Our intention in this time is to do a survey of the high points of redemptive history and then draw some implications for missions. The way I’m approaching this is probably a little different than the way Ralph Winter or someone else might approach it, because when others develop this first talk on God being a missionary God (especially people like Don Richardson) they start with the 2,000 year connection in Genesis 12:3 and so on. But I’m just going behind that to the ultimate goal of God’s mission in the world, namely, to uphold and display His glory, for the enjoyment of his redeemed people, from every people, tribe and tongue and nation.

God’s Glory and Our Joy

Maybe I should tell you my assumption here. This word enjoyment is a very operative and very important word linking with this word glory for me. I call, and have called my theology, Christian Hedonism. The book Desiring God is an unpacking of that phrase. Everything I’ve ever written is an attempt to defend the phrase that God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in him. That’s my summary of my life calling. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, which means that if God’s glory, or God’s motive or goal, is to display his glory (to make it truly look as good as it is; to magnify it), then he cannot be indifferent to whether it’s enjoyed, because the enjoyment of it magnifies it.

If you are offered a gift and you dutifully accept it, you don’t glorify that gift as much as if you joyfully accept it. And so, the joyful response to God and delighting in God is essential to his being glorified in the world. Which means you are a blasphemer if you renounce joy as the goal of your life, because joy is that by which God is honored and glorified in you. You must make it your aim to pursue the fullest possible joy, which according to Psalm 16:11, is found where?

You make known to me the path of life;
     in your presence there is fullness of joy;
     at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

So now we know where it’s found: in God’s presence, in God’s right hand, because God is our exceeding great reward (Genesis 15:1).

I’m a Christian Hedonist. Meaning, I am devoted, with all the energy that lies within me to being as happy as I can be for as long as I can be. And anybody that offers me a joy that gives me about 95 percent happiness for about 800 years, I will say, “No, thank you.” I want 100 percent forever or I will not buy your deal. And I know where it’s found, because the Bible tells me where it’s found. It’s found in God. When God hears that he is mightily honored.

When you get to heaven and he says, “Why should I let you in here?” Evangelicals say you should say, “Because I trusted Jesus.” Let’s do a little bit of unpacking there, because I think trust involves loving, and loving involves delighting. In 1 Corinthians 16:22 Paul said:

If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.

Which means that faith, which we believe is that alone which justifies, must include love, because you’re cursed if you don’t love him. And nobody who’s justified is cursed. And we’re justified by faith. So faith must include love. We sling around these words: “You don’t believe in Jesus or have trust …” and we think it’s simple like that. Well, I know living in Minneapolis, every drunk on the street trusts Jesus. Every prostitute trusts Jesus. I’ve never talked to a person on the street who says they don’t. I live in Phillips neighborhood, and I can’t get anybody to say they don’t believe in Jesus, no matter how they’re living.

So that language has forced me to get inside the Bible and dig and ask Jesus, “What do you mean? What do you expect from people, by the words trust or belief?”

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst (John 6:35).

Believing means coming to Jesus such that you don’t thirst anymore for anything but him. God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. So I’m on a quest, in missions and in the city, and here tonight, to awaken deeper satisfaction in the glory of God, precisely because God is more glorified in you when that satisfaction arises to him.

If you go about your mission, or your church work, in a kind of self-willed, dutiful way God will not be as honored by your life as if you rejoice in him, delight in him, and pursue joy in him. So these are not throwaway words here; these are carefully chosen. All I’m going to do is put text after text up to show that God is radically God-centered, and that when he seeks your enjoyment of his glory, he does that because his glory shines more brightly in your joy than in your duty.

Creation

Let’s start with creation. Genesis 1:26–27 says:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Here’s the beginning of God’s pursuit of God’s glory in creation. What does that mean “in his is own image”?

It is a sad thing to me that, in our very man-centered day, the concept of the image of God is most commonly talked about as a warrant for how wonderful we are, rather than how wonderful God is. There’s something fundamentally skewed about that. For this reason — images are created to image what they are images of. That’s simple. Images are created to image forth what they are images of. That’s why images exist. Statues of Lenin and Abraham Lincoln are intended to image forth a reality. You are in the image of God quite unlike a frog, or a toad, or a horse for the main reason of imaging forth God. Therefore, the concept of the image of God should draw all attention to God; to the glory of God. That’s what images are for. They get attention for what they image.

But sin entered into the world. If we take this paradigm for humanity and we are like reflectors or mirrors at a 45 degree angle, then the intention of this imaging reality created in it uniqueness is for the glory of God to land on Adam and bounce off to Eve, so that she sees Adam and loves God.

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:16).

In other words, “Recover the image. Live out the image, so that people see your good deeds, the acting image, and give glory to God, not you.” But sin flipped the mirror upside down.

