Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
(Deut 32:35)
…Their foot shall slide in due time…
This verse threatens God’s vengeance against the wicked, unbelieving Israelites. They were God’s visible people and lived with the means of grace. Yet despite all the wonderful works God had done for them, they remained, as Deuteronomy 32:28 expresses it, without counsel and without understanding. Despite all heaven’s cultivation, they produced bitter and poisonous fruit, as the two verses immediately before the text describe.
The expression I have chosen for my text, Their foot shall slide in due time, seems to imply the following things about the punishment and destruction to which these wicked Israelites were exposed.
1. They were always exposed to destruction, just as someone standing or walking in slippery places is always exposed to falling. This is implied in the way their destruction comes upon them: it is represented as their foot sliding. The same thing is expressed in the words, Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction (Ps 73:18).
2. They were always exposed to sudden, unexpected destruction. Someone walking in slippery places is liable to fall at every moment. They cannot foresee at one moment whether they will stand or fall the next. When they do fall, they fall all at once, without warning. This too is expressed in the words, Surely thou didst set them in slippery places; thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation as in a moment? (Ps 73:18-19).
3. Another implication is that they are liable to fall by themselves, without being thrown down by someone else’s hand. Someone standing or walking on slippery ground needs nothing but their own weight to bring them down.
4. The only reason they have not fallen already, and do not fall now, is that God’s appointed time has not come. For it says that when the due time, or appointed time, comes, their foot shall slide. Then they will be left to fall, as their own weight inclines them to do. God will no longer hold them up in these slippery places, but will let them go. At that very instant they will fall into destruction. Someone standing on slippery, sloping ground at the edge of a pit, unable to stand without support, immediately falls and is lost when that support is withdrawn.
The Doctrine: Preserved Only by God’s Will
The observation from these words that I now want to emphasize is this:
Nothing keeps wicked people out of hell for even a single moment except the mere will of GOD.
By God’s mere will, I mean his sovereign choice, his will exercised at his own discretion. No obligation restrains it, and no difficulty of any kind hinders it. Wicked people’s preservation for one moment depends on it as completely as if nothing else had the slightest part in preserving them, in any respect whatsoever.
The truth of this observation may be seen in the following considerations.
1. God has no lack of power to cast wicked people into hell at any moment. Human hands cannot be strong when God rises up. The strongest have no power to resist him, nor can anyone deliver them from his hands.
He is not only able to cast wicked people into hell; he can do it with the greatest ease. Sometimes an earthly ruler has great difficulty subduing a rebel who has found ways to fortify himself and made himself strong through the number of his followers. But it is not so with God. No fortress offers any defense against God’s power. Though people join hands, and vast multitudes of God’s enemies unite and band together, they are easily broken to pieces. They are like great heaps of light chaff before a whirlwind, or large quantities of dry stubble before devouring flames.
We find it easy to step on and crush a worm we see crawling on the ground. We also find it easy to cut or singe a slender thread from which something hangs. It is just as easy for God, whenever he chooses, to cast his enemies down to hell. What are we, that we should think we can stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?
2. They deserve to be cast into hell. Divine justice therefore never stands in the way or objects to God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. On the contrary, justice cries out for an infinite punishment of their sins. Divine justice says of the tree that produces such grapes of Sodom, Cut it down, why cumbreth it the ground? (Luke 13:7). The sword of divine justice is brandished over their heads every moment. Nothing holds it back except the hand of mercy freely exercised at God’s discretion, and God’s mere will.
3. They are already under a sentence condemning them to hell. They not only justly deserve to be cast down there. The sentence of God’s law has already been pronounced against them and remains against them. That law is the eternal, unchangeable rule of righteousness God has established between himself and humanity. They are therefore already sentenced to hell: He that believeth not is condemned already (John 3:18).
Every unconverted person properly belongs to hell. It is their place; they are from there: Ye are from beneath (John 8:23). And they are bound for it. It is the place that justice, God’s Word and the sentence of his unchangeable law assign to them.
4. They are now the objects of the very same anger and wrath of God that is expressed in the torments of hell. They do not avoid going down to hell at each moment because God, in whose power they are, is not then very angry with them. He is as angry with them as he is with many of those miserable creatures he is now tormenting in hell, who feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath there.
Indeed, God is far angrier with great numbers who are now on earth, and doubtless with many now in this congregation, perhaps at ease and undisturbed, than he is with many now in the flames of hell.
