N13864:610
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
A HISTORY Of the WORK of REDEMPTION. › Period 3 › Introduction: INTRODUCTION.
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.
II. The whole time of this period is sometimes in scripture called the end of the world, as, 1 Cor. x.11. "Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they were written from our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come." And the Apostle, Heb. ix.26, in this expression of the end of the world, means the whole of the gospel day, from the birth of Christ to the finishing of the day of judgment: "But now once in the end of the world, hath he appeared, to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." This space of time may well be called the end of the world ▪ for this whole time was taken up in bringing things to their great end and issue, to that great issue that God had been preparing the way for, in all the great dispensations of providence, from the first fall of man to this time. Before, things were in a kind of preparatory state; but now they are in a finishing state▪ It is the winding up of things which is all this while accomplishing. An end is now brought to the former carnal state of things, which by degrees vanishes, and a spiritual state begins to be established, and to be established more and more. First, an end is brought to the former state of the church, which may be called its worldly ⟨p. 174⟩state, the state wherein it was subject to carnal ordinances, and the rudiments of the world: and then an end was brought to the Jewish state, in the destruction of their city and country, and then, after that, an end is brought to the old Heathen empire in Constantine's […]; which is another and further degre• of the winding up and finishing of the world: and the next step is the finishing of Satan's visible kingdom in the world, upon the fall of Antichrist, and the calling of the Jews: and last will come the destruction of the outward frame of the world itself, at the conclusion of the day of judgment. But the world is all this while as it were a finishing, tho' it comes to an end by several steps and degrees. Heaven and earth began to shake, in order to a dissolution, according […] prophecy of Haggai, before Christ came, that so only those things that cannot be shaken may remain i. e. that those things that are to come to an end may come to an end, and that only those things may remain which are to remain to all eternity.