Now, the back of a mirror is black, and as light hits it it’s absorbed and stops right there. Instead of light being reflected, a shadow is cast on the ground in the shape of this mirror. Eve and Adam looked down at the shadow, and they said, “Wow, that’s something!” And they fell in love with their shadow.” That’s sin. The devil said, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” You won’t worship God anymore. You’re going to worship yourself, shadowed on the ground. And believe me, that shadow is very powerful. It can put people on the moon. It can find solutions to smallpox. It can create electricity, refrigeration, jet propulsion, and CAT scans.

The shadow of the image of God, that broken echo of who God really is in us around us, is very attractive. The whole human race worships it. We worship ourselves. And that’s exactly the opposite of what God intended. So God began by putting a person, a couple, in the world to manifest His glory; to image forth who he is. And we fell from that.

The Tower of Babel

Then the Bible starts to give examples of what happens when you fall. For example:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:1–4).

That’s an illustration, in Genesis 11, of what becomes of the human race, having fallen from looking to God as the source of satisfaction, joy, and worship, and beginning to look at themselves. They want to make a name for themselves. They’re going to build themselves a city right up into heaven, exactly the opposite of what God meant for them to do.

The Call of Abram

And then God intervened in the world with the choosing of Abraham. Now these words, in the choosing of Abram, might appear different than what I’ve said, but check it. This passage is one chapter after humanity said, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” God chose one family to start a program. Genesis 12:1–3 says:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing”

So it may look to you that, in making his name great, it doesn’t sound like God is too concerned about God; he’s concerned about Abraham being great. But when you carry it through and study the purpose of this people, for example in Isaiah 49:3, God says:

You are my servant Israel (speaking of Abraham’s descendants) in whom I will be glorified.

So yes, he does make Abarham’s name great. But the point of Abraham’s greatness is to deflect that greatness to God. He says, “I will be glorified in you,” and how does he do it? He does it through faith. No distrust made Abraham waver. No distrust. Distrust is a great dishonor to God. Trust is a great honor to God. Romans 4:20 says:

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith, giving glory to God.

He grew strong in his faith, and I would say thus, giving glory to God. Faith glorifies God. Abraham was fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised (Romans 4:21). God is glorified as trustworthy when we believe him. So when God chose Abraham and said, “I’m going to make you great,” Abraham believed the promise. And in believing the promise, he became humble, and let God work for him, instead of those folks in the Tower of Babel who were trying to work their way into heaven. God worked for him to make him great, and thus, reflecting off of every good thing that happened to Abraham is God’s trustworthiness, goodness, and power.

It’s the same thing with us. When we trust him to work for us, his greatness is magnified. If we presume to help him out with our self-initiative, then we get the glory. So the calling of Israel is for the glory of God.

The Exodus

Let’s jump ahead to the Exodus. This is the pivotal moment in the history of this people as they were brought out of Egypt. Why did God rescue his people from Egypt? Why did he do that? I’m quoting here from Ezekiel 20:8. It says:

They rebelled against me and were not willing to listen to me. None of them cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.

So they deserve to be punished. Then what happened?

Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they lived, in whose sight I made myself known to them in bringing them out of the land of Egypt (Ezekiel 20:8–9).

So if you ask what was the bottom line motive for protecting this undeserving people, the answer is: concern for his reputation. God acted for the sake of his name. I’m beginning to show you that in instance after instance in the Bible, God was motivated by a passion for the glory of God.

Let’s continue on this theme of the Exodus in Psalms. Psalm 106:6–8 says:

Both we and our fathers have sinned;
     we have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness.
Our fathers, when they were in Egypt,
     did not consider your wondrous works;
they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love,
     but rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.
Yet he saved them…

Now, here’s salvation. Start to get this, because we’re going to see this again and again. Here is the salvation of a rebellious, undeserving people. They rebelled against him, yet he saved them. So the question becomes why? On what basis?

...for his name’s sake,
     that he might make known his mighty power (Psalm 106:8).

Salvation comes to his people, who are rebellious, because God has a passion for his name, and making known of his mighty power. God’s commitment to the glory of God is the foundation of our salvation. Do you think that’s a fair restatement of that sentence? He saved them for his name’s sake. The goal of God in saving is the glory of God.

Question and Answer

Are you saying this takes priority over John 3:16?

Let me give you the short version of that answer now, and then we’ll see it unpacked. How does the love of God for the world and the love of God for God relate to each other? Now, if you asked me what’s prior, I would say God’s commitment to God is prior and is the foundation of his love to man.

However, I want us to understand the meaning of the love of God for us in a way that the two are not in any way at odds with each other. And they’re not at odds with each other for this reason: The most loving thing that God can do for you is to give you the joy of joining God in making much of God. That’s the short answer though it might need a little explanation. The best, most loving thing that God can do for any human being, is to come to them and to say to them, “In spite of the fact that you are a sinner deserving hell, I have found a way and will always find a way to enable you to have an eternity of infinite joy, joining me in making much of me.”

