“To all true Christians: you have heard what a superlatively excellent being your God is. His excellencies are all matter of joy and comfort to you; you may sit and meditate upon them with pleasure and delight.
The thoughts of the greatness, power, holiness, and justice of God is matter of terror to the wicked, and will be matter of horrible amazement to them forever; but it is all comfortable and rejoicing to you. The most terrible and dreadful of all God’s attributes need not to be terrible, but comfortable to you.
You may think of His great power, of His terrible majesty, of His vindictive justice, with joy, as well as of His mercy and goodness; you may think of His being a consuming fire joyfully, as well as of His being the Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley, for all His attributes are on your side: His justice and holiness, as well as His pity, love, and compassion.
You may think of His descending from heaven to judgment in His dreadful majesty, and all the world rent to pieces before Him with earthquakes and thunder and lightning, and devils and wicked men trembling in inexpressible horror and amazement at the sight of Him, with as much comfort as you may think of Him hanging upon the cross.
You are delivered from the wrath of this dreadful Being, are got into Christ, a safe refuge from all danger, and where you never need to fear the feeling of His vengeance. His wrath is to be poured out on His enemies, but you are safe and need not fear: you are out of the way of that stream of brimstone which kindles hellfire.
You are come to Mount Sion, the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the General Assembly and church of the first-born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than the blood of Abel.
This God, to whom there is none in heaven to be compared, nor any among the sons of the mighty to be likened; this God who is from everlasting to everlasting, an infinitely powerful, wise, holy, and lovely being, who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, is your God.
He is reconciled to you and is become your friend; there is a friendship between you and the Almighty; you are become acquainted with Him, and He has made known Himself to you, and communicates Himself to you, converses with you as a friend, dwells with you, and in you, by His Holy Spirit.
Yea, He has taken you into a nearer relation to Him: He is become your Father, and owns you for His child, and doth by you, and will do by you, as a child. He cares for you. He will see that you are provided for. He will see that you never shall want anything that will be useful to you.
He has made you one of His heirs, and a co-heir with his Son. And He will bestow an inheritance upon you, as it is bestowed upon a child of the King of Kings.
You are now in some measure sanctified, and have the image of God upon your souls, but hereafter, when God shall receive you, His dear child, into His arms, and shall admit you to the perfect enjoyment of Him as your portion, you will be entirely transformed into His likeness, for you shall see Him as He is.
The consideration of having such a glorious God for your God, your friend, your Father, and your portion, and that you shall eternally enjoy Him as such, is enough to make you despise all worldly afflictions and adversities, and even death itself, and to trample them under your feet.”
-–Jonathan Edwards “God’s Excellencies: A Sermon on Psalm 89:6,” in Sermons and Discourses 1720-1723, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 10, Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven: Yale, 1992), 434-435. It may be read here in its entirety.
