There's an idea that is sort of the thread that you can trace, and that idea is enjoying and glorifying God. That the end for which God created the world is His own glory. And the life that is the life of fulfillment. of true joy, not just surviving, not just getting by, not just putting in time, but the life that has true meaning and significance is the life that lives for the same end. There can be a faulty assumption among some Christians, and especially among unbelievers, that the path of godliness is not a path that leads to a rewarding and fulfilling life.
That the secret is to step off the narrow path and indulge in forbidden fruit, at least for a season. But Jonathan Edwards saw clearly that glorifying God and enjoying God are not at odds with each other. This is the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and we're concluding two days in the life of Jonathan Edwards. Keep studying this series with our featured teacher Stephen Nichols when you give a donation before midnight tonight. We'll send you the series on DVD and unlock it and the study guide in the free Ligonier app.
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So what was Edward's big idea? How does a Christian both glorify and enjoy God? Here's Dr. Nichols. We've been talking about Edward's life.
I thought now would be a good moment to sort of take a step back and look at some of Edwards' writings and look and see what ideas mattered to Edwards and even see if we could uncover perhaps the idea that mattered the most to him. I mentioned the sermon, God Glorified in Man's Dependence, or God Glorified in the Work of Redemption as seen in Man's Dependence on Him. That's actually the full title. Yeah. And in that sermon preached in 1731, Edwards makes a fascinating comment.
He says that when we are saved, God gives us many wonderful blessings. I mean, think about it. He gives us forgiveness of sins. He gives us a promise of new life, abundant life. We're brought into the family of God.
We have the doctrine of illumination, the Spirit's presence enabling us to understand God's Word and to see it as God's Word. When God saves us, He gives us Wonderful gifts, tremendous gifts. But Edwards says there's one gift that we should focus on. This is what he says in the sermon. God Himself is the great good which the redeemed are brought to the possession and enjoyment of By redemption.
We actually Well, let me put it this way. When God saves us. He gives us himself. And not only, as Edwards frames it, We possess God or He possesses us. But we enjoy.
Him. This is God. This is the creator of the universe. This is the same God who, in sinners, has the bow of wrath bent. This is the God.
that we now enjoy. Edwards continues He is the highest good.
Now, that was a big debate. In the Greco-Roman world, what is the highest good? And philosophers debated over what was the highest good. There are many goods. that you could live your life for, many good things you could pursue.
But what is the ultimate good thing? The highest good. See, that's what Edwards means when he says he is the highest good. And the sum of all that good which Christ purchased, God is the inheritance of the saints. He is the portion of their souls.
God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place. their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor. and glory. When God redeems us, He gives us. himself.
And he He desires that we, in fact, enjoy. And The word that you trip over, or the words that you trip over in Edwards, are the words joy, sweetness. Pleasure. In fact, we even see it in a writing from 1734. That sermon was from 1731.
But in 1734, Edwards wrote up what was called the conversion.
Well, later it was called the conversion of President Edwards. And it was written by himself. This edition was published by the American Track Society right around 1800. Six thousand of these things were produced in the first printing, and they quickly were sold out. Yeah.
This was written. At the bequest of Aaron Burr. Remember him? He's going to marry Edward's daughter, Esther. He's going to be the president of Princeton.
And he thought that it would be helpful for the young men at Princeton if they could have the story of Jonathan Edwards' conversion.
So Edwards, and he himself dates his conversion to seventeen twenty one. Edwards wrote up his conversion, and it was called the personal narrative. Listen to what he says. He's talking about the time of his conversion, and he says: After this, my sense of divine things gradually. increased and became more and more lively and had more of that inward sweetness.
The appearance of everything was altered there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast. or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God's Excellency. His wisdom His purity and love seemed to appear in everything, in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and the blue sky. in the grass, flowers, and trees, in the water, and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind.
He goes on to talk about how he would sit and just view nature, and he would. Quote, behold the sweet glory of God. in these things. And in the meantime, I would be singing forth with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator and the Redeemer. This is the effect that God had on Jonathan Edwards, and he expresses it in these terms of sweetness.
In fact, he sort of reminds me of David writing Psalms and speaking of pursuing the joy of God.
So we have this in 1731, Edwards writing about how God gives us himself. In 1734, he's Describing his conversion in terms of now apprehending the sweetness of God, or as he likes to say, he now relished God, and relishes that thing you put on the hot dog. But it's also something else, and I think it's the other thing that Edwards means when he says that he relishes God. Yeah. And it becomes very clear That this is going to be the theme at the center of what Edwards was about.
As that Westminster shorter catechism, which Edward was schooled on, and which he made sure all of the children of Northampton were schooled on. What is the chief end. And see that's a way of expressing the highest good, isn't it? There are many ends. There are many results, even good.
ends that we could live for. But what is the chief? And What is the ultimate? What is the highest? And it is to glorify and enjoy God forever.
It is hard sometimes for us to put those two together. And it's hard sometimes for us to think of the Puritans as putting those two together. But in fact, Edwards did. And in fact, he shows us a great example of how that is in fact our chief end.