Now that’s very different from the way the world understands being loved. The world today — and it infects all of evangelicalism — insists on defining love as that attitude towards me, which makes much of me. And the whole doctrine of self-esteem has been created to buttress it. So the world would say, “I am not truly loved unless you enhance my esteem of me.” And I say that the Bible says you are not truly loved, unless somebody helps you esteem God, or helps you delight yourself infinitely and abundantly in making much of God.

So God makes much of God in everything he does. That’s what I’m trying to show you here. God, for his namesake and for the display in his mighty power, does this.

Now what is loving toward man? What is loving towards man is to come to man and say, “What would make you infinitely healthy, infinitely happy, and infinitely satisfied forever?” And the answer is: knowing, loving, enjoying, and being conformed to God. So, “God so loved the world” means that God has undertaken, in the death of Jesus, to find a way to enable sinners to enjoy glorifying God, forever.

Now, I’m way ahead of myself here, because I’m coming to that in the New Testament. I’ve got about 20 or 30 minutes on the Old Testament, and then I’m going to go right to the cross as soon as we get to the New Testament. But now you see some of the radical implications of this, not just for missions, but for rearing your kids, public education, psychology, counseling, and preaching. Everything is affected by the centrality of God in the mind and heart of God. Everything. Close that parenthesis and we’ll be back.

This puts it even more starkly. I’m glad you asked it, because people are offended by these texts, especially the way I talk about them. I try to make them offensive. Because, frankly, I don’t think people see what they see until you carve the traditional junk off the point of the arrow. It just goes “plink”. When in fact, it’s an incredibly powerful arrow. We need to let this truth in because we are an infected evangelicalism with a man-centered, worldly mindset. We’re infected through and through, and therefore, these texts are very offensive. “He saved them for his name’s sake.” What, is there a megalomaniac in heaven? Is there an egocentric God? How can that be love? Those are the kinds of things I get all over the country, and I want them. I’m trying to get them. I make it as offensive as I can. And then with your kind of question being asked, we can suddenly say, “Maybe I’ve never even known what the love of God is. I’ve only made much of God because he makes much of me.”

People shake and cry about these things. I had a young woman come up last Sunday and take my hand after I had made a case for the deadness, blindness, and inability of the human heart to see the Bible. Our text was Psalm 119:18, “Open thou my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” I was arguing that you can see it only if God comes to you, and with trembling and tears running down her face, she said, “I want to see so bad. I want to be a Christian so bad. I don’t think I’ve understood this at all.”

Then we closed with Jesus. She came back on Wednesday night. She had not been in church for years and years, and it taught me. It taught me that preaching human inability — moral inability to love God, trust God, and see God, along with radical, utter dependence on the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of the heart — does not destroy evangelism. It saves sinners, if you present the whole thing, because two people professed faith last Sunday, under that sermon. It blew me away. I thought, “Praise God, we begin the new year with two people professing faith.” I don’t get nearly enough professions of faith to make me happy.

The Exodus Continued

And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord (Exodus 14:4).

Have you ever asked yourself why 10 plagues? I mean, make this short work? Do the number 10 first. Why the flies, the gnats, the dust, the blood? Here’s the provocative reason: God is a show off. No offense, Lord. That means he has something to show off here. And he means to drag it out.

. . . that he might make known his mighty power.

He meant for these stories to be written down so that Israel would never forget this. They would tell these stories to their children, generation, after generation, after generation, the frogs, and the gnats. God controls gnats. God controls frogs. God controls water. God controls everything. He can make it dark and he can make it cold.

God wants to be known as a very powerful God. And he wants to get glory over this rascal Pharaoh.

The Giving of the Law

At Sinai, a few months later, God gave a law to his people. What’s at the heart of this law?

You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me . . . (Exodus 20:3–5).

I want to focus on this for a minute.

What does jealousy mean? God is jealous. There is good jealousy and bad jealousy. There is healthy, right jealousy, and there is sick jealousy. I just did a couple of hours of premarital counseling a few weeks ago for John and Leslie, who get married next Saturday. I asked them something, and I’m always asking questions like this. How do you feel when instead of coming to your house, Leslie, at night, John plays basketball with the guys? How do you feel about that inside, when he makes a choice like that? What I’m fishing for here is an unhealthy need to always be together. I’m looking to see if there’s dysfunction in the emotional dependence here on these two. They need to bring to this relationship some good, strong, healthy independence. So that would be sick if she said, “I hate it. I want him to be with me. He ought to be with me.”

Whoa, he should not always be with you. But a healthy jealousy is, if she saw him kissing another girl. She should get very angry. She should take him by the scruff of the neck and say, “What was that?” And that’s what God does when we love the world. James 4:2–5 says:

You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?

What does it mean when he calls the church “adulteresses”? Because they ask him for something to spend it on their passions. You see the picture in his mind? Here’s a wife (the professing church) and here’s the husband in the bedroom. Very attractive. Available. Here’s a paramour at the end of the hall, wanting sex with the wife. She looks at her husband and looks down the hall. This paramour requires 50 bucks. She walks into her husband’s room (this is prayer) and says, “Oh husband, I pray that you would give me $50,” so that she can go have sex down the hall. That’s what James has in mind.

