One of the things perhaps just parenthetically right from the outset to say is that if you are provoked to ask a question, and wish to goodness you could, do remember please that tomorrow morning we will have a question and answer time. I love those times. So write down your question as you get them and I think they’ll tell you tomorrow how to filter them our way.

A Sweet and Bitter Providence

I think it was 12 years ago now that I preached on the book of Ruth to my church, and a few of the people in this room perhaps heard those messages. I entitled the first message A Sweet and Bitter Providence. You remember the story.

There comes a famine on the land of Judea and Naomi and her husband Elimelech are forced to leave the land and go to Moab. In Moab, Elimelech dies. She has two sons, who perhaps to her dismay, marry foreign wives and then they die. Then, after a long season, Naomi decides to return to Judea. One of her daughters-in-law, Orpah, decides not to go with her, and Ruth says, “Where you go, I will go. Where you’re buried, I’ll be buried, and your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16–17). So they go back, and when they get to Bethlehem, the women see her coming and they say, “Is this Naomi?” Now, you know that Naomi means “pleasant”. They say, “Is this Naomi?” and here’s what she answers:

Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me (Ruth 1:20).

There was no doubt in Naomi’s mind that God was almighty and that he had dealt bitterly with her. The famine was of God, the death of Elimelech was of God, the death of Mahlon and Chilion was of God, and the abandonment of Orpah was of God. She’s right. The Almighty had dealt very bitterly with her and she came back. At the end of that first chapter in this beautiful book, there’s this ray of hope in the sentence, “I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty . . . the Lord has afflicted me” (Ruth 1:21). And then it says, “And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest” (Ruth 1:22).

Now, the barley harvest is where Boaz was, you remember. That was his field. When Ruth goes down to the field, Boaz sees her and falls in love with her. Boaz is willing to forsake his name and give his seed for Ruth and Naomi, and these great words are at the end of the book: “And the Lord gave her conception” (Ruth 4:13). Then the women say:

Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age . . . (Ruth 4:14–15).

And so the book has a happy ending under the providence of God. There is a sweet and bitter providence. She was right, the Almighty dealt bitterly with her and the Almighty dealt sweetly with her. That’s the story of the book. It’s also the story of the book of Esther. It’s also the story of the book of Job. It’s also the story of the book of Joseph in Genesis 37–50. It’s also the story of Jesus Christ, dead and risen. It’s the story of redemptive history, a sweet and bitter providence, and all of you are in the one or the other right now. Some of you are in both simultaneously, and before you die, it will probably be more bitter than it has been and also more sweet. That’s just the way life is.

His Purposes Will Ripen Fast

Now, during that series of messages on Ruth in 1984, there was a family that was walking through some very deep waters. Somebody in my church is always walking through very deep waters because it’s a church about this size. There’s always somebody in tragedy, which parenthetically makes me love God and marvel at God because when the Bible says, “Weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15), it doesn’t say how to do that simultaneously, which is always necessary in the local church. There are always people, there are some here tonight, who are so happy they’re busting, and there’s some here who can barely keep the tears back at what’s going on at home. And I’m supposed to rejoice with you and weep with you right now in this pulpit, and I can’t, but God can.

That is a miracle that nobody can explain, that Almighty God can receive about 10 million prayers tonight of people who are happy and 10, or 20, or 30 million prayers of people with broken hearts and he can be a high priest, sympathetic, able to sympathize with both of them simultaneously. If you can handle that, you can handle any problem in theology. God’s mind is inscrutably great and it is wonderfully comforting to a pastor who has to face those kinds of people every Sunday and preach not himself, but God.

Well, this family was walking through the dark, and when I was done, the mother rang my doorbell one afternoon — this doesn’t usually happen — and she asked if she could come in. She took out of a bag a very large cross stitch, which now hangs over the mantle in my living room. It had William Cowper’s hymn on it, which had become the theme song of our series on Ruth.

