354. CONVICTION, HUMILIATION.

Christ himself endured great trouble and a sense of God’s wrath before his exaltation and the enjoyment of God’s love. The people of Israel endured cruel bondage and were forty years in a desolate wilderness before they came to the pleasant land.

As men are in two exceeding different states, first a state of condemnation and then a state of justification, so it seems reasonable and wise that they should be so sensibly; first that they should be sensibly in a state of condemnation, before they are sensibly in a state of justification: that so the sense of the mind should be in the same order as the state of the soul. For as the glory of the thing is in its being in this order—tis the glory of redemption that it is after so exceeding miserable, extreme, necessitous [a] condition—so it tends much to the sensibleness of the glory, that the man should be first sensible of his misery and extreme necessity, and afterwards of Christ’s sufficiency and salvation. It tends much to the perception of the glory, for there is no glory without perception; and the perception God intended is surely as much in the person that is the subject of the work, as any. It may in some measure answer the end to look back and see past misery and danger, and so only to be sensible of [them] after they are past, but ordinarily not so well. And if this order ben’t observed and they are not made sensible so, I believe God often, by one means or other, keeps them or brings them into doubts about their condition after they are converted, and so makes them sensible, or some other way makes it up.

Flying for refuge denotes fear preceding safety, or at least a sense of danger and necessity attending the application of the soul to Christ. He that comes to Christ does as it were resort to him as an hiding place from the wind and as a covert from the tempest, and as he that resorts to a cool shadow in a weary land after he has been scorched and made

faint by the heat, and as he that comes at length to a river of refreshing water in a dry place after he has been sore distressed with thirst; and Christ is so much the sweeter to him. Proverbs 18:10, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”

Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 13, The “Miscellanies:” Entry Nos. a–z, aa–zz, 1–500, ed. Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 428-429.

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