Adulteresses, do you not realize that friendship with the world is enmity with God? (James 4:5).

The jealousy of God is a signal that he is passionate for your affection, satisfaction, and joy in him alone. Which means he esteems his glory as satisfying to you and if you go out after anything else, you’re an adulterer or an adulteress. So his glory is highlighted in his saying, “I’m enough, I’m enough for you, look at me alone. Worship me. Delight in me. Be satisfied with me.”

Murmuring in the Wilderness

In the wilderness, these people having received a good law and been rescued by God, were so rebellious. They murmured again and again and again. Now why didn’t God wipe them out? Here’s the reason Ezekiel 20:21–22.

The children rebelled against me. They did not walk in my statutes and were not careful to obey my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live; they profaned my Sabbaths. Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the wilderness. But I withheld my hand and acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out.

He was concerned for his reputation and for the sake of his name. That’s why he didn’t punish them and wipe them out in the wilderness. The conquest of Canaan.

A King for Israel

Let’s just take this text in 2 Samuel 7:23. They moved through the wilderness, 40 years of wandering, getting ready to take over the land.

And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whom God went to redeem to be his people, making himself a name and doing for them great and awesome things by driving out before your people, whom you redeemed for yourself from Egypt, a nation and its gods?

So God was making himself a name when he drove out the nations before Israel in the land of Canaan. This text is wonderful. This is so full of hope for people. You’re divorced, for example, or you have made a wreck of your life or somebody has made a wreck of it. Listen to this. You remember now that Israel after a period of judges became antsy for a king so that they could be like the nations. This was very displeasing to the Lord and they cried out and God said to Samuel. God said, “They’re not rejecting you, but me. Go ahead and give them a king.” All the people said to Samuel, “Pray for your servants to the Lord your God that we may not die.” Because now they’ve heard from God that this has been very offensive to him that they’ve asked for a king and now they have Saul. They said, “For we have added to all of our sins this evil to ask ourselves a king.”

So it’s done. God has conceded and said, “Give them a king.” And in fact — marvel of marvels about his sovereignty — he’s willing to work with that concept for the rest of history. David becomes the paradigm of the son of David, who is Jesus who is now King of kings and Lord of lords. And there wasn’t supposed to be a king in Israel, except God. Well, God finally got it that way, that there will be no king but God, namely his Son, Jesus, but he went this roundabout way, through their sinful desire for a king. Samuel said to the people:

Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil.

Now stop right there. That’s gospel. Do you see that little sentence? “Fear not, you have done all this evil.” There’s something wrong with that picture. It’s supposed to say, “Fear, you have done all that evil.” That’s what it’s supposed to say. “Fear, you have done all that evil.” Evil should make us fear God. And when we do right, we shouldn’t be afraid. When we do wrong, we should be afraid, so this is strange. He says, “Fear not, you have done all that evil.” So we have gospel here, folks. This is an undeserved blessing.

And Samuel said to the people, “Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil. Yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty. For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself (1 Samuel 12:20–22).

So God comes to these sinning people. And instead of destroying them and saying, “You want another person for a king, you can have your king, see you later, I’ll raise up from the stones children of Abraham, and we’ll start over again.” Instead of saying that — which he could have because he would have been just and right and glorious to do it that way — he doesn’t do it that way. He tolerates it. He passes over it. He forgives it. What’s the motive? You could say, “God so loved the world.” That’s not what this text is. There are texts that say that and we’ll get to that. This text says he loves his name. He really loves his name. He is passionate about his glory. And that’s why he does not cast away these rebellious people. They are named by him. Psalm 25:11 shows us how to pray this way. David prays:

For your name’s sake, O Lord,
     pardon my guilt, for it is great.

Do you pray that way? The New Testament version of that is for Jesus sake. Please teach your children and know for yourself that at the end of your prayer, “In Jesus name, amen,” is not a throwaway phrase. I’ve had four teenage boys and now I have a little two year old, Talitha. And as I have taught them all to pray, we’ve had family prayer, day after day for 35 years or so I insist they say those words early on — “in Jesus name” or “in your name” or “in Christ’s name” or “for Christ’s sake.” The very exact wording is not important.

And when they start to end their prayers, “God bless Karsten and help him and Shelly be well and may football go okay tomorrow and help me do well in geometry, in Jesus’s name amen.” At the end of that time, I’ll say to Abraham, “Abraham, you didn’t sound like you meant that last phrase.” He might say, “What last phrase?” I will say, “The phrase ‘in Jesus name, amen.’ Did you mean that? What do you mean?” It’s kind of like a period.