God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. He plants His footsteps on the sea, And rides upon the storm.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; The clouds you so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour. The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower.

Deep in unfathomable mines Of never-failing skill, He treasures up his bright designs, And works his sovereign will.

Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.

That hangs over my mantle, cross stitched by hand out of tragedy, and it bears witness to me day in and day out that there is a sweet providence coming for every bitter experience for those who trust the living God.

That was 12 years ago, and I have tried to devote my life as faithfully as God would enable me to help my people know God, love God, and trust God, who is absolutely sovereign, absolutely wise, and is pursuing them. How I wish the last verse of Psalm 23 were translated accurately. It’s not in any version. Every version has chosen to preserve the King James, which says, “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” The Hebrew verb radaph means “pursue”. It always means “pursue”. It never means follow. All I can imagine is that it must be that in Elizabethan English “follow” meant “pursue”. It’s what a highway patrolman does when you break the speed limit and he turns on his red light and comes after you. That’s what goodness and mercy are doing to you tonight if you are a saint. I have so tried to labor to build a people that believe that in the midst of the most agonizing, bitter providences.

Defining Providence

In Grand Rapids, R.C. Sproul had the advantage of some audio-visual aids. Up here, he plastered the definition of providence from the Heidelberg Catechism, which cannot be improved upon, I don’t think. It goes like this. And I want you to know that I believe this with all my heart:

God so governs all things, that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, all things come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.

When Noël and I were married in 1968, I asked my dad to read this text from Habakkuk 3:17–18:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
     nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
     and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
     and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
     I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

Why? Because Psalm 63:3 says that the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life. That’s what I aim at in my preaching. I want to so cultivate faith that when the death of your most precious, or yourself, is imminent, as it is for one of the young mothers in our church right now, you don’t say, “He can’t love me,” but rather, “His love is better than her, and his love is better than my life with my children.” That’s the kind of people I want so badly to be the instrument of begetting.

Facing Bitter Providences

Some of you have heard this message on tape, so you’ve asked me about the people I referred to last September. Let me tell you the rest of you. Preparing for this talk was not easy in that it was like a pounding last year at our church of one baby born with only one ventricle, the next baby born with a 10th of his brain, the next baby born with the liver on the outside of the stomach, and the next baby born with no eyes, totally blind. How does the church handle that in one summer? Tom Steller, my associate, went to see this little blind baby named Paul. In the hospital, he read these words to the parents. I was on vacation down in Georgia and that was happening in Minneapolis, and I was communicating with the dad by email trying to encourage him.

Tom read John 9:2–3:

And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Tom believes in the sovereignty of God. It was a bitter providence. Here’s the story of these four babies. The baby born with the liver outside, I buried three days later. It died a day later than when I preached. The baby born with 10 percent of his brain now has 40 percent of his brain and the doctors can’t explain it, and he’s acting almost normally. The baby with one ventricle has had two surgeries and is very healthy. There was a big churchwide party for him about three weeks ago. The blind baby had surgery two weeks ago to put in artificial eyeballs so that the skull would not contract, and this family is really struggling. I don’t want to make a spectacle out of them here, so I won’t give you any details except to say that we go through seasons when we face bitter providences, seasons of great strength and seasons of great darkness. Don’t judge anybody in the season of darkness. Give them some space, okay?

To have your whole life turned on its head with a totally blind baby is a weight that is worse than death. I’ve watched the couple who lost their baby. They’re recovering, they’re at church, they’re praying. Did Tom Steller give this family a false hope by reading that text? Because the glory of God was manifest in the healing of that man. That man who’d been blind from birth ended up seeing. So the point seems to be this man was born blind in the providence of God for the sake of the glory of God’s healing power. Now, is that misleading?

You don’t just pluck verses out that you like and skip what comes next. And my associate Tom Steller is a very bright and faithful biblical theologian and he knew what he was doing. It was not misleading because in John’s theology, the Gospel of John, at the end of the book, there’s another story about how God’s providence aims to be glorified in a bitter providence. And it’s very different from healing. It goes like this. This is John 21:18. Jesus says to Peter:

Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.

