Matthew Everhard: The Joy of Jonathan Edwards

Opening Banter and Show Introduction

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between, broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now.

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I usually do a little dialogue with you guys, if it's just me and you, but we have a special guest on, so I want to get right to it. He doesn't want to sit through hearing me talk about camping and lake life and all that stuff up here in Michigan that we're getting ready for this summer, but it's Matthew Everhardt, is on the podcast today.

He's pastor of Gospel Fellowship PCA, just north of Pittsburgh, adjunct professor of evangelism, Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, President's Council Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh.

I'm seeing a lot of Presbyterian here, we're gonna get along great today. Married to Kelly with four children, and he's got a couple books out, and we're gonna be talking about his latest one, but he's got Holy Living, Jonathan Edwards, Seventy Resolutions, Hold Fast to the Faith, Devotional Commentary on Westminster, Confession of Faith, didn't know we had that one, going to be purchasing that myself, so I can read through that.

Souls, How Jesus Saved Sinners, and a Theology of Joy, Jonathan Edwards and the Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity, which piqued my interest, and as you guys know, I'm pretty selfish. If someone or something piques my interest, I call them up, say, hey, come on the podcast, let's talk about it, and hopefully it brings value and content to you guys as well.

So it is Matthew.

Everhardt. How are you doing, Matthew? Good, what's up everybody? So glad to be on the show. Thank you, Greg, for having me. Now, do you go by Matthew or Matt? Either one doesn't really matter, just don't call me late for dinner.

Some people call me Matthew, other people call me Matt. I had a guy one time who called me Mark for four years, and I didn't have the heart to correct him, and then finally, like four years in, somebody said, hey, Matt, and he confronted me.

He's like, you let me call you Mark for four years, so does not matter, brother. Glad to be on.

The show. Thanks for having me. Oh, that's so funny. There is a certain point where if you let it go for too long, you just have to let it keep going. You're like, well, I've seen the guy four or five times, you know, I'm now Mark.

Some.

People are really particular about how their name is said, or how it's spelled, or how it's pronounced, or even that it's the right name. I'm just glad that I'm talking to you today, Greg. I feel like I'm honored to be with you today, and I do want to hear about your camping experiences, by the way.

It sounds.

Amazing. Oh, I appreciate that. The only reason I said that is because that Matt and Matthew is the one I get the most pushback on. I have a lot of Matthews that go, I am not a Matt. I'm not a doormat.

I don't get walked on. It's Matthew, and I don't see it that way, but some Matthews do, so I'm glad you're comfortable with that. Well, now that we've got the names out of the way, that was kind of like the Christian version of pronouns, I think.

Is that allowed? I think so, yeah. Tell me about this book, because I saw, and first of all, for anyone listening, and I want you to plug your YouTube channel while you're on here, too, because it's amazing.

I just happened to go back and find an old video. I say old, but three, four years, which in podcasting years is internet age, is decades old, it seems like, but I think it was three or four years old, and it was all on explaining the covenant theology, and you did such a fantastic job of breaking down those big, deep theological kind of positions into a nice, concise, and I might even say dumbed-down version for an idiot like me.

I went, wow, this is so needed. That was kind of one of the goals of this podcast, and it made me a little depressed. I said, oh, there's a gentleman already out there doing it much, much better, so I should just quit now, but instead, I said, let's have him on the podcast and have him bring some of that knowledge and intellect to the podcast, so I just want to say the YouTube channel has blessed me, and I want you to throw that out there in the course of this episode so people can go subscribe and watch it as well, but first and foremost, The Theology of Joy, Jonathan Edwards and the Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity.

How'd this book come about? Because this is a very.

Jonathan Edwards, Joy, and the Search for the Summum Bonum

Interesting subject, I think. Well, thanks for saying that, and by the way, I do appreciate the plug on the YouTube channel as well. It's kind of embarrassing to look at some of those videos because some of them are, you know, the channel's been around for a while, and a lot of them is before my beard was even gray, back when it was naturally dark, and then there was that embarrassing phase where I tried to dye it for a little bit.

That was so stupid, so now I look back at those videos and I just kind of recoil at looking at myself. That's the unfortunate thing about being a video-based platform, unlike audio, where you kind of sound the same throughout the decades or whatever.

So the book came about in my research for my doctoral dissertation program. Now, this was back when I was living in Florida. I was attending RTS Orlando at the time, and the guy who was kind of leading the doctoral program said a couple things about a dissertation.

He said, first of all, pick a topic that, when you die, that somebody can say that this really shaped and changed your life, like this was something that captured your heart. Because practically, the other thing is, he said, you've got to be able to latch on to some particular topic for multiple years and be able to research the same thing without getting bored.

And so I looked at my own heart, to be honest, Greg, and this was, let's see, what year did I graduate? Mid -20-teens, I guess. And I was a pastor. I was busy. I was stressed. I was stressed when I was at home thinking about church.

And when I was at church, I was stressed thinking about home. And I looked at my own life and I kind of did a little check down of the fruit of the spirit. And I started with love and I said, yeah, I definitely have love.

I love the Lord. I love Christ. I love my wife and my kids and my church. And then I went to joy and I was like, ah, okay. So I have a joy deficit in my heart. And so I thought about the concept of studying happiness or joy, which is one of the great pursuits of the philosophers.

It's like one of the all-time philosophical questions is the, what is the sumum bonum? What is the greatest good? What brings about happiness? All the way back to the Greek philosophers, they, they quested to know what makes the heart happy.

You know, Ecclesiastes 2 is about the same thing. And so I latched onto the idea of joy kind of philosophically as a, as a topic. And Jonathan Edwards was the theologian that I had encountered that was just constantly talking about joy and happiness.

And so on one hand, recognizing there's something in my own heart that needed it. I wanted to study something that was practical to me. I needed joy and happiness. And on the other hand, finding Edwards as kind of like my dead mentor, he talked about happiness and joy proliferously just through throughout all his writings.

And we can talk about some of those if you want to. But one of the things I noticed about Edwards he's, he's kind of famous for his sermon sinners in the hands of an angry God, which is more or less a fire and brimstone sermon, but it's probably not the best piece to describe his entire body of work because almost everywhere, ubiquitously in his writings and in his preaching joy or happiness comes into the equation, at least at some points in almost everything he writes.

And so I thought, okay, here's the guy I'm going to latch onto Edwards. Moreover, his works are so voluminous that you could never even, you know, no one Edwards scholar can totally sap all of the writings that he has because there's just so much content.

And so I thought, okay, this is profound. This is real. This is something that a lot of us need in our lives, which is joy. It's a, it's one of the fruit of the spirit. And so I'm going to study this.

And so that's kind of how I got into the topic. Oh, I love that idea too. And for me, you said it's psych, it's a philosophical, it's one of the deepest philosophical questions. And one of the reasons why it interests me too, because it does seem to be something that we can really wrestle with and we'll get into it a little bit here, but I was thinking along the lines of just understanding the difference of happiness and joy.

They're two different words. Sometimes we use them interchangeably. Biblical joy to me, when I read through the Bible, it seems to be something entirely different than secular happiness. Do you touch at all on that book and those kinds of, maybe not that dichotomy explicitly, but do you touch on that?

And their joy is something different than just an emotional feeling of gladness or happiness? Or am I off track there?

No, you're definitely on track. And I think that's an Edwardsian distinction is to recognize the difference. Now, just a little bit about the term. So you and I, we probably think of joy as being a little bit richer and deeper than the word happiness.

Okay. So I too mind that distinction. I think there is a difference between joy and happiness as we use those terms commonly today. In Edwards's writing, there is not a distinction between joy and happiness as synonyms, as two words to describe a similar concept.

So whether we're using joy or happiness or gladness or any of the other synonyms here, Edwards is basically talking about the same thing. So you can't parse the words just based on which term he's using.

However, he clearly recognizes what you and I would think is the distinction between those two. And that is to say that happiness, as we regard it, is circumstantial. It's something that is brought about usually on some particular occasion by some certain set of circumstances that are pleasing to us.

And of course, it tends to fade almost as quickly as it is obtained. So when we think of happiness, we might think of a good glass of wine, or we might think of a good conversation with a friend, or we might think about a beautiful spring or summer day.

Those kinds of things certainly do bring a kind of happiness into our hearts. But the problem with those things is that the moment that they are obtained, that happiness, that euphoria that it brings into the heart dissipates almost as quickly as those circumstances go away.

