"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is a sermon written by the American theologian Jonathan Edwards, preached to his own congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, to profound effect,[1] and again on July 8, 1741 in Enfield, Connecticut.

[2] Like Edwards' other works, it combines vivid imagery of sinners' everlasting torment in the burning fires of Hell with observations of the world and citations of Biblical scripture.

This was a highly influential sermon of the Great Awakening, emphasizing God's wrath upon unbelievers after death to a very real, horrific, and fiery Hell.

Whenever Edwards preached terror, it was part of a larger campaign to turn sinners from their disastrous path and to the rightful object of their affections, Jesus.

[6] In the final section of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards shows that his theological argument holds throughout scripture and biblical history.

[9][page needed] The first comprehensive academic analysis of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was published by Edwin Cady in 1949,[10] who comments on the imagery of the sermon and distinguishes between the "cliché" and "fresh" figurative images, stressing how the former related to colonial life.

[13] Lukasik stresses how, in the sermon, Edwards appropriates Newtonian physics, especially the image of the gravitational pull that would relentlessly bring down the sinners.

[15] Choiński suggests that the rhetorical success of the sermon consists in the use of the "deictic shift" that transported the hearers mentally into the figurative images of hell.