He has a reputation of being a jerk. He is known as a Puritan of the worst kind: a cold-hearted intellectual, fascinated by hell and wrath. His sermon “Sinners in the Hands of Angry God” is read by high school English students all across America as an example of just how terrible puritanism was. The sermon is misunderstood, however, as is the man himself. Ronald Story has sought to undo some of these notions (see Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love). For this Puritan the gospel was not primarily about escaping hell and judgment. Rather, it was about grasping the beauty and glory of God himself. This is the gospel message that many need to recover today. The true beauty of the gospel is God himself.
The starting point for Edwards’ theology was God himself. Strachan and Sweeney pick up on this and communicate it helpfully in their address of Edwards’ theology of beauty. They write:
Though biblical spirituality certainly addresses and responds to the heart-cries of lost sinners, its starting place is nothing other than the living God. From the awe-inspiring opening of Genesis 1:1 – “In the beginning God” – to the cataclysmic ending of Revelation 21:22 – “in the city…is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” – the Bible declares without interruption or apology that God is the starting and ending points of true religion. (Jonathan Edwards on Beauty, 23-24).
Edwards himself saw conversion as seeing the true beauty and glory of this very God. Saving faith was “not only a speculatively judging that God is gracious, but a sense how amiable God is upon that account, or a sense of the beauty of this divine attribute” (quoted in Strachan and Sweeney, 24). God himself was beautiful and apprehending His beauty was partially what happened at conversion. The very nature of saving grace is “a relish of the excellency of the divine nature.” The gospel draws us first and foremost, Edwards believed, to God himself. So McClymond and McDermott quote Edwards as distinguishing between love of God and love of what God can give us, they write:
Divine love is not to be confused with gratitude to god. Truly divine love is not based on “any benefit we have received.” Therefore “love or affection to God, that has no other ground than only some benefit received or hoped for from God without any sense of a delight in the absolute excellency of the divine nature, has nothing divine in it.” So natural men who may “be affected with gratitude by some remarkable kindness of god to them” are probably driven not by divine love but by self-love. (The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 360)
First and foremost salvation is about getting God.
The gospel then is not merely about belief, it is about “tasting and seeing” God. Edwards believes that when Paul speaks of the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” he is talking about the believers new sight to see the beauty of Christ himself. It’s about more than mental ascent, it’s about embracing with the heart the truth of who God is, particularly as he is revealed in His Son. So Edwards speaks of a “two-fold understanding or knowledge of good, that God has made the mind capable of.” The first type of knowledge is “speculative or notional.” The other, however, is the “sense of the heart.” He writes:
Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness…When the heart is sensible of the beauty and amiableness of a thing, it necessarily feels pleasure in the apprehension …which is a far different thing from having a rational opinion that it is excellent. (quoted in John Piper, God is the Gospel, 64).
We believe truly when we come to understand God in both senses of the word, both with the mind and with the heart.
It was not enough for Edwards to talk about escape from judgment, though he does talk about such things. Nor was it enough for Edwards to talk about salvation purely as theological abstraction. Rather, salvation was coming to see, embrace, experience, and relish the beauty of the triune God. In many quarters of Evangelicalism such a picture of salvation is missing. In many circles today we talk about salvation as God saving us from hell, from judgment, from a boring and tedious life, but we do not often speak of his saving us to anything. The ultimate goal of salvation is our betterment, our fulfillment, our satisfaction. John Piper is most certainly right when he states, “We are willing to be God-centered, it seems, as long as God is man-centered” (God is the Gospel, 12-13). And while Edwards certainly sees value for us in salvation, it is primarily in our getting to taste and see that the Lord is good. Salvation is primarily about our getting God, or as Piper says it, the gospel is God.
When I say that God Is the Gospel I mean that the highest, best, final, decisive good of the gospel, without which no other gifts would be good, is the glory of God in the face of Christ revealed for our everlasting enjoyment. The saving love of God is God’s commitment to do everything necessary to enthrall us with what is most deeply and durably satisfying, namely himself. (13)
We need to desperately recover this. I recall Francis Chan speaking to a crowd of young men and women once and asking us if we would still be willing to go to heaven if God was not there. It’s an important question. If the gospel is primarily about getting to see our departed family again, getting heaven, or even escaping hell then it is not the true gospel of Scripture. The best good news we can hear is that we get to be with God. Edwards understood that and we need to grasp it afresh today in the church as well.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 