So just by way of example, we're looking forward to my daughter's wedding, which is coming up. We have our, my oldest daughter is going to get married. This will be my first child that's getting married.

Well, there's so much anticipation of that particular day, and undoubtedly it will be a great day of joy. But we also expect as we do all things to be realistic that that day's happiness will fade at some point as other troubles come into our lives.

And that's typically the experience of all human beings. However, what Edwards would say is that there is a deeper, richer, fuller joy and happiness that is obtained not by the things of this world, but rather it is obtained and retained in the heart through the spiritual experiential relationship that we have in God through Christ.

And so Edwards would say that's actually rooted in the Trinity itself. And so that's one of the reasons why the book is titled Eternal Happiness in the Holy Trinity. So without giving away too much in the book,.

Could we unpack that a little bit? So, and I'm going to be honest with you. I grew up, I was homeschooled for eight or nine years of my school year age life. And that was back in the eighties when social services would show up at the door and why aren't your kids in school?

And it was like a really weird thing. And I remember we studied Jonathan Edwards in our homeschool curriculum. I was brought up in a non-denominational spirit-filled church, but more very legalistic, that whole eighties movement of like, don't touch it.

Don't look at it. Can't see it. God's coming back any second for the rapture. So let's just hunker down and wait. Right. So we were, and Calvinists were weirdos. We'll study some of them and they're great ones.

Like Jonathan Edwards, we'll have a little blurb in history, but for most of my, I'm telling you that into my twenties, even into my early thirties, all I really knew about Jonathan Edwards was that sermon.

And he was just the guy that was going to preach mean stuff to you, fire and brimstone. And he really thought you were a horrible sinner. And to understand that he had this, this, this really deep understanding of joy and preached on it and taught on it.

It really, it really threw me in my early thirties. I went, Oh my goodness, wait a minute. What was this guy talking about? So in the book, you say the joy is rooted in, in the Trinity. What are we, what are we saying there when we say, look at happiness, joy, circumstantial, yeah, we get that.

Those are real world things. But now we're talking about something that's kind of maybe intangible to us. How can joy be rooted in the Trinity?

The Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Affections

Yeah, great question. So for Edwards, everything that he talks about and thinks is Trinitarian, and Edwards is a Trinitarian theologian as all good Christian thinkers ought to be. And so when Edwards is trying to explain the Trinity, he does so in ways that sometimes make reformed theologians a little bit uncomfortable because when Edwards talks about the Trinity, he tends to not use confessional or creedal language as much as we wish he would.

Because we think of course, as reformed people that the creeds and the confessions are very, very helpful. They're the basic ways that we talk about the Trinity. And in fact, the creeds and the confessions, they set up those fences or parameters.

So for instance, we should affirm these things, but anything outside of that, we do well to deny. And so we are very thankful for creeds and confessions, especially as reformed people, Presbyterians in particular appreciating the Westminster confession of faith.

But it's a little bit frustrating to study Edwards on the Trinity because he doesn't tend to simply quote into rehash what the creeds and the confessions already say. Although Edwards does say that he could easily affirm the Westminster confession of faith.

Instead, what Edwards does when he describes the Holy Trinity is he tends to describe their relations between the three persons, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now here's where it gets a little bit weird.

So Edwards would say that the Father is something like God in the prime, God in his ultimate essence. And so when the Father contemplates himself, that is Edwards' explanation for the begottenness of the Son.

The Son is the beloved and the Father is the lover. The Father loves his own self-conception and his self-conception of his identity is of course perfect. And so this is the way that Edwards tries to explain the fact that the Son of God is begotten of the Father, but not created.

He didn't come into being at any one particular time, but it's the Father's love essentially for his own glory and his own self. So then somebody asks, well, wherein is the Holy Spirit? Well, Edwards would say that the Holy Spirit is essentially the joy or the love or the overflow of the Father's love for the Son.

Okay. So it's a little bit strange and certainly non-formulaic to describe it that way, a little bit Augustinian in the way that he does that. But Edwards essentially conceives of the Holy Spirit as the abundance and the overflow of the joy that the Father has for the Son and that the Son has for the Father.

And so in Edwardsian thoughts, there's a deep connection there between the human believer and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. Because as we know, Christians, we are indwelt by the person of the Holy Spirit.

