Edwards: Grace, a Drop from God's Infinite Fountain

The cacti of trendy biblical scholarship tend to send me back to the redwoods of the past, men like our friend Jonathan Edwards. Found this tonight in his sermon 'It Is What May Well Make Us Willing and Desirous to Go with God's People, That God Is with Them' (try getting that on your Sunday morning bulletin). Typical Edwards. Wonderful.

God is with his people as they have fellowship and communion with God and as they are partakers with God in his good, possessing infinite good, and those are partakers with him in the same excellency and happiness. God communicates himself to his people. He imparts of his own beauty. They are said to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). They are partakers of God's holiness (Heb 12:10).

So God communicates to his people of his own happiness. They are partakers of that infinite fountain of joy and blessedness by which he himself is happy. God is infinitely happy in himself, and he gives his people to be happy in him. . . .

That grace and holiness, that divine light and love, and that peace and joy that is in the hearts of the saints is a communication from God. Those are streams, or rather drops, from the infinite fountain of God's holiness and blessedness. 'Tis a ray from the fountain of light.

--Jonathan Edwards, in The Glory and Honor of God: Volume 2 of the Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards (ed. M D. McMullen; B&H 2004), 155
Dane Ortlund