N13259:506
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
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.
THREATENINGS are significations of something; and if they are made consistently with truth, they are true significations, or significations of truth, or significations of that which shall be. If absolute threatenings are significations of any thing, they are significations of the futurity of the things threatened. But if the futurity of the things threatened, be not true and real, then how can the threatening be a true signification? And if GOD, in them, speaks contrary to what he knows, and contrary to what he intends, how he can speak true, is inconceivable.
ABSOLUTE threatenings are a kind of predictions; and though GOD is not properly obliged by any claim of our's, to fulfil predictions, unless they are of the nature of promises; yet it certainly would be contrary to truth, to predict and say such a thing would come to pass, which he knew at the same time, would not come to pass. Threatenings are declarations of something future, and they must be declarations of future truth, if they are true declarations. It's being future alters not the case any more than if it were present. It is equally contrary to truth, to declare contrary to what, at the same time is known to be truth, whether it be of things past, present, or to come: for all are alike to GOD.
BESIDE, we have often declarations in scripture of the future eternal punishment of the wicked, in the proper form of predictions, and not in the form of threatenings. So in the text. These shall go away into everlasting punishment. So in those frequent assertions of eternal punishment in the Revelation, some of which I have already quoted. The Revelation is a prophecy, and is so called in the book itself; so are those ⟨p. 189⟩declarations of eternal punishment.—The like declarations we have also in many other places of scripture.