Before I pray, let me share with you something that I shared with a little prayer group that we have in the morning that got me all stoked about being in the Bible as much as we’re going to be in it tonight.

Joy at the Center of Reality

Most of you probably know that Psalm 19 has two halves. Psalm 19:1–6 is about God’s communicating through his world. It says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” And the second half (Psalm 19:7–14) is God’s communicating through his word. It says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.” So the second half is all about Scripture and the first half is all about creation. What I had not noticed before, which sets us up for the theme of this seminar, is that when David begins to wax poetic about how to feel when you watch the sunrise and go across the sky and then set, he says this, “In them, God has set a tent for the sun” (Psalm 19:4). In the firmament he’s set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man he runs his course with joy.

So he wants us to look up at the sky and know that God’s glory is being declared, and the way we should perceive and feel about it is like a bridegroom coming out to meet his bride. It’s like a strong man running his race with joy. It’s like Eric Liddell with his head cocked back, saying, “I feel God’s pleasure when I run.” Isn’t that amazing? The heavens are telling the glory of God for our joy like a runner. A strong man runs his course with joy. When you see the sun, feel joy in God.

Then when you turn from the world to the word, it says:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
     reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
     making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
     rejoicing the heart . . . (Psalm 19:7–8).

The Bible is written to make your heart glad. And then he gets metaphoric. It’s like finding gold, much fine gold. It’s like eating honey and drippings from the honeycomb (Psalm 19:10). So he uses lavish language for the communication of joy through the world and lavish language for communication of joy through the word, all to say joy is very close to the center of reality. In fact, I think what you’re going to see in this seminar is, unless you’ve thought about it a lot before, you’ve never dreamed how central joy is to the essence of reality. I mean the essence of ultimate reality, that is, the essence of God. God is love, the Bible says, and when you think that through to the bottom, it includes God is joy.

The Pleasures of God

The title of this seminar is “The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight In Being God”. I can’t help but run forward too much farther. I just have to know a few things about you. I was told by David that we got people from all over the world here. First of all, let’s have a wave of hands of how many do not attend Bethlehem regularly. Raise your hand. Okay, that’s wonderful. We’re so glad you’re here. And how many are from out of state, out of Minnesota? Okay, that’s amazing. How many are from outside the United States? Okay, we have a bunch of Canadians, but we have some people from Italy and from some countries in Africa, I’m told anyway. So thank you. No matter how close you are — you might live down the street — or how far you’ve come from around the world, I’m really honored that you’re here.

Let’s talk about The Pleasures of God was born. The book that Tony just held up by Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man written in 1677 was the place that this seminar, this book, The Pleasure of God, was born. Scougal was 27 years old when he wrote the book. He was at the University of Aberdeen when he was 15. At 19 he was appointed instructor in philosophy. He taught there for four years. He left for a year in Auchterless and was called back to King’s College, Aberdeen, to teach divinity. He died of tuberculosis in 1678, not yet 28 years old. Now pause. He was 27 years old and he’s dead and he’s shaping my life 300 years later. That’s worth thinking about.

One of the dark strains in the melody of God’s providence is that the likes of Henry Scougal at 27; David Brainerd at 29, missionary to Indians in America; Henry Martin at 31, missionary to the Persians; Robert Murray M’Cheyne, pastor in Scotland at age 29, should all of them die at such early early age. Why? We often think of bad reasons. Here’s a good one (Isaiah 57:1–2):

The righteous man perishes,
     and no one lays it to heart;
devout men are taken away,
     while no one understands.
For the righteous man is taken away from calamity;
     he enters into peace;
they rest in their beds
     who walk in their uprightness.

You never know what God is sparing people when they die. It’s because people are so worldly that they think death is the worst thing that could happen. It’s not. It makes me wonder, in fact, about little babies. We have a couple little babies on the brink of eternity in our church right now. What about them? What should we think about that? This is not the whole answer to why righteous people die. It is an answer, and we need answers.

All these who died so young did more for God’s kingdom in their short lives than most others have done with their three score and ten. Note God’s ways. With his unusual blessing, we can do more in five minutes than we can in five years without him. I read that again preparing for this, I thought, “Oh, I wish you would feel that, believe that, embrace that, and regularly ask God for those five minutes.”

