Jonathan Edwards uses the image of fire throughout his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". This sermon, delivered at the beginning of the First Great Awakening, was designed to drive fear into the hearts of Edwards’s audience and cause them to repent.

The First Great Awakening refers to a period of intense religious fervor and revival among Puritans during the mid-eighteenth century. Edwards had noticed that people were becoming more relaxed in their religious observance and their commitment to leading what Edwards considered to be a morally upstanding and spiritually devoted life. Edwards wanted to make sure that anyone who heard his sermon would be afraid of the consequences of not turning toward the salvation represented by Jesus Christ.

One of Edwards’s primary tactics in doing this was to evoke the image of a burning fire in hell. Throughout his sermon, Edwards makes references to the fiery, painful, and unending torment that awaited anyone who refused to acknowledge Jesus Christ as their savior. Edwards used phrases like the "fire of wrath" to talk about the afterlife awaiting unrepentant sinners. He claims that God will hold a person over the pit of hell the way someone might hold a spider over a fire, and he also describes God as throwing a person into that fire if they are deemed unworthy of heaven. This imagery is designed to evoke fear, ideally causing people to recommit themselves to Christian morality and salvation through God and Jesus Christ.