We are infilled with the Spirit and it's the Spirit who brings about the fruit of the Spirit, including love, joy, peace, patience, et cetera. So whenever a believer is experiencing real joy, that is undoubtedly the work and the ministry and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Now, if I could take it one step further, Greg, and just talk about Edwards' understanding of an affection that may help us to kind of ground our understanding of Edwardsian theology of joy. So for Edwards, again, whenever he describes things, he kind of does it in a way that's truly reformed on one hand, but doesn't tend to use creedal or confessional definitions on the other hand.

So when Edwards conceives of conversion or regeneration, that change in the heart of the individual as he or she is converted from deadness and sin unto life, one of the things that Edwards really hammers home is this idea that the heart itself is changed.

And the heart is the seat of what he calls the affections. And by that, he means something deeper than just emotions. So emotions, they kind of come and go. Like I'm happy today, and I'm mean and angry the next day.

But no, the affections are the soul's inclination towards, on one hand, or it's being repelled from God on the other hand. So unbelievers are repelled by God. They're horrified by God. They're disgusted by God.

But when God converts the sinner, that very affection or that orientation or that inclination of the heart changes. So now the person is disposed towards and loves and rejoices in God. Okay? So the joy that the believer has at conversion is actually a change of affection.

It's a change of the whole orientation of the heart from repulsion of God to drawing to love for an admiration towards God in his Trinitarian glory. So this is why we begin to feel real joy when we're converted.

And again, it's not circumstantially derived, but it's that kind of deeper lasting, real joy that is brought about only through the Holy Spirit's having taken up residence in the Christian believer's heart.

Does that make sense? No, that makes total sense. When you were saying that I'm kind of picturing a North and South pole of a magnet, it's the same magnet, but you flip it around to the other side. It goes from pushing away to now it's acting as an attractant.

So under that kind of definition, then what you're saying is, what I'm hearing, I hope too, is so true biblical joy cannot be had by an unbeliever. They can experience happiness, but the joy that kind of surpasses all understanding that, and I would throw a piece in there, a piece, maybe even in times of trouble to where there is even a happiness in being under persecution.

I myself have been in times of deep sorrow and persecution, yet I found joy. I wasn't walking around with a smile on my face, but there was a joy in my heart of knowing that I rely on the sovereignty of God in my times of trouble, as Spurgeon said.

So is that what we're saying too, that the unbeliever, the unregenerate heart cannot have those things of the Holy Spirit producing joy, correct? That's exactly right.

That is exactly right. So unbelievers are going to constantly mistake joy and happiness for one another. They're going to search for something that tries to bring real peace and purpose and meaning into their life.

But by definition, they're always going to be drinking sand because whatever they search for in this life is only going to bring them further pain. Because the more they try to search for that, which is real and it can be had, but if they search for it in any place other than Christ, it's ultimately going to be unfulfilling.

So every search of the unbeliever is going to be like running through a maze that ends up taking you nowhere except to back to the starting place again. The unbeliever is going to be thwarted every time he tries to fill his life with any kind of real lasting sustenance, whether he pursues it in sex or whether he pursues it in materialism or success or achievement, or even religious goods and services, we might say.

The works of the law that are only done of the flesh, they're never going to have that real heartfelt, deep, lasting, sustaining joy that the believer has. And this is what actually enables believers to weather the storms of life, whether it's persecution or whether it's disappointments or whether it's physical ailing health, yet the believer has this kind of lasting joy that's able to sustain through the midst of the worst experiences of life.

And it's only because we have that kind of joy that we see the hope that is at the other end of the tunnel, so to speak. So when the revivals, sorry to cut you off there, when the revivals came through in the 1740s, of course, Edwards is part and parcel of the great awakening.

George Whitfield would be the other person who's probably most connected historically with the great awakening. But one of the things that Edwards is realizing is that not only is his church, the church in North Hampton, experiencing these infillings of joy and happiness, but this seems to be the regulated experience of the believer as the revivals are pouring across the colonies.

And Edwards is describing the effect of these joys. It's causing husbands and wives to love each other and to renew their vows. It's causing children to rejoice. And he's seen conversions at even a young age.

He's seen people want to reconcile with neighbors with whom their relationships had been torn apart and fractured. And he's seen all this kind of glorious reconciling of human relationships one to another.