That means that I don’t deserve any answer to prayer. Do I? John Piper deserves to be punished every day of his life. I’m a sinner. I have never earned anything from God, never. I deserve hell, left to myself. Christ undertook on the cross to purchase everything good that comes to me, including the rising of the sun tomorrow morning. That mercy, that I do not deserve, is purchased for me by Jesus. Therefore, if I’m going to ask God to be nice to me, whose right am I coming in? Whose name, whose value, whose worth, whose purchase? And the answer is not mine, but Jesus. Jesus hadn’t come when this psalm was written. They looked only to God’s name. And they just said, “Lord, I don’t know why you’d pardon me. I know you’ve got the sacrificial system but I know deep down inside of me that the blood of bulls and goats does not take away sin. And so you’re going to do something or you have done something I don’t get. But for your name sake, for your glory, not for me, forgive me.” That’s the way they prayed before the cross.

Heads me in paths of righteousness
     for his name’s sake (Psalm 23:3).

Israel’s Exile

Here they are now hundreds of years later, God being patient with them through a divided kingdom, one king after the other being an absolute jerk and idolater.Finally he says, “All right, enough is enough.” And the northern kingdom is sold into slavery among the Assyrians. And the southern kingdom a few hundred yours later is sold to the Babylonians and they are out of there — exile.

Here they are, finally they’re punished. They’re sent away from the promised land. I think these verses here (Isaiah 48:9–11) are the most God centered verses in the Bible — at least the most densely God-centered. Why is he not going to punish them, instead draw them back and save them. I think there’s six of these,

For my name’s sake I defer my anger;
     for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,
     that I may not cut you off.
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
     I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
     for how should my name be profaned?
     My glory I will not give to another.

You can’t miss the message. Why is he deferring his anger? That is, why is he being merciful? Answer: He’s committed to his name. God is committed to God. Ezekiel 36 says it another way, written to the same situation of exile:

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes (Ezekiel 36:22–23) . . . It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord God; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel (Ezekiel 36:32).

There you have the rug pulled out from under all the contemporary man-centered stuff that looks at the cross or looks at the image of God and puts the thumbs under our armpits and says, “It’s all an echo of my excellence. I’m a diamond in the rough. I feel good about myself. And that’s what the love of God is all about.” I’m offending some of you because that may be your whole paradigm of people helping. I don’t think it’s a good one. He says, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I’m about to act.” He’s going to save them. This is salvation. He’s not punishing here. He’s rescuing. That’s about as non-20th century as you can get. That’s about as non-American and non-evangelical as you can get. Because people will just say, “Oh, man, you preach that and you will destroy people’s self-esteem and they’ll walk out feeling like worms and have no power to love anybody. Because if you don’t feel good about yourself, you can’t love others.”

Something is wrong here. Something is profoundly wrong. You know what love your neighbor as yourself really means? It means become a Christian Hedonist. Really love yourself. Which means, find God satisfying. Don’t settle for anything less than knowing and loving and delighting in and being satisfied with the ultimately satisfying, namely God. Be radically hedonistic. That’s what self-love is. This is what Jesus told us to be.

The Coming of Christ

The life and ministry of Jesus, why did he come? Now we’re getting close to John 3:16. Why did he come? Well, he came because God so loved the world that he sent. Let’s put it alongside that. John 17:4 says:

I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.

Jesus came to glorify Father. John 7:18 says:

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true . . .

The Son is seeking the glory of the Father and in his humanity, identifying himself with us in the way we should live, we should live to the glory of the Father. Now here comes as close as any to answering the question about how the mercy of God and the glory of God relate. Romans 15:8–9 says:

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

Now, if you want one phrase for missions, what’s the goal of missions? The goal of missions is that the nations might glorify God for his mercy. So which is penultimate and which is ultimate? And I would say, he comes with mercy to rescue sinners among all the peoples. He does it ultimately, that he might be seen to be great. So the ultimate thing is not sinners. The ultimate thing is not mercy, the ultimate thing is glory. And mercy is what he uses to get people into a position where they can see it and love it and be satisfied by it. And we call that “salvation.” Of course, if you only think of salvation as escape from hell, and forgiveness of sins, this might not make any sense. But if salvation includes, essentially, the eternal satisfaction of your cavernous longings in God forever, then it makes sense.

When mercy comes, it takes godless people, and enables them through the forgiveness of sins, to start enjoying the glory of God and thus magnifying the glory of God forever. So I do say, in answer to your question, that mercy and love are penultimate, or a means to the glory of God. And the glory of God, which includes the glory of his love and more, is ultimate.

