793. JUSTIFICATION. REWARDS.
Believers may be heirs of eternal life prior to their good works. They may have a right by Christ’s righteousness received by faith that may be prior to any regard to anything in them as a good work, or any virtue or lovely qualification in them; and yet [it] may be the pleasure of God to bestow heaven upon them in that way, viz. in reward for their good works, as lovely to God in Christ. And this contains no more absurdity or inconsistency than Christ himself, his being the heir of the kingdom of the world as a Son prior to his good works, and its being yet the pleasure of God that he should have the possession of the kingdom given him in reward for his labors. He was the Son of God, and so the heir of the world, and that was the reason that God appointed him to those labors, that he might obtain the possession of it in that way. So believers being heirs as children (which they are by the righteousness of Christ), is the reason that God appoints them to obtain heaven in a way of good works, which God hath before ordained that they should walk in them.

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 18, The “Miscellanies:” 501-832, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 495.

Filed under:
miscellany mondays, the miscellanies