Then John comments:

This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God (John 21:19).

This is not rescue and not healing, but torture. He’s going to be crucified. That’s what “stretch forth your hands” means. Tradition has it that Peter said, “Please do it upside down lest I look too much like my Lord.” He would have been screaming with pain. It’s the kind of thing that when you see it happen, you scream until your throat is raw with, “Where are you, God?” Regarding that, John says, “By what death he would glorify God.”

Therefore, the point of John 9, where it says that neither this man nor his parents sinned that he was born blind, but that the works, the providence, the glory of God might be glorified doesn’t mean he had to be healed. It means that one way or the other, God’s purpose is that his glory, his worth, his perfections be shown to be absolutely sufficient for this situation, healed or dead. John 21 and John 9 are two ways of glorifying God.

The Purpose of God in All Acts of Providence

Now, the point of my message tonight is that the purpose of God in all of his providences is the revelation of his glory. The purpose of God in every sweet and bitter providence is to reveal some aspect of his perfections that would cause us to more intensely delight in him and honor him.

It’s a great mystery in one sense why God would create the world. R.C. Sproul is good at posing questions about the mystery of God. I mean, I hope you heard that question in the first hour. He said, “Do you believe that God knows all possible contingencies? Do you believe that when Jesus said, ‘If these signs had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented’ (Matthew 11:21)?”

He knows the ‘would-haves’ of every city situation, and there are infinite numbers of them. And each one is followed by another infinite spinoff, and each one of those has another infinite spinoff of what would have been, and God handles that without any hard disc drive at all. Well, here’s another question, why did he create the world? He was, from all eternity without beginning and without development, infinitely happy in the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. The Father is begetting a son eternally and enjoying his Son’s reverberation back to him of the full panorama of all of his perfections, and the Holy Spirit is the personal divine energy of love standing forth in his own right in this fellowship.

Nothing else needed to make this complete, so what moves this great, eternally happy God to create the world? If you have children, you will be asked that question. Barnabas, my 13-year-old, has asked it before, and with his eyes shut, shaking his head the night before last, he asked it again. He said, “Daddy, how could God not begin?” I just said, “That’s what it means to be God.” And he’s still shaking his head, and I’m glad he’s shaking his head, because if he had that one in his back pocket, I’d worry.

An Overflowing Fountain

Jonathan Edwards, the most significant dead teacher in my life, helped me tremendously because he said, “It is no sign of a fountain’s deficiency that it is prone to overflow.” The fact that God created the world is no evidence of need. It’s no evidence of a defect. It’s no evidence of a deficiency. It is evidence of self-replenishing fullness that in some inscrutable way he has within himself an impulse to manifest his glory — and then I will add tomorrow — for the enjoyment of his people. Therefore, all the acts of God’s providence in creation and the history of redemption are intended to magnify, to display, to highlight, to put on display the panorama of the perfections of God.

Creation is a PR effort. It’s a going public with all that God is in himself. The heavens are declaring what? The glory of God. The heavens are telling the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). That’s why they exist, which is why, by the way, there can be nothing but superficiality where God is not reckoned with. We have such an incredible respect in America for science, and science minus God’s being and purpose is superficial. It doesn’t really matter whether you can get to the moon or split the atom or make a bomb or have missiles that can land on a dime. All of that is very superficial because superficial means you deal with something apart from its main point.

If you deal with things always separate from their main point, you are superficial. And the main point is the atom is declaring the glory of God. If you miss that, you miss the main thing and everything else you say is superficial. It’s just dealing at the thin, little level of discernment and the massive meaning of it all is just missed. God, I believe, created and performs all acts of providence in order to display his glory, the beauty of his manifold perfections.

