Human nature in its fourfold state ... In several practical discourses

1. The misery of a natural state; it is a state of wrath, as well as a state of sin. We were, says the Apostle, children of wrath, bound over, and liable to the wrath of God; under wrath in some measure; and, in wrath, bound over to more, even the full measure of it in hell, where the floods of it go over the prisoners for ever. Thus Saul, in his wrath, adjudging David to die, (1 Sam. xx. 31.) and David, in his wrath, passing sentence of death against the man in the parable, (2 Sam. xii. 5.) say each of them, of his supposed criminal, He shall surely die: or, as the words in the first language are, he is a son of death. So the natural man is a child of wrath, a son of death. He is a malefactor dead in law, lying in chains of guilt: a criminal held fast in his setters, till the day of execution: which will not fail, unless a pardon be obtained from his God, who is his judge and party too. By that means, indeed, children of wrath may become children of the kingdom. The phrase in the text, however common it is in holy ⟨p. 95⟩language, is very significant. And as it is evident, that the Apostle calling natural men, the children of disobedience, (ver. 2) means more, than that they were disobedient children; for such may the Lord's own children be: so to be children of wrath, is more than simply to be liable to, or under wrath. Jesus Christ was liable to, and under wrath: but I doubt we have any warrant to say, he was a child of wrath. The phrase seems to intimate, that men are, whatsoever they are in their natural state, under the wrath of God; that they are wholly under wrath: wrath is, as it were, woven into their very nature, and mixeth itself with the whole of the man; who is (if I may so speak) a very lump of wrath, a child of hell, as the iron in the fire is all fire, For men naturally are children of wrath, come forth, so to speak, out of the womb of wrath; Jonah's gourd was the son of a night, (which we render came up in a night, Jonah iv. 10.) as if it had come out of the womb of the night; (as we read of the womb of the morning, Psal. cx. 3.) and so, the birth following the belly whence it came, was soon gone. The sparks of fire are called sons of the burning coal,