God does not keep from releasing his hand and cutting them off because he overlooks their wickedness or feels no indignation against it. God is not altogether like them, though they imagine him to be. God’s wrath burns against them. Their damnation does not sleep. The pit is prepared; the fire is ready; the furnace is already hot, ready to receive them; the flames already rage and glow. The glittering sword is sharpened and held over them, and the pit has opened its mouth beneath them.
5. The devil stands ready to fall upon them and seize them as his own at whatever moment God permits him. They belong to him. He possesses their souls and holds them under his dominion. Scripture represents them as his goods (Luke 11:21).
The devils watch them. They are always beside them, at their right hand. They stand waiting for them like greedy, hungry lions that see their prey and expect to have it, but are held back for the present. If God withdrew the hand that restrains them, they would pounce on these poor souls in a moment. The old serpent has its jaws open for them. Hell opens its mouth wide to receive them. If God permitted it, they would quickly be swallowed up and lost.
6. Hellish principles reign in the souls of wicked people. These would quickly ignite and burst into hellfire if God did not restrain them. The very nature of people ruled by the flesh contains a foundation for the torments of hell. Corrupt principles reign within them and possess them completely; these are seeds of hellfire.
These principles are active, powerful and exceedingly violent in their nature. Without God’s restraining hand upon them, they would soon break out. They would burst into flame just as the same corruptions and the same hostility do in the hearts of damned souls. They would produce the same torments in the wicked here as they do in the damned.
Scripture compares the souls of the wicked to the troubled sea (Isa 57:20). For the present, God restrains their wickedness by his mighty power, just as he restrains the raging waves of the troubled sea, saying, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further; but if God withdrew that restraining power, their wickedness would soon sweep everything before it.
Sin is the soul’s ruin and misery. It is destructive by nature. If God left it unrestrained, nothing else would be needed to make the soul utterly miserable. The corruption of the human heart is excessive and boundless in its fury. While wicked people live here, it is like fire held in by God’s restraints. If it were released, it would set the whole course of nature on fire. And just as the heart is now a cesspool of sin, so, if sin were not restrained, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, a furnace of fire and brimstone.
7. The absence of visible means of death nearby gives wicked people no security for even one moment. An unconverted person gains no security from being healthy now, from seeing no accident by which they might immediately leave this world, or from having no visible danger of any kind in their circumstances.
The world’s varied and continual experience in every age shows that none of this proves a person is not on the very brink of eternity, or that their next step will not be into another world. The unseen, unimagined ways and means by which people suddenly leave this world are innumerable and inconceivable.
Unconverted people walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering. Countless places in this covering are so weak that they cannot bear their weight, and these places cannot be seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noon; the keenest sight cannot discern them.
God has so many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked people out of this world and sending them to hell that nothing suggests he needs to perform a miracle or depart from the ordinary course of his providence to destroy any wicked person at any moment. Every means by which sinners leave this world is so completely in God’s hands, and so absolutely subject to his power and determination, that their going to hell at any moment depends no less on God’s mere will than it would if means were never used or had no part in the matter at all.
8. Unconverted people’s prudence and care to preserve their own lives, or other people’s care to preserve them, do not secure them for a moment. Divine providence and universal experience also testify to this. There is clear evidence that people’s own wisdom gives them no security against death. If it did, we would see some difference between the world’s wise, shrewd people and others in their exposure to early and unexpected death. But what do we actually find? How dieth the wise man? as the fool (Eccl 2:16).
9. All wicked people’s efforts and schemes to escape hell, while they continue rejecting Christ and thus remain wicked, give them no security against hell for even one moment. Almost every unconverted person who hears of hell flatters themselves that they will escape it. They depend on themselves for their own security. They reassure themselves with what they have done, what they are now doing, or what they intend to do.
Each person plans in their own mind how to avoid damnation and flatters themselves that they are planning well for themselves and that their schemes will not fail. They do hear that few are saved, and that most people who have died in the past have gone to hell. But each imagines that they are arranging their own escape better than others have done. They do not intend to reach that place of torment. They tell themselves that they intend to take effective care and arrange matters so that they will not fail.
But these foolish human beings miserably deceive themselves with their schemes and their confidence in their own strength and wisdom. They trust in nothing but a shadow. Most of those who formerly lived with the same means of grace and are now dead have undoubtedly gone to hell. This was not because they were less wise than those now alive. It was not because they planned less well to secure their own escape.