Do All to the Glory of God

Now, when I was growing up in the home of Bill and Ruth Piper, my dad spoke of the glory of God often and prayed deeply and profoundly in my hearing about the name of God being glorified in the world. And I knew 1 Corinthians 10:31, which says:

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

So I knew that my duty was to glorify God. I had one of those experiences that turned me 180 degrees when I learned from Jonathan Edwards that not only do I exist to glorify God, but God exists to glorify God. I had somehow missed that in my father’s prayers and in the preaching in my church. I’m sure it was there, but I missed that God is God-centered, that the thing most dear and precious to God is God, that what drives God in all of his acts of providence is the highlighting of God. I had somehow missed that. But in 1972 and 1973, sitting in a pantry, which I had turned into a study in Munich, Germany, I read this. I brought it along just so you’d see it. There it is. It’s only 33 pages in this. This is The Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World by Jonathan Edwards.

This is a mind-blowing work. It stood me on my head because I had never seen the Bible through glasses like this. The first half of the book is philosophical, and the second half of the book is all biblical texts, dozens and hundreds of them, to show one simple thing: the end for which God created the world is the glory of God; that it be known, that it be understood, seen, savored, praised, and delighted in. Let me just give you a few texts that Edwards gave me to show you that the whole range of God’s providence is for the glory of God.

Creation, Election, and Salvation

God creates all things for his glory. Isaiah 43:6–7 says:

Bring my sons from afar
     and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name,
     whom I created for my glory . . .

God elects from before the foundation of the world for his glory. Jeremiah 13:11 says:

I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory . . .

He saved his people from Egypt for his name’s sake. Psalm 106:7–8 says:

Our fathers . . . rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.
Yet he saved them for his name’s sake,
     that he might make known his mighty power.

He restrains his anger again and again and again for his own name’s sake. Isaiah 48:9–11 says:

For my name’s sake I defer my anger;
     for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you . . .
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.

That passage has hammer blow after hammer blow of “for my name’s sake”, and I was reading just one after the other hundreds of these texts.

Incarnation, Forgiveness, and Support

Christ comes into the world for the glory of God. Romans 15:8–9 says:

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.

He forgives us for his sake. He forgives you for his sake. Psalm 25:11 says:

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

Or Psalm 79:9 says:

Help us, O God of our salvation,
     for the glory of your name;
deliver us, and atone for our sins,
     for your name’s sake!

He works to strengthen you for his name’s sake. Isaiah 60:21 says:

[You are] the branch of my planting, the work of my hands,
    that I might be glorified.

Or Psalm 23:3 says:

He leads me in paths of righteousness
    for his name’s sake.

The Second Coming

The final one I’ll refer to is 2 Thessalonians 1:9–10. Why is Jesus coming back a second time? Here’s the answer Paul gives:

[Those who do not obey the gospel] 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 . . .

Jesus is coming back to be marveled at. That’s why he’s coming, to get glory for himself, to receive praise and honor and worship that he might be highlighted in the universe. All things are from him, through him, and to him. It began with God, it will end with God, and it is happening by his providence through God. All is for the glory of God.

In other words, God is over-flowingly, unashamedly enthusiastic about his own glory. He devotes all of his energies to making his glory known. He’s leading redemptive history. He’s bringing it to consummation. Every work of providence has this as its ultimate goal, that he be seen, that he be known, that he be savored, that he be sung, that he be delighted in, treasured, trusted, and hoped in as the all-sufficient, all-satisfying object of value in the universe. That’s the goal of providence.

So when he commands me, “Let your light so shine that men may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father” (Matthew 5:16), he’s simply telling me to join him in what he has done and continues to do throughout history, to put his own glory on display.

Finding Harmony in the Love and Glory of God

Now, as I came to see this and began to work it through in my own on mind and in Scripture, the question that has shed more light to keep me biblically balanced and biblically in tune, I believe, is to pose the question, if God does that, how can he be loving? That’s the question that presses itself to open this up in its fuller dimensions. Paul said, “Love seeks not its own” (1 Corinthians 13:5). And I say that God, in everything he does, seeks his own glory, ergo, he does not love you. But what do you do with that argument? Here’s the approach that I have found to be most helpful. When you ask that question, you have to ask, how does God love? What would love do? How would love help me?

