Between Two Worlds

Posted by GDG

One of Yale's residential colleges is called "Jonathan Edwards College," an act of tribute to the great theologian which is lost on most of those who live and work around it every day. A few months after I was introduced to Edwards by one of my professors, I decided to do an impromptu survey of some of my fellow students who lived in "JE." So I walked into the courtyard and started stopping random people. I asked them, "Do you know who Jonathan Edwards was?"

One person gave what ended up being a pretty average answer (at least as much as you can take an average from the only five or six people I interviewed). She said, "Yea, sure. Isn't he that guy who preached a sermon about a spider and told all the Indians they were going to hell?" I gave up.

The spider sermon, of course, is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and that is about as far as most Americans are familiar with Edwards. That's a shame, because as marvelous and truthful and poignant and sink-you-down-in-your-couch convicting that sermon is, if it's all you ever read of Edwards in your ninth grade English class, it doesn't very well communicate the sweetness and tenderness of his love for Jesus Christ.

A lot more evangelicals are familiar now with JE's "End for Which God Created the World," thanks to John Piper's efforts, and that, too, is a theological tour de force that every Christian--and every student, especially--should read several times. But even you read "End" along with "Sinners," you still won't get a sense of JE's sweetness and compassion.

So in the interest of introducing some readers to a part of JE they may never have experienced, let me encourage you to read in your devotional sometime his sermon "The Excellency of Christ." It is one of my favorites. Here's a taste:

Christ's holiness never so illustriously shone forth as it did in his last sufferings, and yet he never was to such a degree treated as guilty.

Christ's holiness never had such a trial as it had then, and therefore never had so great a manifestation. When it was tried in this furnace it came forth as gold, or as silver purified seven times. His holiness then above all appeared in his steadfast pursuit of the honor of God, and in his obedience to him. For his yielding himself unto death was transcendently the greatest act of obedience that ever was paid to God by any one since the foundation of the world.

And yet then Christ was in the greatest degree treated as a wicked person would have been. He was apprehended and bound as a malefactor. His accusers represented him as a most wicked wretch. In his sufferings before his crucifixion, he was treated as if he had been the worst and vilest of mankind, and then, he was put to a kind of death, that none but the worst sort of malefactors were wont to suffer, those that were most abject in their persons, and guilty of the blackest crimes. And he suffered as though guilty from God himself, by reason of our guilt imputed to him; for he who knew no sin, was made sin for us; he was made subject to wrath, as if he had been sinful himself. He was made a curse for us.

Christ never so greatly manifested his hatred of sin, as against God, as in his dying to take away the dishonor that sin had done to God; and yet never was he to such a degree subject to the terrible effects of God's hatred of sin, and wrath against it, as he was then. in this appears those diverse excellencies meeting in Christ, namely, love to God, and grace to sinners.

Gg