And he desperately wants everybody to feel the same kind of infilling joy that he and his wife, Sarah, who had some very ecstatic experiences in the early 1740s, he just wants people to experience and know that kind of happiness.

And so interestingly, while Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a great sermon, and I recommend everybody to read it. It's great. I typically ask people whether or not they read it in high school.

It used to be everybody had. Now, most people aren't. And it's a great sermon, but it should be balanced by probably other sermons that Edwards preached. For instance, his sermon, Heaven is a World of Love, where it's just as gloriously dripping with eternal joys and eternal love, as much as Sinners is rich with warnings and replete with dangers and cautions.

It's a great sermon too, and those two should probably.

Joy, Common Grace, and the Limits of Circumstantial Happiness

Be read together. Yeah. So we look back at that era, the Reformer era, and I see a couple things. And maybe this is kind of a two-part thought and tell me what you think about this. One, I would look back on that and, okay, how can we translate those very pragmatic thoughts and theologies of Jonathan Edwards into today, into 2024, just because I also feel that, well, I say feel, not feel, but I think when I talk to a lot of people in Western Christianity and in the United States in particular, we have a very, and I say we, I'm saying unbelievers and sometimes even believers in life, but mostly unbelievers have a really good chance of just coasting through a kind of general happiness in a very rich country like the United States.

We have so many things that can give us circumstantial happiness, right? Just get that job, put in my time, listen to my country music, crack a beer, go out on the boat, go to the race, go to, you know, all these different things to where you're just moving through life, coasting from one happy situation to another.

And you could live a pretty decent, happy life apart from God through His common graces of just what He's provided for us in this country. And I feel that's probably one of the great delusions that Satan absolutely loves this day and age is just be happy.

You don't need to understand that there's actual joy in, as a believer, just fulfill your life with those physical things and those, you know, circumstances and things like that. So I would say, is it going to be hard for us to take that type of theology to where I would argue the Reformers had a much more dismal life, the average person had a much more dismal life with economic status and how you died and diseases and how you could get attacked by, you know, municipalities and kingdoms and monarchies, all these things.

How do we translate that into 2024 when we have a non-believing and even a believing world and country that just goes, I'm pretty happy with just skating by. I know many Christians that are just like, hey, go to church once a week, put in my two hours, you know, hey, we got cookouts coming up, we got this, that, and they've just, you know, circled themselves with these things to give them a minimal happiness that they kind of coast by on without ever really knowing spirit filled joy, as you explained a few minutes ago.

So how do we translate that four or 500 years into 2024 for the, pragmatically for the believer today or the unbeliever today? Yeah. You know,.

I referenced Ecclesiastes 2 earlier in our discussion here, and I think that's such an informative biblical text because the writer there actually does have the opportunity to obtain all of the things that people tend to associate with happiness.

He has slaves and he has fields and he has riches and he has sex and he has drink, all of these materialistic acts aspects that we would think at least theoretically should be something like a salve to the soul that brings real happiness.

But the irony of that text is that it doesn't. In fact, what he finds is that it's only a vanity and a chasing after the wind as he says. And throughout Ecclesiastes, there's the steam of that which is under the sun.

In other words, everything that God has made, referencing by irony, that which is over the sun, namely God. And so the end of the book is that only true purpose and meaning is found in worshiping the true and living God, right?

Well, it's kind of interesting because this culture that we live in today is essentially the Ecclesiastes 2 culture where we do have access to everything. We have access to some of the best medicines.

We have access to more entertainment than has ever been possible before in human history. There's more need for entertainment though, somewhat ironically. And when we really look at our culture, one of the things that we find is like the writer of Ecclesiastes, those things, though they are had in abundance, still have not brought happiness to the unconverted heart.

And in fact, what we see is exactly the opposite, the dead opposite of what we would think would happen. We would think that having all of these materialistic and outlandish opportunities would bring us some kind of a happiness, but rather we have more people that are depressed, more people that are lonely.

We have more people that are on drugs and alcohol and prescribed medicines, all of these things to try to regulate the kind of happiness that is, it's so tangibly right in front of our face in Christ.

And yet our culture, of course, in its deadness and ignorance continues to search everywhere, but the reality, which is in Christ. Now, one thing I'll throw in here, and I think Edwards would probably agree with this.

There is a sense in which certain things like weddings or a good bottle of wine or a walk in the park with your friend, those things do have actual happiness, but what they are, Edwards would say, I think are typological glimpses of the real.