If we could speak with them and ask them, one by one, whether they expected, when they were alive and used to hear about hell, ever to suffer that misery, we would doubtless hear one after another reply:
“No, I never intended to come here. I had planned otherwise in my mind. I thought I would devise a good way to protect myself. I thought my scheme was good. I intended to take effective care. But it came upon me unexpectedly. I did not expect it at that time or in that way. It came like a thief. Death outwitted me. God’s wrath was too quick for me. Oh, my cursed foolishness! I was flattering myself and pleasing myself with empty dreams of what I would do later. While I was saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ sudden destruction came upon me.”
10. God has placed himself under no obligation by any promise to keep an unconverted person out of hell for one moment. God has certainly made no promises of eternal life, or of any deliverance or preservation from eternal death, except those contained in the covenant of grace. These are the promises given in Christ, in whom all the promises are Yea and Amen.
But surely those who are not children of the covenant, who do not believe any of its promises, and who have no share in its Mediator, have no share in the promises of the covenant of grace.
Whatever some have imagined and claimed about promises made to unconverted people’s earnest seeking and knocking, this is plain and evident: however much effort an unconverted person puts into religion, whatever prayers they offer, until they believe in Christ, God is under no obligation of any kind to keep them from eternal destruction for a moment.
This, then, is how unconverted people are held in God’s hand over the pit of hell. They have deserved the fiery pit and are already sentenced to it. God is dreadfully provoked. His anger toward them is as great as it is toward those actually suffering the execution of his fierce wrath in hell. They have done nothing at all to appease or diminish that anger. Nor is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up for one moment.
The devil is waiting for them. Hell has its mouth open for them. The flames gather and flash around them, eager to seize and swallow them. The fire confined in their own hearts struggles to break out. They have no share in any Mediator. No means within their reach can give them any security.
They have no refuge, nothing to hold on to. Everything that preserves them at each moment is the mere will, exercised at his own discretion, of an incensed God, and his forbearance, unpledged by covenant and required by no obligation.
Application: The Danger of Remaining Unconverted
This teaching may serve to awaken unconverted people in this congregation. What you have heard is the condition of every one of you who is outside Christ. That world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone, spreads beneath you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of God’s wrath. There is hell’s wide-open, gaping mouth. You have nothing to stand on and nothing to hold on to. Nothing lies between you and hell but the air. Only God’s power and mere will hold you up.
You probably do not realize this. You find that you are kept out of hell, but do not see God’s hand in it. Instead, you look to other things: the good condition of your body, your care for your own life and the means you use to preserve yourself. But these things really amount to nothing. If God withdrew his hand, they would do no more to keep you from falling than thin air does to hold up someone suspended in it.
Your wickedness makes you, as it were, as heavy as lead. It draws you downward toward hell with great weight and pressure. If God let you go, you would immediately sink, swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf. Your healthy body, your own care and prudence, your best schemes and all your righteousness would do no more to hold you up and keep you out of hell than a spider’s web would do to stop a falling rock.
Unless it were God’s sovereign choice to preserve you, the earth would not bear you for one moment, for you are a burden to it. Creation groans under you. Created things are unwillingly subjected to the bondage of your corruption. The sun does not willingly shine on you to give you light to serve sin and Satan. The earth does not willingly yield its produce to satisfy your lusts, nor willingly provide a stage on which your wickedness can be acted out. The air does not willingly give you breath to sustain the flame of life within you while you spend your life serving God’s enemies.
God’s creatures are good. They were made for people to use in serving God, and they do not willingly serve any other purpose. They groan when abused for purposes directly opposed to their nature and intended end. The world would spew you out if not for the sovereign hand of him who subjected it in hope.
The black clouds of God’s wrath now hang directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and heavy with thunder. Without God’s restraining hand, the storm would immediately burst upon you. God’s sovereign will holds back his harsh wind for the present. Otherwise it would come with fury. Your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like chaff on the summer threshing floor.
God’s wrath is like great waters held back by a dam for the present. They increase more and more and rise higher and higher until an outlet is opened. The longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and powerful its course becomes once it is released.
It is true that judgment against your evil works has not yet been executed. The floods of God’s vengeance have been held back. But meanwhile your guilt constantly increases. Every day you store up more wrath. The waters continually rise and become more and more powerful. Nothing but God’s mere will holds back these waters, which resist being stopped and press hard to move forward.
