The Bow of God's Wrath

The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether inexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God.
--Jonathan Edwards

As I was listening to Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God I was absolutely taken back by the above paragraph. Obviously the theological implications of the statement are nothing that we haven’t heard and read thousands of times before, (which I don’t intend to minimize) but what took me back was the way that Edwards articulated the truth. Specifically the phrase…The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. I was convicted as I thought about the weak and passionless way that I speak about the truth of Gods Word to people, many of which are lost and dying and standing with the arrow of wrath aimed directly at their heart of stone.

I fear that as we reacted to the disgusting methods of semi-pelagian pragmatists who seek to entertain and are but a mockery, and reaffirm our Puritan heritage by giving ourselves over completely to exposition and exegesis, that somewhere we lost the value of words. Words and language are an amazing gift from a Sovereign God, and he has ordained words that flow from our mouth and our pen to means by which his providence unfolds. For example, the gospel proceeding from our lips may be the means by which He draws a sinner to Himself (Rom. 10:14-15) and we teach and preach and talk about pursuing holiness (1 Peter 1:13-16) those words may be the means that the Spirit uses to convict a brother or sister of sin and thrust them towards repentance.

If our words and language are tools by which our Sovereign God carries out his providence, shouldn’t we toil and labor to ensure that our words are not dull tools but sharp and ready to be the means that God might use to cause someone to become undone before him?

My heart aches as I think about my failure to use God’s gift of language for all that it is. May we strive to be good stewards of the gift of language as we labor to stir the affections of our hearers upward.