The Importance of Doctrinal Order | Clip from Divine Retribution

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Now, we're looking at a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. So I think that Edwards, of all the preachers in this book,

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Edwards is probably the best known. But let me give you just a few highlights from his life that Mr.

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Roberts mentions in the introduction to the chapter, and then Chuck, you're going to run us through an overview of the sermon.

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Jonathan Edwards, born in 1703. His mother was a very godly and very intellectual young woman, daughter of a famous pastor named

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Solomon Stoddard. And Stoddard's not as well known today, but he was very well known in that day, arguably the most influential pastor in the early decades of the 18th century in the

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New England area. Stoddard had pastored during five seasons of revival, you know, extraordinary seasons of grace in his church.

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Eventually Edwards is going to work with Stoddard. And though Stoddard was an earnest godly man, he also had some wrong views of church membership that developed.

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It's called the halfway covenant. You can look that up. We don't have time to cover it here. Edwards' first stirrings spiritually happened when he was a seven -year -old during a time of revival in the area, and that stirring faded.

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So it kind of, you know, made him interested in his soul, and then it passed away. Later when he went to college, toward the end of college, he went through another season of real concern over his soul, and that led to genuine and lasting conversion.

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Now in 1722, when he was about 19 years old and had been a Christian for a few years, he began preaching.

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He was licensed to preach, and he started preaching in New York. Preached there for about eight months. Eventually in 1726, he becomes the assistant to his grandfather,

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Solomon Stoddard. And he marries a young woman named Sarah, who also was a very capable young woman and a great aid to him throughout his life.

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1729, three years after joining arms, so to speak, to work with his grandfather, in 1729,

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Solomon Stoddard died. And Edwards is now the sole pastor of a very influential church.

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Strangely, from 1729 to 1734, those first five years, very difficult years for him.

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I suppose we should expect that looking back, you know, when you have an older man that's very influential. But when we think of Jonathan Edwards, you know,

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I guess we just kind of put him on the level of the apostles, and we think, well, he wouldn't have any problem, you know, following anyone.

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But as a young man, he did have some trouble and the church seemed fairly apathetic.

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He began to preach on the great themes of redemption and God's sovereignty and prayed for an outpouring.

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And in 1734 and 35, there was a powerful period of restoration or revival in the church and that faded.

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But then with the coming of George Whitefield in 1740 to the area, another wave of revival began and that lasted longer.

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1744, about, what, 15 years after he comes to the church initially, there are some problems.

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There's some teenagers who have been misbehaving and he calls attention to that publicly in the church and reads their names.

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And these powerful families exert their influence. And in 1750,

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America's greatest theologian and perhaps greatest spiritual leader is kicked out of his own church.

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1751, he goes to be a missionary to the Indians. In 1757, he is asked to be the president of the

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College of New Jersey, which becomes Princeton. And he becomes the president. And then he takes the smallpox vaccination and dies.

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All right, Chuck, why don't you overview the sermon? So the sermon in the series, as Mr.

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Roberts lays it out, is Divine Retribution, as Edwards wrote it, was the eternity of hell torments. Based on Matthew 25, 46, these shall go away into everlasting punishment.

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This is, I think, a helpful sermon considering that there are so many people today who don't think that God will actually punish people eternally, or whose view of hell is inadequate as you hear them talking about.

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It's obvious. So it's a helpful sermon for us today, but it's also one of those things, as we've seen so often in this book, that is most helpful because of how it's laid out in the order that it is.

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If you've discounted all that's gone before, then you probably are going to discount this also. Or if you've not thought carefully about who

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God is and the depravity of man, the heinousness of sin, then you're going to possibly discount this.

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But if you've thought carefully through those other issues, then how could you not think carefully about the things that he says here?

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So here, again, we see the order is important. Thank you for watching the clip.

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We hope that it was helpful for you. If you want to hear the full audio of that podcast, you can find it on any of your favorite podcast apps.