If God merely withdrew his hand from the floodgate, it would immediately fly open. The fiery floods of God’s fierceness and wrath would rush out with inconceivable fury and come upon you with omnipotent power. If your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, indeed, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the strongest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would do nothing to withstand or endure it.
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow is ready on the string. Justice aims the arrow at your heart and draws the bow taut. Nothing but the mere will of God, an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, keeps the arrow for one moment from becoming drunk with your blood.
This is the condition of all of you who have never undergone a great change of heart through the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls. It is the condition of all who have never been born again, made new creatures and raised from being dead in sin to a state of new light and life, entirely unknown to them before.
You may have reformed your life in many ways. You may have had religious feelings and maintained a form of religion in your families, in private devotion and in God’s house. You may have been strict about it. Yet you are in the hands of an angry God in this way. Nothing but his mere will keeps you from being swallowed up in everlasting destruction at this moment.
However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, before long you will be fully convinced. Those who have passed out of circumstances like yours see that it was so with them. Destruction came suddenly upon most of them when they expected nothing of it, while they were saying, Peace and safety. Now they see that the things on which they depended for peace and safety were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.
The God who holds you over the pit of hell, much as someone holds a spider or some loathsome insect over a fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath toward you burns like fire. He regards you as worthy of nothing but being cast into the fire. His eyes are too pure to bear having you in his sight. In his eyes, you are ten thousand times as abominable as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than any stubborn rebel ever offended his ruler.
Yet nothing but his hand keeps you from falling into the fire at every moment. Nothing else accounts for your not going to hell last night, or for your being allowed to wake again in this world after closing your eyes to sleep. No other reason can be given for your not dropping into hell since you rose this morning except that God’s hand has held you up.
No other reason can be given for your not going to hell since you sat down here in God’s house, provoking his pure eyes by the sinful, wicked way you attend his solemn worship. Indeed, nothing else explains why you do not drop into hell at this very moment.
Oh, sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in. You are held over a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit full of the fire of wrath, in the hand of that God whose wrath is as provoked and inflamed against you as against many of the damned in hell.
You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing around it, ready at every moment to singe it and burn it through. You have no share in any Mediator, and nothing to seize to save yourself. You have nothing to keep away the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing you have ever done, nothing you can do, to induce God to spare you for one moment.
Consider more particularly several things about this wrath, of which you are in such danger.
1. Consider whose wrath it is. It is the wrath of the infinite GOD. If it were only human wrath, even that of the most powerful ruler, it would deserve comparatively little attention. The wrath of kings is greatly dreaded, especially that of absolute monarchs who have their subjects’ possessions and lives wholly in their power, to dispose of entirely as they choose. The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion: Whoso provoketh him to anger, sinneth against his own soul (Prov 20:2).
A subject who greatly enrages a ruler with absolute power is liable to suffer the most extreme torments human ingenuity can invent or human power inflict. But the greatest earthly rulers, in their greatest majesty and strength, clothed with their greatest terrors, are only feeble, contemptible worms of the dust compared with the great and almighty Creator and King of heaven and earth.
They can do only a little, even when most enraged and when they have unleashed the utmost of their fury. Before GOD, all the earth’s kings are like grasshoppers. They are nothing, and less than nothing. Both their love and their hatred deserve contempt. The wrath of the great King of kings is as much more terrible than theirs as his majesty is greater.
And I say unto you, my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that, have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him (Luke 12:4-5).
2. You are exposed to the fierceness of his wrath. We often read of God’s fury: According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries (Isa 59:18). Again, For behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebukes with flames of fire (Isa 66:15). And so in many other places.
We also read of God’s fierceness. Revelation speaks of the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God (Rev 19:15). These words are exceedingly terrible. If it had said only the wrath of God, those words would have implied something infinitely dreadful. But it does not say only that. It says the fierceness and wrath of God! The fury of God! The fierceness of Jehovah! Oh, how dreadful that must be! Who can express or conceive what such expressions contain!
But it does not say only that. It says the fierceness and wrath of Almighty GOD! It is as though there would be a very great display of his almighty power in what the fierceness of his wrath would inflict. It is as though omnipotence itself would be enraged and exerted, as people are accustomed to exert their strength in the fierceness of their wrath.
Oh, then, what will the consequence be! What will become of the poor worm that suffers it! Whose hands can be strong? Whose heart can endure? Into what dreadful, inexpressible, inconceivable depth of misery must the poor creature who suffers this be plunged!
