“ If heaven be such a blessed world, then let this be our chosen country, and the inheritance we seek. Let us turn our course this way. It is not impossible that this glorious world may be obtained by us. It is offered to us. Though it be so excellent and blessed a country, yet God stands ready to give us an inheritance there, if this be the country we choose, and upon which we set our hearts, and spend our time chiefly in seeking it. God gives men their choice. They may have their inheritance where they choose it, and may obtain heaven if they will seek it by patient continuance in well-doing, Rom. 2:7. We are all of us, as it were, set here in this world as in a large wilderness with divers countries about it, with several ways or paths leading to those different countries, and we are left to our choice what course we will take. If we heartily choose heaven, and set our hearts chiefly on that blessed Canaan, that land of love, and love the path which leads to it, we may walk in it; and if we continue so to do, it will certainly lead us to heaven at last. Let what we have heard of the land of love excite us all to turn our faces towards that land, and bend our course thitherward. Is not what we have heard of the happy state of that country and the many delights which are in it enough to make us thirst after it, and to cause us with the greatest earnestness and steadfastness of resolution to press towards, and to spend our whole lives in traveling in the way which leads thither? What joyful news might it well be to us when we hear of such a world of perfect peace and holy love, to hear that there is an opportunity for us to come, that we may spend an eternity in such a world“
—Jonathan Edwards, “Heaven Is a World of Love,” in Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 8 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 392–393.
“The heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars that God hath settled and fixed in heaven, and appointed to be for times and season, and for days and years, are here represented as ‘faithful witnesses in heaven’; that is, they give a faithful testimony with respect to times and seasons. They never cheat or fail us. So it is with respect to God’s heaven, and Jesus Christ, the Sun of righteousness, the mediator of that covenant, the seed of David. As the sun and other heavenly bodies never cheat us, never fail the expectations of those that expect them in their season, so God’s covenant never fails, and Christ never fails those that trust in him. We may as surely depend on the fulfillment of God’s promises, as in the night we may surely depend on the due returns of the light of the sun in the morning, or as in winter we may surely depend on the returns of the benign influences of the sun in the proper season of spring.”
~ Jonathan Edwards, The “Blank Bible,” ed. Stephen J. Stein, vol. 24, part 1 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 520.