God’s Unusual Blessing

I’ve been preaching and leading in this church for 32 years now, and I could tell you story after story where I hit the wall in terms of planning or in terms of figuring out a problem or a relationship or a sermon and hit it and hit it and hit it. And suddenly you go to your prayer bench, you bend down and cry out to the Lord in desperation, and within seconds the whole solution is before you. God is just God. He doesn’t have to give it to you at any time at all. He may withhold it for months. He may withhold it for five hours on a Friday morning when you have to preach Saturday night and give it to you in five minutes Friday afternoon. You just don’t know.

So we just shouldn’t think the way the world thinks when it comes to long lives or short lives or hard lives or easy lives. God’s ways are not our ways. So beyond all Scougal’s expectation, he wrote this and he didn’t write it for publication. He wrote it as a letter to a friend in a spiritual need. And the friend began to circulate it privately until Gilbert Burnett published it. And for 300 years it has been reprinted at the request of God’s hungry people. If Tony’s right that it’s out of print, I promise you it will not be for long. I’ll see to that. If nobody else is going to publish it, Desiring God will publish it. That book should not be out of print. For 300 years it has been feeding God’s people.

The Excellency of Divine Love

Now here’s the passage, page 68 of the Christian Focus Edition. Heads up Christian Focus, if you’re watching, keep it in print. We’ll put it back in print. There’s a section called Excellency of Divine Love. One sentence riveted my attention, took hold of me in 1987 and became the center of my meditation for three months and produced the book The Pleasures of God. Now before I read the sentence, which is right there, let me just say that again. Sentences change lives, not books. You can’t ever remember what was in a book. Just a sentence, or two, or three. Sentences change lives.

I’ve got a handful of them in my life that have been absolute determinative breakthroughs, like Augustine’s sentence: “He loves thee too little who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake.” That’s one of the most important senses I’ve ever read outside the Bible. Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” That’s a life-changing sentence. And on and on. You don’t remember books. You remember little pieces of books. And here was a little piece. He said, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.” In the context, he meant a human soul. So I ask if this is true for man, may it not also be true for God? That the worth and excellency of God’s soul would be determined, measured, by what he loves, the object of his love?

Objection: God is not a soul/body combination the way we are. So should you even pose that question, the worth and excellency of a soul? One of the great things about growing up in a Bible saturated home is that you always think of Bible verses to contradict what people say. God says:

I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul (Jeremiah 32:41).

Now, it doesn’t matter to me that that’s metaphorical language. God doesn’t have a lub-dub beating heart and doesn’t have a soul in distinction to a body. But the inspired writer was willing to have God talk about his heart and his soul and doing something with all of it. And that’s all I’m talking about, whatever that is. Whatever that is, I want to know is it beautiful, excellent, and glorious because of what it loves? It’s the same question that Scougal asks about the human soul. You might ask, “What other questions might you ask to determine the excellency and beauty of a soul? By what it thinks?” It’s like, “Okay, let’s not ask about what it loves but what God thinks or what humans think.”

Here’s the problem, the clear and accurate thought in your head or mine or God’s is beautiful only in the service of right affections. The devil is quite able intellectually, but he loves all the wrong things and therefore his thinking serves evil and his soul is squalid. How about by what the mind or heart wills? Does that determine what the excellency of the heart is? Yes, but there is half-hearted willing and wholehearted willing. You don’t judge the glory of a soul by what it wills to do with lukewarm interest or with mere teeth-gritting determination. Your true quality is not perceived and displayed most clearly in what you gut out by the dent of willpower. No, no, no, no. That’s not the way you determine the excellency of a soul, not by what it wills. You need to know its passions. Not what we dutifully will, but what we passionately want is reveals the excellency or evil of our souls.

Well-Placed Love

So is that what Scougal meant, passion, when he said love, the object of its love? The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love. I’m saying that means the object of its passion, the object of its delight, the object of what it treasures. Is that what he meant? I don’t want to misuse him. The answer is yes because here’s what he says. And keep in mind he’s talking about man’s soul:

The love of God (the love for God he means) is a delightful and affectionate sense of divine perfections, which make the soul resign and sacrifice itself wholly to him, desiring above all things to please him and delighting in nothing so much as in fellowship and communion with him and being ready to do or suffer anything for his sake.