There are two answers to that, or the answer comes in two stages. First, the greatest love gives to the beloved what is best. I don’t think we’d have any naysayers on that. It gives the best for them. The greatest love gives to the beloved what is best for them. Now, that means for God to love you he must give you God — not a new car, not health, not a spouse, not a family, not a long life, and not gold streets in heaven, but God. If he gives you anything less than God, he is not as loving as he could be toward you. If I were to say, “I love you, and the evidence of it is that I commend John Piper for your contemplation,” I would not be loving.

And it’s for this very simple reason. There is something better than John Piper, namely God, and I’m concealing that from you; therefore, I’m not loving you. But when God is posed with this huge issue of how to love, and he is giving the answer, “I must do for them what is best for them,” and casts about reality for the best, he has no choice but to give God. So he and I are in very different realms here. First Corinthians 13:5 was written to tell me how to love, not God. When it says, “Love seeks not its own,” he’s talking to created beings. God is in a class by himself, and when he comes to love me and says, “I will give them what is best,” he chooses nothing less than himself because he’s loving. That’s the first step in the answer.

Enabled to Enjoy God

Here’s the second step. If he’s to be really loving, fully loving, then he can’t just stop by giving me the gift of himself and then sort of stand back and with a kind of “we’ll see what they’ll make of this gift” and a manifestation of indifference towards whether I come to be fully satisfied in that gift. If he really loves me, he can’t stand back like that. He can’t be indifferent to whether I praise him or delight in him or trust him. To be fully loving toward me he must engage his energy on my behalf to see to it that I not only receive him, but that I am satisfied in him, delight in him, and trust in him.

Now, we’re getting very close to the question of how God can be loving and pursue his own glory in all that he does. The Bible relentlessly appeals to me to rejoice in God, to serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2), to delight myself in the Lord (Psalm 37:4), to enjoy him, to savor him, to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8), and to drink from the river of his delights (Psalm 36:8). Isaiah 55:1–2 says:

Come, everyone who thirsts,
     come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
     come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
     without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
     and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

The Bible is unabashedly hedonistic in demanding that you find your satisfaction in God and that you come to him to get and not give, lest you turn him into a weak beneficiary of your benefaction. God will be the treasure in your life, manifest in your satisfaction.

Joy in God Is Essential

Now, we are right at the brink of the solution. Has God, in relentlessly pursuing your satisfaction in the gift of himself to you, now become man-centered? Has he forgotten his God-centeredness? Has he forgotten that he will be glorified, that he will be displayed for the perfection that he is in all that he does? And has he now begun to orient all of his life and energies to make you the center of the universe?

It could easily sound like that, but that’s not the case. There’s a very simple reason from your human experience why that’s not the case, and it’s found in the sentence that lies closest to my theology. Many of you have read it and heard it, namely, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. That’s the one sentence that you should take away from tonight, probably. God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. And every one of you, when you stop to think about it, knows that’s the case.

I wrote a poem for my wife a few weeks ago. She turned 48 and I’m 50, and we just adopted a little baby.

I’m a 50-year-old daddy. You have to believe in the sovereignty of God when you do that. And I test all of my theology first in the crucible of my marriage and in my fatherhood over four sons and one daughter to see if the center holds at home. So I wrote a little poem about the providence of God because I was thinking about providence.

Of all the little girls God made and destined for his heaven, There was a special grace displayed in 1947. Of all the cities on the Earth and all their thousand names, A little was given birth in Norfolk on the James.

Of all the couples on the coast that changed to ma and pa, This little girl became the boast of George and Pamela. Of all the places they could go and raise her at their will, They chose a place for her to grow called Brightwood on a hill.