Okay. So in Edwards' cosmology, whenever he looks at the physical material universe, the things that are, that around us, the trees and the rocks and the hills and the streams and the sunshine and the sunsets, he thinks those things are only glimpses into a more real eternal world.

Okay. So it's not that they're fake. You can actually be happy if you have a good steak. And I recommend that you have a good steak. If you, if you, if you have a means to get one, I have it rare or medium rare, you'll probably really like it.

But those things, what they are is they're like taste tests to the real banquet that is to come in the, in the glories of heaven. And so an Edwardsian theory of joy is actually always pointing towards that, which is eternal.

It's not that a steak can't make you happy. It's that it's typological of the greater banquet meal that is to come. And so one of the things that's great about Edwards is he's always pointing us towards eternity.

And interestingly, it's the brevity of life, the pain of life, the difficulties and the hardships of life in the 1700s or the 18th century, which makes the relief so clear between that which is lasting and that which is not.

Creation as a Window Into Eternal Reality

Yeah. That's so good. You know,.

I just wrote a blog post for a friend of mine who has a website and was kind of focusing on that. I'm an avid hunter. I have acreage in Northern Michigan. I hunt a conservation list. I'll be out in a blind or walking fields for hours at a time.

And that's usually my time to sit there and go, you know, in the fall to sit there and go, okay, what are we doing next year for the business? How am I going to lead my wife and family? What are we doing for our Bible?

So let's plan all that out when you're stuck inside of a little you know, blind for eight hours and you don't have your phone with you and you've removed all distractions. The only thing sitting there is your Bible and your bow or your gun and nature in front of you.

You can get a lot of things done between you and God. And I look out that window every year and I'm just amazed. I watch, I've been watching the same two ravens come back to the same tree for nine years now.

I watch porcupines and coyotes and cougars and elk and deer and black bear. And I just go, how, how can anyone, well, the Bible states it, right? Romans, but there, no one has an excuse. I'm looking into glimpses of eternity.

It's like the glory of God is so great that even in his creation, even in the fall of sin, his glory comes through even in creation because, you know, I was out back in my tree last, I have a maple tree in my backyard.

I looked up, it's fire red, it's orange. And I went, I just had this thought. I looked up, I go, isn't that so pleasing to the eyes yet? That's a cycle of death. That is the cause of the fall of sin that those trees have to die and then rebirth.

And that whole cycle is because of sin. But yet in that, there's still beauty and glory. God gives me something pleasing to look at to the eyes. It smells good. It looks good, right? It pleases the senses.

And I said, praise God for even the common grace of being able to appreciate those things. And I'm kind of tracking with what you're saying, Edward was saying. I look at those even in nature and see a glimpse, a little taste of eternity, of God's glory.

And I find no man without excuse, anyone with two sets, any senses, ears, eyes, smell, whatever. You have no excuse not to know that there is a creator, much like Roman says. And it sounds like kind of that's where Edwards was even on joy.

Look at you're experiencing all these little tastes and touches of glory. Why settle for just happiness or why settle for just what's in the unbelieving world?

Is that kind of where he was going with that? Yeah. I'm just like praising God for what you said there, brother. I really appreciate that. Let me just drop a couple of recommendations for anyone who's maybe interested in Jonathan Edwards and reading up on him.

Because one of the great things about being an Edwards scholar is that it's all of his stuff is free online. There's a website called edwards .yale .edu. And I'd almost rather have your listeners go there even than getting my book as much as that.

That would be great because all of Edwards's stuff is for free there. And so if you're interested, let me just drop a couple of recommendations first in volume 11. So there's 26 printed works in the Yale editions, but there's more than that online.

Volume 11 is his work on types and typology. He has a book called shadows or images of divine things. And that's where Edwards has these great little vignettes, things that he sees in the created world.

And he looks through each one, almost like it's a window into eternal realities. So I would call them like sermon illustrations, but actually Edwards had kind of this interesting cosmology where he believes that the material world is like spiritual windows into doctrinal or theological truths.

So you could read that, or at least just kind of flip through it as something really interesting to see how Edwards looks at the natural order of creation. Okay. So there's that that's volume 11. Volume four is one of my favorite volumes because that's the volume that's focused on the great awakening itself.