N13864:423
A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…
A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of divinity, in a method entirely new. / By the late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, president of the College of New Jersey[.]
Boston: printed by Draper & Folsom, 1782
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.
If we are Christians, we belong to that building of God that has been the subject of our discourse from this text: but if it had not been for the history of the Old Testament, we should never have known what was the first occasion of God's going about this building, and how the foundation of it was laid at first, and how it has gone on from the beginning. The times of the history of the Old Testament are mostly times that no other history reaches up to; and therefore, if God had not taken care to give and preserve an account of these things for us, we should have been wholly without them.
Those that object against the authority of the Old Testament history of the nation of the Jews, may as well make it an objection against Moses's account of the creation that it is historical; for, in the other, we have an history of a work no less important viz. the work of redemption. Yea, this is a far greater and more glorious work, as we observed before; that if it be inquired which of the two works, the work of creation, or the work of providence, is greatest? it must be answered, the work of providence; but the work of redemption is the greatest of the works of providence.
Let those who make this objection consider what part of the Old Testament history can be spared, without making a great breach in that thread or series of events by which this glorious work has been carried on.—This leads me to observe,