Well, he's preaching on this, he's writing on this. We should say a little bit about Edwards' writing style. Edwards loved physical activity. He thought that you should have a good hour or so of physical activity every day. And so he would split his own wood.
Until he got pastoral interns, and then he had the pastoral interns split his wood for him.
So, of course, after the Great Awakening, everybody wanted to come and be a pastoral intern at Northampton. And they would do some duties for him, they would split his wood, and then many of them ended up marrying his daughters.
So, it worked out pretty well for everybody. But uh he would chop wood. and he would go horseback riding. and he would go horseback riding through the Connecticut River Valley. absolutely beautiful country.
to horseback ride through. And Edwards would often take some scraps of paper and pen and ink with him as he would go, and sometimes he would pull over on the side by the river bank there and he would write down some thoughts.
Well, it's hard sometimes. You know, these aren't ballpoint pens. This is inkwells and quill pens. And in the winter, of course, in these cold Massachusetts winters, the ink is going to freeze, so we can't do that.
So this got a little cumbersome for him.
So Edwards developed a rather curious habit. He would gather in his pocket some pins, and in the other pocket he would put a series of little pieces of cloth that were scraps from dresses his daughters were making or from fans. They would get these cut-out patterns from Boston, boxes of patterns. They would cut them out and make fans and then send them back to Boston. And they would get paid for that, and these fans would then be sold in Boston.
It was sort of a way to make a little extra money. This was a very industrious family, the Edwards family. And so there was always scraps of cloth lying around the house, and so Edwards would stuff some cloth in one pocket, some pins in the other, and he'd go off to horseback ride. And he'd have an idea. Yeah.
And he would pull out a piece of cloth, and he would associate the idea with that particular piece of cloth, and he would pin it to his coat. I think we keep riding. And they would get another idea and he would pull out another piece of cloth and so on and so forth. And neighbors always knew how far he had been riding that day by how many cloths were pinned to his coat. And so he'd get back to his home, take his saddle off, send the horse to the stable, walk into his study, and begin to systematically remove the pieces of cloth.
And as he took the piece of cloth off, he would remember the idea grab his quill, dip it in some ink, and right at the idea. Remember, don't try this at home. Edwards was a unique person in the pages of human history. And he could do that. He started writing what he called miscellanies.
He started lettering them. Got through A to Z. Then he went AA to ZZ, and he thought, this is not working well. I should number them. By the time he died he was up into the fifteen hundreds.
Now some of these are just a few sentences. The longest one is about sixty pages. And it is on, of all things, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. And they are on every subject. One will be on Plato.
The next one will be on hell. The next one will be on justification. The next one will be on a Psalm. Then we're back to Plato. Then we're dealing with something that has to do with the particular controversy in England.
They're all over the map. And Edwards began to organize these miscellanies. And put them in the drawers of his desk. He had a writing desk that was made just for him with all these drawers and folding doors. And I think, in many ways, the cabinet was sort of a replication of his mind, if you will.
And he would put these miscellany notebooks in these cabinets, and then he would number them based on the drawer where they belonged. And then he developed a cross-referencing system to tie all these miscellanies together. This is a fascinating person. He wrote all the time on all kinds of scraps of paper.
Now, this was a draft of a miscellany that then he used and put into a letter. and the piece of paper itself was ripped.
Well, what do you and I do with ripped out paper? We just throw it away. Not Edwards, he saved it. And so all he did was contour his writing to the rip. See.
One of my favorite manuscripts of Edwards is a manuscript that is constructed entirely of the Boston Herald newspaper type. titles. Of course, you've got a lot of space up there on the masthead.
Well, Edwards cut off all the mastheads, then he turned the paper this way. And then he wrote. This direction. And then he attached that together and that was a manuscript. There were all these broadsides that would be put up.
You know, this is what they call a broadside. And this particular broadside, God Saved the King, so we are long before American revolutionary sensibilities here. This particular broadside was from the lieutenant governor. From Massachusetts, issuing a fast day, a public fast day. And Edwards After the fast day, went out to the lamppost.
Ripped the broadside down, took it inside, and used it for paper.
So he filled the margin with his ideas. He couldn't quite fit it all on here, so he stole a piece of paper from his sermon manuscript pile and stuck it on there to finish his idea. God saved the king. Edwards would write on anything he could find. He did not like the French language, and sometimes people would send him books in French.
Edwards turned the book upside down and wrote in between the lines. Why not? In the mid-1730s, Edward's brother-in-law gives him a gift. And this gift is a Bible. That's a fascinating Bible.
Okay. It has the short leaves. Of Scripture, the quarto is what they call it, because you take a folio and you divide it into four and that becomes a quarto.
So quarto and folio are the sort of two books you find in an antique book or rare books. And the biblical pages themselves are quarto. Then, in between the biblical pages, there is a blank folio page. This thing is actually in two volumes. Each volume is about this thick, and folio is this size.
So it's this big.
