Jonathan Edwards on being a “watchman”

By Ryan Martin | Published: January 27, 2011

Last Tuesday night at our “Watchmen” men’s meeting, I mentioned a passage in a book about how Jonathan Edwards looked at himself as a “watchman” after the pattern of Ezekiel 3 in his preaching about the judgment of God.

The name of the book is Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought, by Doug Sweeney. Below is the passage I had in mind, all cited from the book:

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Edwards preached dozens of hellfire sermons during his thirty-five years of ministry, many of which survive. Like the Puritans before him, he did so in the manner of the ‘watchman’ of [Ezekiel 3:17-22], whom God held responsible to sound a trumpet clearly when his people were threatened with danger. . . .

This was serious business. Edwards believed that he was a watchman for the people in his care. He believed, as he proclaimed at one of his colleagues’ ordinations, that ‘ministers of the gospel have the precious and immortal souls of men committed to their care and trust by the Lord Jesus Christ.’ He believed in the words of Hebrews, as he said once in Northampton, that his ‘God is a Consuming fire that will burn up all that resist him.’ So he preached from time to time on the dangers of damnation. ‘If there be really a hell,’ he wrote in 1741,

of such dreadful, and never-ending torments, . . . that multitudes are in great danger of, and that the bigger part of men in Christian countries do actually from generation to generation fall into, for want of a sense of the terribleness of it, and their danger of it, and so for want of taking due care to avoid it; then why is it not proper for those that have the care of souls, to take great pains to make men sensible of it? Why should not they be told as much of the truth as can be? If I am in danger of going to hell, I should be glad to know as much as possibly I can of the dreadfulness of it: if I am very prone to neglect due care to avoid it, he does me the best kindness, that does most to represent to me the truth of the case, that sets forth my misery and danger in the liveliest manner.*

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*Douglas A. Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word, p. 134-6, citing Jonathan Edwards, “The Great Concern of a Watchman for Souls.”

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Enduring evil “like the moon walking in her brightness”

By Ryan Martin | Published: January 12, 2011

Jonathan Edwards speaks here of the importance of long-suffering from his sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:4, “Charity suffereth long and is kind.”

This spirit of Christian long-suffering and meekly to bear injuries is a true greatness of soul. It shows a fine and noble valor for persons thus to maintain the calm of their minds; it shows an excellent inward fortitude and strength, as Solomon says, Proverbs 16:32, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

That is, he shows a more noble and excellent valor and greatness of mind than great conquerors who subdue walled cities.

It is from a littleness of mind that the soul is easily disturbed, and put out of frame by the reproaches and ill treatment of men, as we see that little streams of water are much disturbed by small unevenness and obstacles with which they meet in their course, and make a great deal of noise as they pass over them; whereas great and mighty streams would pass over such obstacles calmly and quietly, without at all rippling the surface of the water.

He that possesses his mind after such a manner that when others reproach him and injure him, and show a spiteful spirit towards him, can notwithstanding maintain in calmness a hearty good will to his injurer, and look down on him with real pity for him without any [tumult] or bitterness: he herein as it were manifests a godlike greatness of soul.

How high is such a person’s mind exalted? There is no man in the world so much above his adversaries as he; like the sun that is so high that it is not at all disturbed by the storms that are here in this lower world, but goes on in its brightness just as it did before; and like the moon walking in her brightness, while the dogs are barking at her she is not moved, but goes on in her own course placidly shining through the heavens still. (Charity and Its Fruits, in Yale’s Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol 8, p. 200-1).

Notice how Edwards pulls such vivid examples from nature to illustrate the mind of the saint unperturbed by the evil of others, however so great.

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Man’s highest happiness

By Ryan Martin | Published: January 7, 2011

The words of the 18C pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards:

“Man’s highest happiness consists in holiness. It is by this the reasonable creature is united to God, the fountain of all good. Happiness does so essentially consist in knowing and loving and serving God, and having a holy and divine temper of soul, and the lively exercises of it, that those things will make a man happy without anything else. But no other enjoyments or privileges whatever will make a man happy without this.” Charity and Its Fruits: Sermon 2. Cited in Yale-Works, 8:161.

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“Verbal symptoms of our deep disease”

By Ryan Martin | Published: January 6, 2011

Last night the young people and I read this together in A. W. Tozer’s Pursuit of God, where he laments that God has been forced out of the central place He should have in the human heart, only to be replaced by things:

Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and ‘things’ were allowed to enter. Within the human heart ‘things’ have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.

This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble.

There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets ‘things’ with a deep and fierce passion.

The pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.

The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never original intended.

God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole counsel of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution (pp. 21-22).

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Turretin on the necessity of verbal revelation

By Ryan Martin | Published: January 1, 2011

Turretin asks if it was really important that humankind receive verbal revelation. After all, isn’t human reason alone sufficient to lead a person to a happy life? The answer is No.

. . . [T]he orthodox church has always believed . . . the revelation of the word of God to man to be absolutely and simply necessary for salvation. It is the ‘seed’ of which we are born again (1 Pet. 1:23), the ‘light’ by which we are directed (Ps. 119:105), the ‘food’ upon which we feed (Heb. 5:13, 14) and the ‘foundation’ upon which we are built (Eph. 2:20).”

Truly, the Word of God is a precious gift. It sustains our soul in our salvation.

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Welcome!

By Ryan Martin | Published: December 31, 2010

This blog, part of the newly reconstructed Bethany Bible Church website, will provide biblical, theological, and other musings  from the pastors of Bethany Bible Church.

The posts on this blog can be sent automatically to any blog reader when you subscribe. For example, I use Google Reader to subscribe to several different websites and blogs. Whenever those websites are updated, instead of my having to go to that website to see if there is new content, it is sent automatically to my reader.

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