The Death of Christ

Now we’re right at the center of the Bible with the death of Jesus. I believe this paragraph right here is the most important paragraph in the Bible. That’s John Piper’s judgment, no authority for saying that. Romans 3:23–26, I believe, is the most important paragraph in the Bible, which means you ought to know it and lean on it. We have a tract at Bethlehem called “Quest for Joy”, which is an attempt to put into six statements, the gospel so that over lunch at work, if somebody’s willing to let you give your philosophy of life and share the gospel, you have a concrete, simple way of doing it. But it takes us six steps to do it. And step number one is God created you for his glory. And step number two is you haven’t lived through his glory and neither have I. That’s easy to say to anybody and make it understandable. Every person in the world knows that that’s the case. They have not lived for the glory of God. And you can quote them Isaiah 43:7, that they were created for his glory and you can talk about the mirror and all kinds of ways to do it.

Step one is God created us for his glory, and step two is that we ought to live for his glory, and step three is none of us has lived for his glory, we have all sinned. And the reason I start with the first two is so that this word right here makes sense in Romans 3:23. If you start sharing the gospel, without bringing the glory of God in early, they won’t understand what Romans 3:23 means. Sin is the failure to glorify God, that’s what sin is. And if you say just something like “sin is disobedience to the law of God,” you are setting them up for some massively legal understanding of this relationship. Someone might say, “God has a law, you didn’t obey it, start obeying it, go to heaven,” or something like that. Or someone might say, “Jesus obeyed it. And now trust Jesus and you go to heaven,” and there you’ve got a bunch of antinomians who think the law has nothing to do with them. I mean, all kinds of things go wrong the first 30 minutes of a person’s exposure to the gospel.

We’re thinking about a big project in Bethlehem and one of the elders said, “Most of the problems in a business project come from what you do in the first 30 minutes of the planning.” It’s the same thing with the sharing of the gospel. The phrase, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), means seeing is a failure to see and enjoy and delight in and reflect the glory of God. Paul continues:

And are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus Romans 3:24–26).

God’s Righteousness in Jeopardy

Why was the righteousness of God in jeopardy? Why did it need to be demonstrated? Why did God need to do such a drastic thing as to kill his Son, so that his righteousness would be vindicated? And the answer is given in the next phase: “Because in his divine forbearance, he passed over former sins.” Like what? Like David, who committed adultery and murder, and Nathan came to him and said, “You are the man.” And he said, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan (stand in wonder) said, “The Lord has taken away your sin” (2 Samuel 12:13). Just like that. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. No judge can do that.

Let’s say a judge in Cambridge has a rapist and a murderer in one person standing before him. The evidence is clear, he’s guilty. He knows he’s guilty. He says he’s guilty, but he’s sorry. And the judge says, “Okay. You can go. Thanks for your apology.” That judge would not survive. Neither should God. He should be off the bench of the universe. That’s the problem with the cross. God is wicked to forgive sinners. It says plainly in Proverbs 17:15:

He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous
     are both alike an abomination to the Lord.

We have a major problem here, folks. God’s goodness to us is the biggest problem in the universe, not your suffering. You’re suffering is wholly to be expected and deserved. You’re getting far less than what you deserve no matter what suffering you’re going through right now. Everybody in this room deserves to go to hell. If you only suffer and die from cancer it’s no suffering at all compared to what you deserve. The real problem in this room right now is that we’re warm and the mega problem is that we’re forgiven by faith alone. That’s a major problem. And the solution to the problem is the execution of the Son of God. So the Son is mainly given to vindicate the justice of the judge who lets sinners go free just because they apologize and put their faith in Jesus.

That’s a God-centered cross. And oh how different from what the cross is done with, or made of, in our day. Read and weep most about books on the cross today. We’re almost done here and I’ll open it up for questions.

The Christian Life

Here are a few texts on the Christian life:

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Whoever speaks, [let him speak] as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, [let him serve] as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ . . . (1 Peter 4:11).

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:16).

It’s everything in the Christian life. When you go home tonight, if you get a snack when you go home, like these water bottles and wonderful snacks over there, were you doing it to the glory of God as you ate? I hope so. If you say, “I eat crackers for the glory of God.” How do you drink sparkling water to the glory of God? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you might be able to obey this but you understand how you’re being and therefore your obedience will be in jeopardy if something confusing happens in your life, like the water turns out to be poison.

There are a lot of ways to drink orange juice to the glory of God. I wrote an article one time how to drink orange juice to the glory of God just to answer that question for my people. It starts with gratitude, “Thank you, you made the orange. Thank you for the truck that got it here. Thank you for the wonderful pasteurizing procedures that keep it from being infected in my life. Thank you for refrigeration. That’s all from you.”

I was giving these illustrations to my boys as we sat around the breakfast table. The context in 1 Corinthians is love. And I said “One of the ways you drink on shoes to the glory of God is asking Barnabas if he wants the full cup and you get the half cup. And if you pour the full cup for him and you take the half cup you drink orange juice more to the glory of God than if you poured the full cup and gave him the half cup.” There’s all kinds of ways to think this through. But you need to do that.

Christ’s Second Coming

Last one second coming. Why is Jesus coming back? Here’s one answer. Second Thessalonians 1:9–10 says:

They (unbelievers) will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.

