MME Designs's Weblog

An Experiment in point of view.

The evangelists of olden times wandered about, doing righteous toil. Preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1753) left us with fire and brimstone sermons about man’s dependence upon God. The great preacher culled a line from Deuteronomy to open “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) stating: “…their foot shall slide in due time (32:35).” Fortuna enters a man’s life in chance events subsequent to demonstrations of strength, or conversely, weakness in character. Few men see Fortuna as a servant of God: she swings like a pendulum between providence and ruin. To those who see God as the Great Tuner of universal harmony, Fortuna’s acts are part of a divine plan that cannot be resisted or circumvented. Edwards insisted that when – not if – but when a man’s foot shall slide, “Then shall they left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight.” Edwards could see that the foolish children of men delude themselves in their own schemes, and confident in their own strength and wisdom, they “trust to nothing but shadow.” Be not deceived, my friends, to those who radically preach the Gospel, Fortuna is useless to men. There is no point in placing trust in her (as with Spirit), for she cannot discern between those who are good and those who are not. It is like leaving your mother’s deathbed to return to a siren who leads you to go hungry in a distant land.