So he does argue the love he has in mind here, the loving your heart for excellent things is desiring them and delighting in them. Therefore, when love is well placed, the soul’s pleasures are unsurpassed. He says:

The most ravishing pleasures, the most solid and substantial delights that human nature is capable of are those which arise from the endearments of a well placed and successful affection.

So when he’s talking about the love that’s flowing out of the human soul, he doesn’t mean the kind of compassion that you have for the totally undeserving. That’s just not the point here at all. The point here is love flowing towards the lovely. What do you delight in? What do you pursue? What do you long for because of its excellence and its beauty? That’s what he’s talking about. He says:

When the substantial delights of a well-placed affection are unsurpassed, its excellency is revealed. For the excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.

So I would say that’s clearly true for man. For him, the well-placed and successful affection is when that affection is in God and that is the excellency of man’s soul. I might linger over that last sentence for just a moment. The excellency of your soul — that is, the greatness and the beauty for which you were made — is to be satisfied in God. It’s to have a well-placed and successful affection for God. That’s amazing. You were made to be happy in God. I’m going to give you a lot of reasons that happiness is the purpose of creation, and that that’s no contradiction to the glory of God because God is most glorified in you when you’re most satisfied in him. It is amazing.

Our Passion for Joy

Now, I’m arguing this is also true of God, not just man. If we think of God’s love as his powerful, prevalent passion, the omnipotent energy of his approval and enjoyment and delight, then the pleasures of God are the measure of the excellency of his soul. If the parallel works, then when God has a well-placed, successful affection, the excellency of his soul is thus revealed. I don’t mean this is the only way to discern the excellency of God’s soul, but it is one.

Here’s maybe just another word about how the book came to be. Someone might say, “Why would you write a book on this, all these thoughts that got stirred up about this?” The reason in one sense is I’m always looking for fresh ways to know God. Because in knowing God, my joy is satisfied, and in knowing God, I’m conformed to God. If it’s true that I could know God better by knowing what he delights in, then let’s go at it. So when I ask here why might we want to focus on this, why it matters that God’s excellency consists in his well-placed pleasures, these are the two answers. The two great passions of our lives, to be deeply and lastingly happy and to glorify God — that is, to reflect and make much of his greatness and beauty — come to pass in seeing God’s glory in what he delights in. Let me try to show you that.

First of all, consider our passion for joy, our desire to be happy. If God is happy and if his happiness is in certain things, then seeing that happiness fully, like in 360 pages, will increase our happiness for these reasons. Matthew 25:23 says:

His master said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

Enter into the joy of your master. When you die, God won’t just give you happiness; he will give you his happiness. Isn’t that what that says? Enter into the joy of your master. So if he’s not happy, we’re finished. John 15:11 says:

These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full.

Have you ever worried that your capacities for happiness are not big enough to keep you happy forever? Therefore, “forever” is a pretty scary word because it sounds boring after about 30 years or 30,000 years. If the Lord said to me, “I’ll give you your greatest desire forever.” I’d say, “Oh, goodnight. Write a good book? Preach a great sermon?” That just won’t work for eternity, and what he’s telling us is it’s not our destiny. Your highest present capacity for happiness is not what you are destined for. It’s pretty puny. You need a new body to handle the Vesuvius of joy you’re going to have when you have the joy of God. If you had the joy of God in this body, it would blow to smithereens. You have to get a new body, new eyes, a new brain, and a new everything, with enough continuity so we know each other. Jesus prays:

I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them (John 17:26).

Wow, so get this, you say to Jesus when you get up in the morning, “I love you Jesus,” and as soon as you say it, you feel, “That’s wimpy,” I do. That’s all you’ve got for Jesus? Yeah, that’s all I’ve got. I give what I have. That’s wimpy. So if that’s wimpy, what are you going to do for all eternity? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, the love with which the Father loved the Son is going to be in me, and that is infinite, which is why it takes an eternity to do it. It gets better and better and better loving him more and more, seeing more and more. A finite mind cannot comprehend an infinite God except in an infinite length of time, which means it never ends because God is infinite. This stretches the capacity to understand, but it sure is good news given how wimpy I am in my affections for God.

