Edwards
states that:
whatever some have imagined and pretended
about promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and manifest,
that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes
in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal
destruction.
By natural man, Edwards means any person who
has not become a Christian and been saved by making a confession of faith that Christ is his
lord.
Edwards is stating that the purpose of his sermon is to illustrate
that an unsaved individual can at any moment be plunged into the fires of hell. Edwards goes to
great pains to describe how the unsaved live: they are like people trying to cross over a great
fire on a very rickety bridge that is missing planks: they could at any step fall through the
rotting planks to perish horribly. Or they are like a spider dangled over a fire, or like people
walking on an unstable shore, liable at any time to slip into...
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