The striking characteristic of preaching during the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century was that the gospel was urgently preached. From eminent figures such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John and Charles Wesley, to unheralded and obscure lay preachers both Calvinist and Arminian, all were convinced, as John Wesley put it, that nothing in the Christian faith “is of greater consequence than the doctrine of the Atonement.”[1]

Jonathan Edwards

 

Revival touched North America before Britain, and the preeminent figure in the New England awakening was Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). He was, and remains, one of America’s greatest theologians, able to combine deep learning in doctrine with clear and effective communication of the gospel and deep pastoral concern for his congregations.

Edwards saw the redeeming work of Christ as the ultimate reason for the incarnation: “Christ came into the world on this errand, to offer himself as an atonement, to answer for our desert of punishment.”[2] Because of the holiness, majesty, and justice of God, sin must be dealt with: “Justice requires that sin be punished,” and because of the dreadfulness of sin, “with infinite punishment.”[3]

Edwards proclaimed that this requirement was met in the death of Christ, who “suffered the full punishment of sin that was imputed to him, and offered to God what was fully and completely equivalent to what was owed to the divine justice for our sins.”[4]

Edwards showed how preaching about the atonement is vital to evangelism. In a sermon of 1740, he explained the significance of the cross to children, to whom he appears to have been very effective at reaching, with a good number being converted through his ministry.

Although renowned for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards set the love of God firmly alongside the justice of God as the reason for the atonement:

How wonderful his love to sinners was, in that he would die for such sin and wickedness, such corruption . . . he was willing to undergo great sufferings for that sin and wickedness . . . How astonishingly wonderful was this! Where is anything that can parallel this love?

 

Edwards emphasized the freeness of the sacrifice of Christ: “It was entirely Christ’s own free and voluntary act. Nor was there ever anything done more voluntarily and freely by Christ than offering that sacrifice of his own life.” There was no compulsion in this: “Compulsion is a thing that is not compatible to the Deity.”[5]

Edwards plumbed the profoundest mystery of how suffering and death touched the very heart of the Godhead.

George Whitefield

 

Probably the greatest preacher of the Evangelical Revival was George Whitefield (1714–1770). In his powerful proclamations of the gospel, he stressed the plight of man owing to sin, and the redemption of Christ, who came “by his obedience and death to make atonement for man’s transgression.”[6]

As the Reformers had done, Whitefield repeatedly stressed that justification is by grace alone through faith in Christ; this rested on the work of the cross: “Nothing but an infinite ransom could satisfy an infinitely offended justice,” therefore God sent “his only and dear Son Jesus Christ . . . to fulfill the covenant of works, and die a cursed, painful and ignominious death for us, and for our salvation.”[7]

In a sermon on Abraham’s willingness to offer Isaac on Mount Moriah, Whitefield drew parallels to the work of the cross, which lies at the root of praise and worship:

Think, O believers, think of the love of God, in giving Jesus Christ to be a propitiation for our sins . . . think how your heavenly Father bound Jesus Christ as his only Son, and offered him upon the altar of his justice, and laid upon him the iniquities of us all.[8]

 

John and Charles Wesley

 

Despite their differences, as Arminians, with the Calvinist theology of Edwards and Whitefield, Methodists held with equal firmness similar views of the cross. For both John and Charles Wesley, penal substitution was of great importance.

On May 21, 1738, after a long spiritual struggle, Charles Wesley trusted in Christ alone for salvation. The blessing that came from this was immense, as he confided in his journal that day: “I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ. . . . I saw that by faith I stood.” As he later wrote in a famous hymn, “No condemnation now I dread: Jesus, and all in him, is mine!”[9]

The conversion of his brother John came a few days later as he listened to Luther’s preface to Romans being read aloud. He felt his heart “strangely warmed” and trusted in Christ alone for salvation, who had taken away his sins and saved him “from the law of sin and death.”[10]

The dawning realization that through the cross, Jesus Christ had freed them from the condemnation due for their sins, set the hearts of the Wesley brothers aflame, liberating their ministries and becoming key to their message. Within a year of his conversion, Charles Wesley found himself boldly declaring before the University of Oxford:

All the world being wrapped in sin by breaking of the law, God sent his only Son our Savior Christ into this world to fulfill the law for us, and by the shedding of his most precious blood, to make a sacrifice or amends to his Father for our sins, and assuage his wrath and indignation conceived against us for the same.[11]

 

The same emphasis echoes through the sermons of John Wesley. In a sermon on justification by faith, John said: “To him that is justified or forgiven . . . God will not inflict on that sinner what he deserved to suffer, because the Son of his love hath suffered for him. . . . Jesus Christ is described as the one ‘whom God hath set forth for a propitiation, through faith in his blood.’”[12]

The atonement demonstrated both God’s justice towards sin, which had to be punished, and his mercy, for the just punishment for sin was willingly paid by his Son. It was crucial to John Wesley that God should be seen to maintain his justice, as he adds in his comments on Romans 3:26:

The attribute of justice must be preserved inviolate. And inviolate it is preserved, if there was a real infliction of punishment on our Savior. On this plan all the attributes harmonize. Every attribute is glorified, and not one superseded, no, nor so much as clouded.[13]

 

The only way God could show his justice and mercy in perfect harmony, without destroying the integrity of either, was through the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ. Merely forgiving, or doing away with sin, without the due punishment being dealt with, would not have maintained the integrity of God’s character.

Such thinking is echoed in John Wesley’s understanding of what the Old Testament teaches about the atonement. Of the mercy seat, the covering of the ark in Exodus 25:17–18, he commented: “This propitiatory covering, as it might well be translated, was a type of Christ the great propitiation, whose satisfaction covers our transgressions, and comes between us and the curse we deserve.”[14]

The teaching of penal substitution was, to John Wesley, absolutely fundamental to Christianity. Yet, to him, the propitiatory work of Christ was no cold, legal transaction. It was the supreme proof of the love of God, and came through “the grace of the Son, who freely took our curse upon him, and imparts his blessing and merits to us.”[15]

The teaching of John Wesley became foundational to the army of lay preachers and class leaders who were the key players in the local Methodist circuits and societies. Manuscripts from some of the sermons of these lay preachers still exist. They show how cross-centered was the Methodist lay preaching of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As one preacher, using Romans 3:25 as a text, expressed it:

A Propitiation means an atoning sacrifice, by which the Wrath of God is appeased. But how did He become this propitiation? I answer, by putting Himself in our Place, and drinking the Cup of Justice due to our sins.[16]

 

Not only did the early Methodists delight to preach the cross, they loved to sing its story:

 

For what you have done

His blood must atone:

The Father hath punished for you his dear son,

The Lord, in the day

Of his anger, did lay

Your sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away.[17]

 

Or again:

 

Accomplished is the sacrifice,

The great redeeming work is done;

’Tis finished! All the debt is paid;

Justice divine is satisfied;

The grand and full atonement made;

God for a guilty world hath died.[18]

 

This was the unified message that the preachers of the Evangelical Revival gladly sang and earnestly shared. They proclaimed it everywhere—to the agricultural workers, the miners, and the tradespeople.

The gospel was spiritually liberating, bringing comfort in distress and secure hope of an eternal future with Christ. Many ordinary, hurting, struggling, needy people heard it gladly, and countless lives were changed through its message.

 

 

© 2006 by Day One Publications, Leominster; www.dayonebookstore.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.