Sinner's in the Hands of Our Loving God

In the beginning, the elohim created skies an earth.

Welcome back.  I hope your weekend was restful and whole.  If yours was like mine, somewhat turbulent and testy, then you must rejoice with me when on the next day there is always a new sense of being in the world.

Last Friday, I wrote about the spider metaphor in Jonathan Edward’s sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

I suspect he wrote his sermon after suffering a day of excessive existential clutter and clatter.

Let us press the “refresh” button and attempt a new homily, starting with the title:  “Sinners in the Hands of Our Loving God.”

The portion I share is a small part of a larger loving witness to our God of love.

The text upon which we base our sermon is part of a sentence in the letter called 1 John:  “God is love.”

The entire verse is a thought extracted from a larger context that is calling upon men and women to prove their love by showing it. 

Our sermon is grounded within a larger, ancient, unrecognized, unserved, and Christian pretext that preaches our God of love is sending everyone to heaven.

Indeed, everyone deserves heaven, if for no other reason than being a huge “I apologize” from God for all of us having to suffer those godforsaken spaces and times of existence created by godforsaking people.

Below are Jonathan Edwards’ words from his sermon with a slight alteration:

Our God of love yearns to keep you forever--much as one who observes the life cycle of a spider and grieves its end when it dies--adores you, and is dreadfully provoked to sadness when you are gone. 

God’s love towards you burns like fire that incinerates the mortality that harms you and kills you and blinds you to God’s love. 

God looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be blessed as you pass beyond this wail of tears.

God is of purer eyes than we have to see.  We are ten thousand times more loved in God’s eyes, than in any man’s or any woman’s heart.

We have comprehended God infinitely less than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but God’s love that holds us every moment.

It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that we did not go to heaven the last night; that we suffered to awake again in this world, after we closed our eyes to sleep.

And there is no other reason to be given, why we have not dropped or risen up or passed onward to heaven since we arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held us here.

There is no other reason to be given why we have not gone to heaven, since we have sat here in the house of God, provoking

God’s pure love despite our sinful wicked hearts celebrating God’s blessed adoration.

Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why we do not this very moment drop down or rise up or pass onward into heaven.

Knowing our God of love to be this, let us likewise live our lives.

Ponder that.  Blessings…