In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
During the Great Awaking on July 8, 1741 a minister named Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon of warning to all sinners called “Sinner in the Hand of an Angry God”. Edwards’s sermon brought people of all kinds to tears and to collapse in dread. In Edwards’s sermon he preaches the greats fear of all sinners, full of hellish metaphors, loaded diction, and vivid imagery to scare all sinners into being reborn.
One of Edwards’s hellish metaphors attacks and scares all sinners into not only seeing but believing in that “hells wide gaping mouth” (2) is waiting for them. The reader can really feel the guilt of all sinners on his or her back as if their “wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell” (4). Jonathan Edward used these metaphors to scare the sinners into being reborn. However he was able to bring a little light into his sermon to leave the reader with a small amount of hope.
In addition to Edward’s metaphors his sermon gives the reader an image of hell. This sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” gives the reader a perfect sketch of what hell is suppose to look like “Hell is gaping for them the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up”(1). By perching this kind of sermon Jonathan Edwards was able to strike fear into the unborn sinner’s hearts by showing them there greatest fear hell.
Last but not least Edwards loaded diction creates a dark and guilty weight that lies within the sinner heart. By doing so Edwards’s sermon allows fear to grow with the sinner. “How dreadful is the state of those that are daily and hourly in the danger of this great wrath and infinite misery” (10). Edwards’s diction is so powerful that people in the audience were not able to with stand the attacks that came with it.
Jonathan Edward’s was a minister who shot fear into the