Now the sum of the matter is that God is very self-centered. Jesus is coming back to be glorified in the saints, to get glory — “Glorify Me. Glorify Me.” And to be marveled at — “Marvel at me. Marvel at me.” If you acted like that, you’d be arrogant and unloving. Why is it loving for Christ to act like that?

It’s very simple: He is infinitely glorious and you aren’t. So if you want to love somebody, you must point them to him. If he wants to love somebody, he must point them to him. Is that hard to understand? God is the only being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest virtue. And the way we imitate him in that is not by self-exaltation, but God-exaltation. If God exalts God in your life, you should exalt God in others’ lives. Adam and Eve got this exactly wrong. Because Satan took a half truth and did a dinghy on it. God created them in his image. And Satan came along and said, “You want to be like God?” They should have said, “We’re already like God in the way we should be.”

But he sowed the seed of doubt that God was withholding something good from them. They started to distrust him. And what he meant was, “You can be like God by getting people to praise you, like God gets people to praise him. By relying on your standards of wisdom and goodness, the way God relies on his standards of wisdom and goodness.” Do you see how plausible that is?

God-likeness is independence. God-likeness is I can do it my own way. God says that. God is independent God does in his own way. God consults with nobody. Who has ever given a gift to him that he should be repaid? Who has ever been the counselor of the Lord? Nobody. So if you want to be like God, be independent. Wrong. That’s satanic.

So to say that Christ is coming to be glorified is not to say you should go out of here tonight to be glorified. Because that would be massively cruel to others by getting attention for yourself instead of God. God is the only one that can satisfy people. God is the only one that can save and bless and delight people. So the more you live to get attraction for you, the more cruel you are and un-God-like you are. But the more you live to get attraction, attention, delight, and satisfaction in God, to show his supremacy and get people toward God, the more loving you are.

God has to be that way too. Of course it sounds like a megalomaniac. Of course, it sounds like he’s self-centered. Of course, it sounds like he’s selfish. But that’s only because we haven’t thought through what it means to be God. He’s stuck with it. He’s stuck with being perfect. He’s stuck with being beautiful. He’s stuck with being infinitely satisfying. You’re not. You can give that up tonight and give it back to him.

Therefore, if he loves you, he’s coming tonight and saying, “No matter what it sounds like in your mind, the only way I can love you is to say, ‘Praise me.’” That’s the only way he can love you. If God were to be humble, he would not be God. Well, maybe that’s enough to clear up a few questions. This is all about missions, because the point of missions is to exalt this God with him. If this is his goal, and if all these texts are right, if my angle on these texts, if my understanding of these texts is right, the passion of God for Cambridge and the passion of God for Cambodia, is that his name be known and loved, his reputation be advanced, and his satisfying beauty through Jesus Christ and his work on the cross be embraced by people, and that he be glorified by them forever. So we want to join him in it and give our whole life to this.

Question and Answer

In counseling, isn’t it important to be able to say to someone who feels bad and guilty that one day they will be able to look in the mirror and see how special they are?

The way you just defined the problem calls for a massive grace solution. The thought is, “I don’t deserve your help. Get rid of me. I botched everything, I’m not worth the time of being here,” etc. I would not say to them, “Someday you’ll be able to look into the mirror and appreciate who you are.” I do not accept their analysis of what the problem is. The problem is they don’t trust grace. The problem is they haven’t gotten a handle on justification of the ungodly by faith alone. If we say the obstacle to getting a hold of it is that they have too low a view of themselves we’re undercutting the very doctrine in trying to get them to accept it seems to me. The doctrine says, “Get that analysis out of your head. That’s irrelevant.”

In fact, I think there’s something incredibly liberating about telling a person like that, “You probably don’t have a clue how bad you are.” Well, the alternative is to not assume that health must be based, bottom line, on self-esteem. It sounds like you’re operating with the paradigm that says, “Unless I can find a Christian way to help them feel good about themselves, I’ll never bring them to health.” I don’t know if you’re doing that but that’s the way a lot of people function. I sat in one seminar for example, where the syllogism was sort of drawn like this, “God loves you. Therefore, you are somebody. Therefore, be healthy and feel good and strong and resourceful and, and functional in society.” Now, I’m saying the middle premise is not necessary. I think you can go straight from God loves you to, therefore, rejoice in God.

We believe with all of our heart, that true health, true joy, true liberty, true satisfaction comes from seeing, and knowing, and delighting in God rather than making that love an echo of my excellence or my worth. He really desperately wants, probably, to be made to feel good about himself. I’m not going to help him. I’m going to say, “Look, if I join you in this quest to help you feel like somebody, I won’t help you.” And I know that in Christ, we have worth. “You are of more value than the sparrows,” Jesus said. But the reason he said it is because sparrows cannot glorify God consciously. We have the capacity to reflect and honor and glorify the Lord. So I’m going to go straight to the issue of what the image of God is about in him.

