In this convicting work directed to increase a healthy fear of the Living God to Christians, Mead works from Hebrews 10:31, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.” Mead teaches in what sense God is the living God, and what it means to “fall into the hands” of this God who lives. Every sinner (redeemed, or remaining in unbelief) will ultimately stand in judgment before the Living God, and will have to deal with God both necessarily and everlastingly. Necessarily, as God requires an account of their life, and everlastingly, where the final state of the sinner will be determined. Mead demonstrates that having such a healthy fear of falling into God’s hands is evidenced from that terror which sinners themselves many times feel under the sense of God’s wrath in this world. Men must be saved by Christ to escape the dreadful judgment that accompanies unbelief when they fall into the hands of the Living God. This union with Christ, God’s only Redeemer, is such a union as that by it, a man’s state is fundamentally changed, so that he is no longer a child of wrath. It is a union fixed in the blessed state of justification, and the forgiveness of sins. By virtue of this union, he has a right to all the blessings of the covenant. This is what gives Christians great boldness in the day of judgment to stand before the Living God in whom hands they are judged. This is not a scan or facsimile, has been updated in modern English for easy reading and has an active table of contents for electronic versions.

Pastor Brian Zahnd began "to question the theology of a wrathful God who delights in punishing sinners, and has started to explore the real nature of Jesus and His Father. The book isn’t only an interesting look at the context of some modern theological ideas; it’s also offers some profound insight into God’s love and eternal plan." —Relevant Magazine (Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2017) God is wrath? Or God is Love? In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards shaped predominating American theology with a vision of God as angry, violent, and retributive. Three centuries later, Brian Zahnd was both mesmerized and terrified by Edwards’s wrathful God. Haunted by fear that crippled his relationship with God, Zahnd spent years praying for a divine experience of hell. What Zahnd experienced instead was the Father’s love—revealed perfectly through Jesus Christ—for all prodigal sons and daughters. In Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Zahnd asks important questions like: Is seeing God primarily as wrathful towards sinners true or biblical? Is fearing God a normal expected behavior? And where might the natural implications of this theological framework lead us? Thoughtfully wrestling with subjects like Old Testament genocide, the crucifixion of Jesus, eternal punishment in hell, and the final judgment in Revelation, Zanhd maintains that the summit of divine revelation for sinners is not God is wrath, but God is love.

Pastor John Piper shows how to sever the clinging roots of sin that ensnare us, including anxiety, pride, shame, impatience, covetousness, bitterness, despondency, and lust in Battling Unbelief. When faith flickers, stoke the fire. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it offers some promise of happiness. That promise enslaves us, until we believe that God is more desirable than life itself (Psalm 63:3). Only the power of God’s superior promises in the gospel can emancipate our hearts from servitude to the shallow promises and fleeting pleasures of sin. Delighting in the bounty of God’s glorious gospel promises will free us for a less sin-encumbered life, to the glory of Christ. Rooted in solid biblical reflection, this book aims to help guide you through the battles to the joys of victory by the power of the gospel and its superior pleasure.

"[This is] a book about art (and writing about art), about emptiness, breathing, ordinary language, mysticism, the body, the sexes, childhood, parenting, impersonality, God, theory, exchange, change, tact, forms of inattention, belief, scepticism ..." Adam Phillips, from the new introduction.