose wisely this record too. God is in our request and in the redemption of our consideration, for we ask it in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen. This Reformation audio track is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books. SWRB makes thousands of classic Reformation resources available, free and for sale, in audio, video, and printed formats. Our many free resources, as well as our complete mail-order catalog, containing thousands of classic and contemporary Puritan and Reform books, tapes, and videos at great discounts, is on the web at www.swrb.com. We can also be reached by email. by phone at 780-450-3730 by fax at 780-468-1096 or by mail at 4710-37A Edmonton, that's E-D-M-O-N-T-O-N Alberta, abbreviated capital A, capital B, Canada, T6L3T5. You may also request a free printed catalog. And remember that John Calvin, in defending the Reformation's regulative principle of worship, or what is sometimes called the scriptural law of worship, commenting on the words of God, which I commanded them not, neither came into my heart. From his commentary on Jeremiah 731, writes, God here cuts off from men every occasion for making evasions, since He condemns by this one phrase, I have not commanded them, whatever the Jews devised. There is then no other argument needed to condemn superstitions than that they are not commanded by God. For when men allow themselves to worship God according to their own fancies, and attend not to His commands, they pervert true religion. And if this principle was adopted by the papists, all those fictitious modes of worship in which they absurdly exercise themselves would fall to the ground. It is indeed a horrible thing for the Papists to seek to discharge their duties towards God by performing their own superstitions. There is an immense number of them, as it is well known, and as it manifestly appears. Were they to admit this principle, that we cannot rightly worship God except by obeying His word, they would be delivered from their deep abyss of error. The Prophet's words, then, are very important, when he says that God had commanded no such thing, and that it never came to his mind, as though he had said that men assume too much wisdom when they devise what he never required, nay, what he never knew.