Consider this, you who are here and still remain unregenerate. God’s execution of his fierce anger means that he will inflict wrath without any pity. When God beholds the unspeakable extremity of your condition, and sees how vastly your torment exceeds your strength, and how your poor soul is crushed and sinks into what is like an infinite darkness, he will have no compassion on you.
He will not hold back the execution of his wrath or lighten his hand in the least. There will be no moderation or mercy. God will not then restrain his harsh wind at all. He will have no regard for your welfare, nor take any care to keep you from suffering too much, except that you will not suffer beyond what strict justice requires. Nothing will be withheld because it is so hard for you to bear.
Therefore will I also deal in fury; mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet I will not hear them (Ezek 8:18).
Now God stands ready to pity you. This is a day of mercy. You may cry out now with some encouragement that you may obtain mercy. But once the day of mercy has passed, your most lamentable, anguished cries and shrieks will be useless. You will be wholly lost and cast away by God as far as any concern for your welfare is concerned.
God will have no other use for you except that you suffer misery. You will be kept in existence for no other purpose, for you will be a vessel of wrath fitted for destruction. This vessel will have no other use except to be filled completely with wrath. God will be so far from pitying you when you cry to him that it says he will only laugh and mock (Prov 1:25-26), etc.
How awful are these words of the great God: I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment! (Isa 63:3). Perhaps it is impossible to conceive of words that display these three things more strongly: contempt, hatred and fierce indignation.
If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying your sorrowful condition, or showing you the least regard or favor, that he will instead trample you underfoot. Though he will know that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading upon you, he will pay no attention to that. He will crush you under his feet without mercy. He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it will spatter his garments and stain all his clothing.
He will not only hate you, but regard you with the utmost contempt. No place will be considered fit for you except beneath his feet, to be trampled down like the mud in the streets.
3. The misery to which you are exposed is what God will inflict for the purpose of showing what the wrath of JEHOVAH is. God has intended to show both angels and human beings how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is.
Sometimes earthly kings want to show how terrible their wrath is through the extreme punishments they carry out against those who provoke them. Nebuchadnezzar, that mighty, arrogant monarch of the Chaldean Empire, wanted to show his wrath when enraged with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. He therefore ordered the burning fiery furnace to be heated seven times hotter than before. Doubtless its fierceness was raised to the utmost degree human ingenuity could achieve.
But the great GOD also wants to show his wrath, and display the greatness of his awful majesty and mighty power in his enemies’ extreme sufferings: What if God willing to show HIS wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction? (Rom 9:22).
Since this is his purpose, and what he has determined, to show how terrible the unmixed, unrestrained wrath, the fury and fierceness of JEHOVAH, is, he will accomplish it fully. Something truly dreadful will be accomplished and brought to pass.
When the great and angry God has risen up and executed his awful vengeance on the poor sinner, and that wretched person is actually suffering the infinite weight and power of his indignation, God will call on the whole universe to behold the awful majesty and mighty power to be seen in it: And the people shall be as the burning of lime; as thorns cut up shall they be burnt in the fire. Hear ye that are far off, what I have done; and ye that are near, acknowledge my might. The sinners in Zion are afraid, fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites (Isa 33:12-14), etc.
This is how it will be with you who are unconverted, if you continue in that condition. The infinite might, majesty and terribleness of the omnipotent God will be displayed upon you in the unspeakable intensity of your torments. You will be tormented in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
When you are in this state of suffering, heaven’s glorious inhabitants will go out and look at the awful spectacle so that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty are. When they have seen it, they will fall down and adore that great power and majesty.
And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh (Isa 66:23-24).
4. It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God for one moment, but you must suffer it for all eternity. There will be no end to this intensely horrible misery.
When you look ahead, you will see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts and overwhelm your soul. You will utterly despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any relief, any rest at all. You will know with certainty that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, wrestling and struggling with this almighty, merciless vengeance.
Then, when you have done so, when you have actually spent so many ages in this way, you will know that it all amounts to only a point compared with what remains. Your punishment will indeed be infinite.
Oh, who can express the state of a soul in such circumstances! Everything we can possibly say about it gives only a very weak, faint representation of it. It is inexpressible and inconceivable. For who knows the power of God’s anger?
How dreadful is the state of those who are daily and hourly in danger of this great wrath and infinite misery! But this is the dismal condition of every soul in this congregation who has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious they may otherwise be. Oh, that you would consider it, whether you are young or old!
