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Jonathan Edwards God Rhetorical Analysis

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In order to emphasize God’s contempt for the audience, Jonathan Edwards utilizes inflammatory diction and comparisons of God’s anger to a bow and arrow and “black clouds” to instill fear in the audience so that they will accept God as their savior, provoking a religious revival. Throughout the sermon, Edwards utilizes “fiery” phrases such as “furnace of wrath”, “wrath…burns like fire”, and “glowing flames of the wrath of God” in order to establish a connection between God’s fury and a burning fire, reaffirming the reality of going to hell, as hell is commonly associated with fire. Because fires are also very devastating and unpredictable, Edwards emphasizes the power and degree of God’s disdain and his ability to cause drastic change at unexpected times, making God’s patience seem fragile. …show more content…

This displays how insignificant human beings are to God, for he sees them as inferior, household pests, taking no effort for him to drop them into hell; therefore, Edwards suggests that these people should follow and live by the morals and commands of God, as, at any moment, God can change his mind and take them to hell. A sense of urgency to repent is induced, as the life of a sinner, God’s view of all people, is always in dire danger of going to hell. Because spiders are also not differentiable among each other, Edwards emphasizes God’s supremacy by implying that humans are so irrelevant to God that their individuality is stifled. This creates a feeling of anxiety in the audience as humans think of themselves as individually unique. Furthermore, Edwards compares God’s wrath to a bow and arrow, asserting that the “bow” of God’s wrath is “bent”, and the “arrow” is “made ready”, and it’s only the “mere pleasure” of God that keeps the arrow from “being made drunk with your

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