I’m going to say, “Do you know what? The most glorious news in the world is that God comes to people like you, absolutely broken, helpless failures, who are blowing it over and over again. And he makes the foundation of your health and salvation, something utterly different than you: the cross.” But you can’t go there and say, “Therefore, the cross shows that we are diamonds in the rough and therefore feel good about yourself again.” That’s not the point. The cross is that God moves in with his pure hands and is willing to get them dirty, to love people who are broken sinners. And probably what that guy needs is a community who will just lavish love on him.

It’s not so that he can infer, “Oh, I’m lovable.” See, we keep wanting to tell him the real bottom line health is lovability, when it’s God’s love, God’s glory, God’s beauty. So I’m trying to resist a people-helping approach that really goes back again and again and again, at the bottom line, to man and his worth and his esteem and his value. My alternative is to show him the beauties of Christ, show him the unconditional election and regeneration, and the justification by faith alone. The whole point of it is that you’re not deserving of it. That’s a huge, huge question. And this is a very good thing for us all to think about. How do you help people-helping in the light of God-centered biblical gospel? I personally think, most American evangelical people-helping is way off base.

What do you do with verses that show in some way that God’s will is frustrated, like how he says he desires all people to be saved?

I’ll try to answer it in a few minutes because this is everything, isn’t it? Right. I believe those verses. I take them at face value. I don’t try to twist the words. It might be that “God is not willing that any of you should perish” is answered by the fact that the you refers to the elect. That solves the problem right off the bat, maybe. But let’s just let you be everybody. Which it seems to be in 1 Timothy 2:4. God desires all — meaning every human being on the face of the earth — to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. And here I believe in the election, unconditional election, before the foundation of the world as to who will be saved, and not saved. So you have God being desires that some be saved, and saving them, and desirous that all be saved and they’re not being saved. So what do you do?

My answer is that God really does have a genuine, authentic desire for all to be saved. And he does not bring that desire to consummation in action because of higher and holier purposes than that desire. It’s like a judge who has his son before him guilty of the crime and he doesn’t want to send that son to prison, but he does send him to prison because of higher commitment. So I believe that there can be in God two wills — a will for all to be saved, and a will to save only the elect.

Now, if that sounds like schizophrenia, to you, Calvinistic schizophrenia, let me just point out that the choice of the Arminian is exactly the same. Maybe I’m using the words “Arminian” and “Calvinist” and you don’t even know what those words mean. I’m talking about the free will person who believes that we have the power native in ourselves to frustrate the plans of God. They would look at this verse and say, “God desires all men to be saved.” And I would point out, “But he doesn’t save them all right?” They would say, “Yes.” I would ask, “Why?” Their answer would be, “Because he wants them to have free will so that there can be a genuine love relationship with him.”

So you’re saying he desires them all to be saved but he has a higher commitment to something else, than their salvation — namely, that they have free will. I think they would have to say, “Well I would put it like that. But I suppose that’s what he has.” So both an Arminian and a Calvinist (a sovereignty person and a free will person) come to this text, and they have the very same problem. God wills all be saved and all are not saved. Why are they not all saved? Because this will is overridden by another will. Now where the disagreement comes is what this will is, this higher will. The Arminian says the higher will is that we have freewill and the Calvinist says the higher will is that God be sovereign and glorify himself in the revelation of wrath and mercy.

Then the question becomes, which is biblical? I don’t find free will in the Bible. So I don’t believe in it. It’s that simple to me.

When does God forgive our sin, at the cross or when we profess faith?

I think, at the cross, the full provision and covering was provided for sin. The full payment, the full atonement, the full propitiation, the covering the removal of wrath was bought and provided for. Then, when we are justified by faith — and I think faith includes repentance or confession — that is made over or applied to us. Now, God saw us in that cross from the beginning, but it seems as though he applies it effectively to us at the moment of our conversion. And the reason I stress that is because it’s clear that redemption is in the blood of Christ (Ephesians 1:7), but we are justified by faith. And that comes when we have faith and in Romans 4 justification is made synonymous with forgiveness.

In one sense, we’re forgiven at the cross in that the provision is wholly provided there. In another sense, we’re forgiven at the moment of confession and faith, because that provision is applied to us at that point. It’s time to stop. I need to do that to honor your commitments. But I want to just make sure that that other huge question didn’t get handled too cavalierly. That’s a huge issue. That’s a hard issue. I don’t assume that you just kind of easily say, “Oh, fine, I’ll be Calvinist,” or, “Oh fine, I’ll be an Arminian.” I mean, these are things you weep over. I wept in seminary over these issues. I screamed at my professor, Jim Morgan, over these issues. I put my face in my hands in the fall of 1968 and cried my eyes out over these issues. I did not come easily to these things. I was born an Arminian. I held a pen in the face of my systematic theology teacher in the hallway of Fuller Seminary and I dropped it. I said, “Do you see this Jim Morgan? I dropped it.” I was a fighting Arminian until I read Romans 9.