Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Edwards repeatedly uses images of sightlessness to emphasize the incapacity (or refusal) of fallen man to recognize the danger of his true condition outside of Christ. Edwards’s task, and the aim of all awakening sermons, is to awaken the sinner from the moral blindness of complacency, egotism, and misguided self-assurance in order to move the unconverted to seek rebirth in Christ, the only means of salvation. To that end, Edwards creates a panoramic display of the vulnerability of the sinner to jar and terrify him into a state of psychological and emotional receptivity to God’s healing grace.

The motif of literal and figurative sightlessness appears in the second implication of Edwards’s Deuteronomic verse: “As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee whether he shall stand or fall the next” (625). The simile of walking on slippery ground signifies unforeseen danger; vulnerability to sudden destruction is the birthright of fallen man existing outside God’s protective grace. Edwards notes in the seventh proof of the doctrine that death by natural causes lurks everywhere: “The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable.