N03999:212
Captives bound in chains, made free by Christ their surety
Captives bound in chains, made free by Christ their surety: or, The misery of graceless sinners, and their recovery by Christ their Saviour. By T. Doolittel [sic]. ; [Three lines from Isaiah]
Boston: printed by Rogers & Fowle for J. Edwards, 1742
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
5. These captives are Children of the Wrath of God; whereas others that are Captives to men, might be Children of the Love of God; as they love and delight in God when they be in chains, so God may love and delight in them. If a man's outward condition be never so bad, yet he might comfort himself with the thoughts of God's love to him; though I be in prison, yet God loves me; and though I be in chains, yet God loves me: But the Devil's Captives do not love God, nor are beloved by him. A love of good-will God hath had to many of these Captives, a love of Purpose to do them good in delivering them from their bonds; but a love of complacency and delight, so that God should take pleasure in you while you are voluntarily and totally the Devil's Slaves and Servants, there is not in God towards you. O did you but know the Wrath of God, the Fury of the Lord, what it is, how great, how intolerable; Could you please your selves in that condition in which you are the objects of his ⟨p. 164⟩wrath? As there is no love like to the love of God; so there is no wrath like to the wrath of God; therefore that Condition (be it what it will) is not so bad in which you may be the object of God's love, as that condition is in which you are and must be the objects of his wrath.
6. Death doth not deliver Satan's Captives from their thraldom and their bondage, but doth straiten their Bonds, and strengthen their chains and puts them into an impossibility of Redemption for ever. If a slave be no way delivered while he liveth, yet he is freed when he dies; death will bring him a release, and give him a discharge; Job 3.17, 18, 19. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master. When the King of Babylon had taken Zedekiah captive, and bound him in fetters, he put him in prison till the day of his death, and then he was his prisoner no longer,