N13864:995
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. › IMPROVEMENT OF THE WHOLE.
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.
God has used the creation which he has made, for no other purpose but to subserve the designs of this affair. To answer this end, he hath created and disposed of mankind, to this the angels, to this the earth, to this the highest heavens. God created the world to provide a spouse and kingdom for his Son: and the setting up of the kingdom of Christ, and the spiritual marriage of the spouse to him, is what the whole creation labours and travails in pain to bring to pass. This work of redemption is so much the greatest of all the works of God, that all other works are to be looked upon either as parts of it, or appendages to it, and all are some way reducible to it; and so all the decrees of God do some way or other belong to that eternal covenant of redemption which was between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world. Every decree of God is some way or other reducible to that covenant.
Seeing this work of redemption is so great a work, hence we need not wonder that the angels desire to look into it. We need not wonder that so much is made of it in scripture, and that it is so much insisted on in the histories, and prophecies, and songs of the Bible; for the work of redemption is the great subject of the whole, of its doctrines, its promises, its types, its songs, its histories, and its prophecies.
II. Hence we may learn how God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and ending of all things. Such are the character, […] titles we find often ascribed to God in scripture, in those place, ⟨p. 286⟩where the scripture speaks of the course of things, and series of events in providence: Is. xli.4. Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the Lord the first, and with the last, I am he, And particularly does the scripture ascribe such titles to God, where it speaks of the providence of God, as it relates to, and is summed up in the great work of redemption; as Is xliv 6 7. and xlviii.12. with the context, beginning with the 9th verse. So God eminently appears as the first and the last, by considering the whole scheme of divine providence as we have considered it, viz. as all reducible to that one great work of redemption.