Jonathan Edwards message that sparked the First Great Awakening in America drove truth to the core of the listener's spirit. That is the true characteristic of God's Word when properly interpreted and delivered, it is a double edged sword that penetrates deeply. The church becomes irrelevant when it tolerates godlessness in its midst and justifies it through mere human sentimentalism. Would the church today withstand Edwards' message "Sinners in the hands of an angry God"? Yet we need desperately to heed the truth in it's content.
Between 1560 and 1599, The Geneva Bible was providentially unleashed upon a dark, discouraged, downtrodden English speaking world. Just when it looked as if the Machiavellian, Divine Right kings, such as the Tudors of England, were about to drive Christendom back to the days of Caesar worship, a Bible appeared that set the stage for a Christian Reformation of life and culture the likes of which the world had never seen. By the time of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, just 28 years after the first printing of the Geneva Bible, it was already being said of the English that they were becoming a “people of the Book.” The results of a people reading and obeying the Word of God were the explosion of faith, character, the first missionary movement in history, literature, economic blessing, and political and religious freedom.