There is reason to think that many in this congregation, now hearing this discourse, will actually suffer this very misery for all eternity. We do not know who they are, where they sit, or what thoughts they now have. Perhaps they are now at ease, hearing all these things without much disturbance, flattering themselves that they are not the people in question and promising themselves that they will escape.
If we knew that one person, and only one, in the whole congregation would suffer this misery, what an awful thing it would be to contemplate! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight it would be to see that person! How all the rest of the congregation might raise a lamentable, bitter cry over them!
But alas! Instead of one, how many are likely to remember this discourse in hell? It would be a wonder if some now present were not in hell very soon, before this year is over. It would be no wonder if someone now sitting here in a seat in this meetinghouse, healthy, quiet and secure, were there before tomorrow morning.
Those of you who finally persist in an unconverted condition, even those who stay out of hell longest, will be there in a little while! Your damnation does not sleep. It will come swiftly, and in all probability very suddenly, upon many of you. You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell.
Doubtless this is the condition of some whom you once saw and knew, who never deserved hell more than you, and who once seemed as likely to be alive now as you. Their condition is beyond all hope. They are crying out in extreme misery and utter despair. But here you are in the land of the living and in God’s house, with an opportunity to obtain salvation. What would those poor, damned, hopeless souls not give for one day of the opportunity you now enjoy!
And now you have an extraordinary opportunity. This is a day when CHRIST has thrown the door of mercy wide open and stands in the doorway, calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners. It is a day when many are flocking to him and pressing into God’s kingdom. Many are coming daily from east, west, north and south.
Many who very recently were in the same miserable condition as you are now happy. Their hearts are filled with love for him who has loved them and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and they rejoice in the hope of God’s glory.
How awful it is to be left behind on such a day! To see so many others feasting while you waste away and perish! To see so many rejoicing and singing for joy of heart while you have reason to mourn for sorrow of heart and howl in anguish of spirit! How can you rest for one moment in such a condition? Are your souls not as precious as the souls of the people at Suffield (the next neighboring town), where they are flocking to Christ day after day?
Are there not many here who have lived long in this world and still, to this day, have not been born again? You therefore remain strangers to the commonwealth of Israel and have done nothing throughout your lives but store up wrath against the day of wrath. Oh, sirs, your condition is especially dangerous. Your guilt and hardness of heart are exceedingly great.
Do you not see how generally people of your age are passed over and left behind in this present remarkable and wonderful outpouring of God’s mercy? You need to consider your condition and wake thoroughly from sleep. You cannot bear the fierceness and wrath of the infinite GOD.
And you young men and young women, will you neglect this precious season you now enjoy, when so many others your age are renouncing all the empty pursuits of youth and flocking to CHRIST? You especially now have an extraordinary opportunity. But if you neglect it, you will soon be like those who spent all the precious days of their youth in sin and have now reached such a dreadful state of blindness and hardness.
And you unconverted children, do you not know that you are going down to hell to bear the dreadful wrath of that God who is now angry with you every day and every night? Will you be content to be children of the devil, when so many other children in the land are converted and have become the holy and happy children of the King of kings?
Let everyone who is still outside Christ and hanging over the pit of hell now heed the loud calls of God’s Word and providence, whether old men and women, the middle-aged, young people or little children.
This acceptable year of the LORD, a day of such great favor to some, will doubtless be a day of equally remarkable vengeance to others. People’s hearts harden and their guilt rapidly increases on a day like this if they neglect their souls. Never has there been so great a danger of such people being given over to hardness of heart and blindness of mind.
God now seems to be gathering in his elect quickly in every part of the land. Probably most adults who will ever be saved will be brought in now, within a short time. Probably it will be as it was at that great outpouring of the Spirit upon the Jews in the apostles’ days: the elect will obtain salvation, and the rest will be blinded.
If this should be your condition, you will eternally curse this day. You will curse the day you were ever born to see such a season of the pouring out of God’s Spirit, and wish you had died and gone to hell before you saw it.
Now it is undoubtedly as it was in the days of John the Baptist. The ax is laid at the root of the trees in an extraordinary way, so that every tree that does not produce good fruit may be cut down and cast into the fire.
Therefore let everyone who is outside CHRIST now awake and flee from the wrath to come. The wrath of almighty GOD is undoubtedly now hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let everyone flee out of Sodom: Haste and escape for your lives; look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.
