Fleeing Out of Sodom: Jonathan Edwards

[Kokavkrystallos]

May, 1735 Jonathan Edwards​

(Full text can be read here: Chapel Library)

1. Doctrine: We Ought Not to Look Back.
The following reasons may be sufficient to support this doctrine.

First: That Sodom is a city full of filthiness and abominations. It is a filthy and abominable city; it is full of those impurities that are worthy to be had in the utmost abhorrence and detestation by all. The inhabitants of it are a polluted company. They are all under the power and dominion of hateful lusts. All their faculties and affections are polluted with those vile dispositions that are unworthy of the human nature, that greatly debase it, that are exceeding hateful to God and dreadfully incense His anger. Every kind of spiritual abomination abounds in it: in Sodom there is all filthiness that can be thought of. There is nothing so hateful and abominable but that there it is to be found, and there it abounds.

Second: We ought not to look back when fleeing out of Sodom, because Sodom is a city appointed to destruction. The cry of the city has reached up to heaven. The earth cannot bear such a burden as her inhabitants are; she will therefore disburden herself of them, and spew them out. God will not suffer such a city to stand. He will consume it. God is a holy God, and His nature is infinitely opposite to all such uncleanness as Sodom is full of. He will therefore be a consuming fire to it. The holiness of God will not suffer it to stand, and the majesty and justice of God require that the inhabitants of that city, who thus offend and provoke Him, be destroyed. And God will surely destroy them; it is the immutable and irreversible decree of God. He has said it, and He will do it.

Third: We ought not to look back when fleeing out of Sodom, because the destruction to which it is appointed is exceedingly dreadful. It is appointed to utter destruction, to be wholly and entirely consumed. It is appointed to suffer a dreadful storm of fire and brimstone. This city is to be filled full of the wrath of God. Every one that remains in it shall have the fire of God’s wrath come down on his head and into his soul. He shall be full of fire, and full of the wrath of the Almighty. He shall be encompassed with fire without and full of fire within. His head, his heart, his bowels, and all his limbs shall be full of fire, and not a drop of water to cool him.

Fourth: The destruction to which Sodom is appointed is a universal destruction. None that stay in it shall escape. None will have the good fortune to be in any by-corner, where the fire will not search them out. All sorts, old and young, great and small, shall be destroyed. There shall be no exception of any age, or any sex, or any condition, but all shall perish together.

Fifth: The destruction to which Sodom is appointed is an everlasting destruction. This is said of the literal Sodom, that it suffered the vengeance of eternal fire, in Jude 7: “Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”

Sixth: Sodom is a city appointed to swift and sudden destruction. The destruction is not only certain and inevitable, and infinitely dreadful, but it will come speedily, “Whose judgment...lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not” (2Pe 2:3). And so Deuteronomy 32:35: “The day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.” The storm of wrath, the black clouds of divine vengeance even now every moment hang over them, just ready to break forth and come down in a dreadful manner upon them.

Seventh: There is nothing in Sodom that is worth looking back upon. All the enjoyments of Sodom will soon perish in the common destruction; all will be burnt up. And surely it is not worth the while to look back on things that are perishing and consuming in the flames, as it is with all the enjoyments of sin. They are all appointed to the fire.

Eighth: We are warned by messengers sent to us from God to make haste in our flight from Sodom, and not to look behind us. God sends to us His ministers, the angels of the churches, on this grand errand, as He sent the angels to warn Lot and his wife to flee for their lives, and to say and do as we have account in Genesis 19:15-16. If we delay or look back, now that we have had such fair warning, we shall be exceedingly inexcusable and monstrously foolish.

2. Application of This Doctrine​

The use that I would make of this doctrine is to warn those who are in a natural condition to flee out of it, and by no means to look back. While
you are out of Christ, you are in Sodom.

First: The destruction of which you are in danger is infinitely more dreadful than that destruction of the literal Sodom from which Lot fled. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in a storm of fire and brimstone was but a shadow of the destruction of ungodly men in hell, and is no more to it than a shadow or a picture is to a reality, or than painted fire is to real fire.

Second: The destruction you are in danger of is not only greater than the temporal destruction of Sodom, but greater than the eternal destruction of the inhabitants of Sodom. For however well you may think you have behaved yourselves, you have continued impenitent under the glorious gospel, have sinned more, and provoked God far more, and have greater guilt upon you, than the inhabitants of Sodom, although you may seem to yourselves, and perhaps to others to be very harmless creatures. Matthew 10:15 says, “Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.”

Third: Multitudes, while they have been looking back, have been suddenly overtaken and seized by the storm of wrath. The wrath of God has not delayed while they delayed. It has not waited at all for them to repent, to turn about and flee; but has presently seized them, and they have been past hope. When Lot’s wife looked back, she was immediately destroyed.

Fourth: If you look back, and live long after it, there will be great danger that you will never get any farther. The only way to seek salvation is to press forward, with all your might, and still to look and press forward, never to stand still or slacken your pace. When Lot’s wife stopped in her flight, and stood still in order that she might look, her punishment was that there she was to stand forever.

Fifth: It may well stir you up to flee for your lives, and not to look behind you, when you consider how many have fled to the mountain, while you yet remain in Sodom. To what multitudes has God given the wisdom to flee to Christ, the mountain of safety! They have fled to the little city of Zoar, which God will spare and never destroy. They are in a safe condition; they are out of reach of the storm; the fire and brimstone can do them no hurt there.
But you yet remain in that cursed city among that accursed company. You are yet in Sodom, which God is about so terribly to destroy, where you are in danger every minute of having snares, fire, and brimstone, come down on your head.

Sixth: Backsliding after such a time as this will have a vastly greater tendency to seal a man’s damnation than at another time. The greater means men have, the louder calls, and the greater advantages they are under, the more dangerous is backsliding; the more it has a tendency to enhance guilt, to provoke God, and to harden the heart.
We, in this land of light, have long enjoyed greater advantages than the most of the world, and backsliding will be proportionably the greater sin, and the more dangerous to the soul.

Seventh: We know not but that a great part of the wicked world is, at this day, in Sodom’s circumstances when Lot fled out of it, having some outward temporal destruction hanging over it. It looks as if some great thing were coming; the state of things in the world seems to be ripe for some great revolution.
(NOTE: 40 years later the American Revolutionary War started)

Eighth: To enforce this warning against looking back, let me beseech you to consider the exceeding proneness which there is in the heart to it. The heart of man is a backsliding heart. There is in the heart a great love and hankering desire after the ease, pleasure, and enjoyments of Sodom, as there was in Lot’s wife, by which persons are continually liable to temptations to look back. The heart is so much towards Sodom that it is a difficult thing to keep the eye from turning that way, and the feet from tending thither. When men under convictions are put upon fleeing, it is by mere force. It is because God lays hold on their hands, as He did on Lot’s and his wife’s and drags them so far.
Thus it is that backsliding commonly comes upon persons that have for some time been under any considerable convictions, and afterwards lose them. Let the consideration of this, your danger, excite you to the greatest care and diligence to keep your hearts, and to watchfulness and constant prayer against backsliding. And let it put you upon endeavors to strengthen your resolutions of guarding against everything that tends to the contrary, that you may indeed hold out to the end, for “then shall you know,if you follow on to know the Lord.”—Amen.