N13259:206
Sermons, on the following subjects
Sermons, on the following subjects; The manner in which salvation is to be sought. The unreasonableness of indetermination in religion. Unbelievers contemn the glory of Christ. The folly of looking back in fleeing out of Sodom. The warnings of Scripture in the best manner adapted to the awakening and conversion of sinners. Hypocrites deficient in the duty of prayer. The future punishment of the wicked unavoidable and intolerable. The eternity of hell-torments. The peace which Christ gives his true followers. The perpetuity & change of the Sabbath. / By the late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, president of the College of New-Jersey.
Hartford: printed by Hudson and Goodwin, 1780
Sermon 4: The Folly of looking back, in fleeing out of Sodom.
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. THE destruction to which Sodom is appointed is an everlasting destruction. This is said of the literal Sodom, that it suffered the vengeance of eternal fire, Jude vii. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities about them, in like manner giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.—That destruction that Sodom and Gomorrah suffered, was an eternal destruction: those cities were destroyed and have never been built since, and are not capable of being rebuilt; for the land on which they stood, at the time of their destruction sunk and has been ever since covered with the lake of Sodom or the dead sea, or as it is called in scripture, the salt sea. This seems to have been thus ordered on purpose to be a type of the eternal destruction of ungodly men. So that fire by which they were destroyed, is called eternal fire, because it was so typically, it was a type of the eternal destruction of ungodly men; which may be in part what is intended, when it is said in that text in Jude, that they were set forth for an example, or for a type or representation of the eternal fire in which all the ungodly are to be consumed.
SODOM has in all ages since been covered with a lake which was first brought on it by fire and brimstone, to be a type of the lake of fire and brimstone in which ungodly men shall have their part forever and ever, as we read Rev. xx. 15. and elsewhere.
WE ought not therefore to look back when fleeing out of Sodom, seeing that the destruction to ⟨p. 80⟩which it is appointed is an eternal, destruction; for this renders the destruction truly infinitely dreadful.