Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God Persuasion Analysis

Everywhere you look in the world today, there is always someone trying to persuade you to do something. While watching the television every commercial is sixty seconds of pure persuasion. You can read them in the newspaper. Even while driving on the interstate there are huge billboards that grab your attention to whatever they are advertising. People literally knock on your door trying to persuade you to switch to their religion. The goal of the persuasion is mutual, but the persuasions techniques may differ. The techniques that one uses can depend on many things. For example, the technique a speaker chooses, might depend on your audience or the occasion. In Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God”, Edwards uses three main persuasive techniques which are, connections to reality, his vivid description, and fear of the unknown.
Throughout Edwards’ six hour sermon, he made many connection from what he was talking about to real life scenarios. One of his more prominent connections in the sermon was about a dam and the floods of water that it is holding back. Edwards states on page 88 “The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present: they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose.” The longer you sin, the greater and more powerful the wrath of God will be. Once the dam crumbles under the pressure there is nothing that can stop the liquid stampede that follows. Truly, the first persuasive technique that Edwards used in “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God” is making connections to