Of all the colleges to choose where truth is spoken forth, She chose to meditate and muse at Wheaton in the north. Of all the people she could meet and marry, all or none, A happy providence and sweet that I should be the one.

And now at 48, my belle, we’ve done this 30 times. I thank God for your life, Noël, and say it with my rhymes.

Duty and Delight

Now, suppose I come to Noël this December on our 28th anniversary — the 30 takes into account that I began writing her poems two years before we got married, lest you think my arithmetic is off — and I ring the doorbell and she comes to the door and opens it, looks at me funny because I don’t usually ring the doorbell, and I pull out the roses and say, “Happy anniversary, Noël.” And she says, “Oh, they’re beautiful, Johnny. Why did you?” And I say, “It’s my duty.” That’s the wrong answer. It’s theologically wrong and it’s psychologically wrong.

Let’s replay the tape and I’ll give you the right answer. Ding dong. I say, “Happy anniversary, Noël.” She says, “Oh Johnny, they’re beautiful. Why did you?” And I say, “I couldn’t help myself. I love to buy gifts for you. Why don’t you go change clothes because I’ve arranged for a babysitter and we’re going out tonight because there’s nobody I’d rather spend this night with than you.” Now, why doesn’t she say to me at that point, “You are the most selfish husband. All you ever think about is what makes you happy”? You’re getting it. This is very profound. The reason you laughed when I said “it’s my duty” is that you know intuitively that dutiful worship does not glorify the object of worship as much as delight in the object. You know that.

When you try to articulate it, you scare yourself because you sound like a hedonist. Most of you don’t have the courage to call yourself a hedonist yet. You know intuitively that she is more honored when I say, “You and your fellowship tonight will make me happier than anything else I could do.” Never in a million years would she say, “Why don’t you get down to business and get real and do things for duty sake and not for delight. Why are you always pursuing your own happiness in our relationship?” Never in a thousand years would she say that because she knows, and you know, that when I talk like that — that is, when she becomes the object, the focus, the center of my satisfaction — she is mightily glorified.

Implications of Pursuing Joy in God

God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. You know that. The implications of that are absolutely staggering. I’ve been spending the last 25 years trying to work them out in all that I have preached and written. God has not abandoned his God-centeredness in lovingly pursuing my praise of his glory and my satisfaction in him. He is as God-centered as he ever was. This is my conclusion. The mystery of the gospel is that God has found a way for him to be glorified and me to be satisfied in one act of faith. We will talk about faith tomorrow morning, but let’s go right to the cross and end there where we ought to end.

At the cross, according to Romans 3:25–26, two things happened in one. This is the gospel, brothers and sisters. God put it forward his Son, Jesus Christ, by his blood as a propitiation through faith that he might demonstrate his righteousness because he had passed over sins that had trampled his glory in the dirt. And you can’t pass over sins and be a holy God. You can’t pass over sins and be a righteous judge. Therefore, there had to be an exaltation of the glory of God’s righteousness in the universe, and it cost him his Son to say, “I hate sin. I hate it when my name is dragged through the dirt. This is how much I hate it and will never sweep it under the rug of the universe.”

The other thing that was happening alongside and in the vindication of the glory of the righteousness of God is the justification of sinners. Do you get it? He exalted his righteousness and he exalted me out of the slime of corruption and sin and guilt and judgment and curse and hell. It was all in one — his glorification, my joy. There are only two problems in the universe. Man is perishing and God is profaned, and salvation in one act reverses both. God is magnified in his holiness and his glory, and in his Son, and man no longer perishes but has infinite pleasure at the right hand of God.

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

So the question for tomorrow morning becomes, practically then, how do you respond to this? What are you going to do with this tonight? Are you going to play the dutiful servant and go out work hard for God? Or are you going to join God in his purpose for your life, namely, to bring you so radically transformed into a satisfaction with his infinitely valuable glory that everything in your life changes? That’s what we will talk about tomorrow.