Okay. And there's two of them. It's called his blank Bible. It was in fact his study Bible. And what Edwards would do was he would have that Bible page and he would use the blank page to write his commentary on what he was reading in the Bible.
And then of course you flip the page over and you have the other blank page. And um Well, I guess I can admit this.
Some of the Old Testament is blank. You know, like most of us, right, Edward spent most of his time in the New Testament. But in some of the New Testament, he actually had to insert extra pages.
Now, this becomes Edwards' literary corpus. There's the miscellaneous. There's the blank Bible. And all of these eventually all these ideas eventually find their way into the sermons, and the sermons then eventually feed to the treatises that he wrote.
So religious affections Published in 1746, that was originally sermons. It was originally ideas that he had during the time of the Great Awakening, as he saw both the detractors and the fanatics, as he tried to understand what is the meaning of revival, what is the meaning of a genuine religious affection, how do we know? the genuine work of God. versus a spurious. work of God.
And as he worked through those ideas, He preached some sermons, and then those sermons became religious affections. Same thing is true in a sermon series from 1739. This was a sermon series. thirty Sermons on one verse. Out of Isaiah 55, verse 11.
Imagine a sermon, 30 sermons. Actually, it was a half of a verse. It's only half of Isaiah 55, 11.
Now, it's not true, of course. Edwards used that to move beyond and pull in all of Scripture. But the Puritans had a very simple sermon form. There was text. Followed by doctrine.
Followed by application. Although the Puritans like to call it The use. What is the use of the sermon? Or sometimes they called it improvement. How do we improve?
Not that we improve the text. How do we improve based on the text?
So they would read the text. And explain it, and then they would offer the doctrine of the text. And that doctrine was usually given as a particular sentence, but then it was developed, and there would be multiple points and multiple sub-points, and this could go on forever. It's beautiful, they love that. And then there was the application.
and it too would be multiple points with multiple sub points. What Edwards did with the history of work of redemption, he turned the whole 30-sermon series into this.
So the first sermon deals with the text. Sermons 2. Through 20. Five. Deal with the doctrine.
And sermons 26 through 30 are application. And the doctrine is essentially this. All of history hinges on the work of Christ. On the work of redemption. You ask, what is God doing in this world?
What is the point of everything? Why am I here? It all goes back to the work of the market. Yeah. And then he deals with the application of that.
And we'll come back to that. In our final time together, to look at his application on the doctrine of Providence. But he's working this through. He's starting off with ideas. Always reading the biblical text, always grounding his ideas in scripture and working these out into narratives.
But there's an idea. that is sort of the thread that you can trace through all of these. And that idea is enjoying and glorifying God. It comes to fruition in one of the last things that Edwards wrote. He wrote it in seventeen fifty seven.
In seventeen fifties, while he is at Stockbridge, he writes his big philosophical treatises. He writes Freedom of the Will, he writes Original Sin, and he writes what has come to be called the Two Dissertations. The first is True virtue. A dissertation concerning true virtue. Mm-hmm.
And the second is the end for which God created. The World, or sometimes simply called the End of Creation. These were written in 1757, and they were published posthumously in 1759. In the end for which God created the world, Edwards brings this idea he's been pulling through all of his entire life, his sermons and his experiences, and he pulls it through to the conclusion that the end for which God created the world is his own glory. And the life that is the life of fulfillment.
Of true joy, not just surviving, not just getting by, not just putting in time. But the life that has true meaning and significance. is the life that lives for the same end. And there's a remarkable discovery. That when we live for the glory of God, we find that that is in fact what is best for us.
Yeah. Jesus sort of put the paradox this way. Whoever will keep his life Hold on to it. White knuckled. It's going to lose it.
But whoever loses his life for my sake. He finds it.
Sorry. This is Edward's idea. This is his big idea. to enjoy and glorify God. In all that we do.
Even horseback riding through the Connecticut River Valley, or reading the Psalms, or wrestling with Paul. or preaching, or chopping wood. And all of those things. Glorifying And enjoying God. That's what God made us for.
That's what God wants for our lives. to enjoy him and to glorify him. That's Edward's big idea. and read through his writings. and you'll constantly be brought back.
to that theme. That was Stephen Nichols on the big idea of Jonathan Edwards. Thanks for being with us today for Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.
There's more to come in the story of Edwards, and we skipped over much of his early life.
So if you have now got a taste for Edwards and would like to learn more about this major figure in church history and one who helped shape the development of the religious landscape of what would become America, request the entire series when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. You can also call us at 800-435-4343 or use the link in the podcast show notes. This offer does end tonight, so if you'd like to add this Jonathan Edwards resource to your collection, don't delay. For those living outside of the US and Canada, today is also your final opportunity to request the global digital version of this offer at renewingyourmind.org/slash global. When we're in the midst of a trial, it can feel overwhelming, like we're imprisoned by our circumstances.
For the rest of the week, Derek Thomas will join us to consider several figures from the Bible who were in one way or another imprisoned. That's beginning tomorrow. Here on Renewing Your Mind.