Our Passion to Glorify God

That was our passion for joy is why I care about this issue and God’s being happy and my knowing about it. Now, here’s the second one: our passion to glorify God. That is seeing his excellency in his pleasures transforms us into reflectors. John Piper was born with an insatiable desire to be happy. I didn’t try to have it, didn’t try to have a sex desire, didn’t try to have hunger when I skip a meal, those are givens, and so is my desire to be happy and God put that there for a reason. However, I know that another thing should be in me: a passion for the glory of God, to make much of God, to display the worth and value of God.

Now, that’s told to me in the Bible. My mom and dad told me as soon as I could understand, “Johnny, whatever you do, whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God.” I don’t think a verse came out of my mother’s mouth more often than that verse, except maybe Proverbs 3:5–6, which says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don’t lean on your own understanding.” So, how does this issue and God’s joy help me with that quest? Scougal says:

He who loveth mean and sorted things doth thereby become base and vile, but a noble and well-placed affection, doth advance and improve the spirit unto a conformity with the perfections which it loves.

Now, I bet a bunch of you right now are thinking, “I know who’s writing books about that today.” Greg Beale wrote the book We Become What We Worship and that’s all this is saying. You become like what you worship. That is, you conform to the ugliness of what you crave or you conform to the beauty of what you crave.

Therefore, seeing the worth and excellency of God more clearly in the greatness and the focus of his pleasures will increasingly conform us to his likeness, and therefore glorify him and show him to be great and beautiful. And we all know, I hope, this glorious text right at the heart. I’m sure when we do our sanctification conference in a few weeks, this is going to be really on the agenda:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).

So, we become by beholding. That’s how God set it up. If you can see God’s glory most clearly, you’ll be most transformed and most changed by it. So, when I’m reading my Bible or thinking about what sermons to preach or books to write, I’m thinking, “Okay, that’s what it’s all about. Every book is about that. See God and know God more clearly to get people more changed into his likeness, so the radiance of his beauty shines more brightly in the world. That’s all the universe is for. It’s a really wonderful core to build your life around. We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things. We’re always looking for ways to stir up that passion which reflects the supremacy of God so well, and one of the ways is to behold what makes God happy, the pleasures of God. To give a few other texts, 1 John 3:2 says:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

That means that 2 Corinthians 3:18 is a process leading to a consummation at the coming of Jesus. So, from one degree of glory to the next we are beholding the glory of the Lord, and then we are being changed. And this says, when he appears we’re going to be in the twinkling of an eye changed dramatically. In other words, we’ll be totally done with sinning, and thus in all of our attitudes and actions and thinking we are reflective of his glory. I think I’m going to skip these because they just say the same thing.

The Order of God’s Affection

True knowledge of God’s glory causes the knower to reflect his glory, and this is our aim in meditating on the pleasures of God. So how are we going to approach this? We’ve talked about how the book was born. I’m going to talk next about an overarching statement of God’s happiness from a text. Then, we’ll talk about two kinds of pleasures God has, the pleasures he has in himself and his work and then in us and our response. We’ll get to the second part, Lord willing, in the second half of tomorrow’s lesson. And why does that order matter? It’s the order I’m talking about, God’s pleasure in himself and God’s pleasure in us. Why does that order matter?

Here’s what I say, if we reverse this order and put B, God’s pleasure in us before A, God’s pleasure in himself, the ground of God’s delight in us would be flimsy sentimentalism. Most people, and I fear many Christians have it reversed. They are willing to reckon with God’s greatness and God’s exaltation of himself if they start with his affirmation of them and his delight in them. And if he delights in me, I’m willing to delight in him. That’s biblically backward. The ground of God’s delight in us would be flimsy sentimentalism rather than a mile deep God-centeredness. So, for his glory and our firm and unshakeable joy, we put him and his delight in himself first.

A Statement on God’s Happiness

Let’s talk for a moment about an overarching statement of God’s happiness. I think we’ll work through this one and then we’ll take our break. This is not a very long section. It’s the overarching statement of God’s happiness. Where in the Bible do you find this said centrally? Here’s a key text. This is 1 Timothy 1:8–11:

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

Now, that phrase really captured me. I was thinking, “Is this worth a book? Can I press on this and go into this?” This really took me. So let’s take it apart. I’m going to go backwards. The gospel of the glory of the blessed God, Yahweh, the one who absolutely is, “I am who I am,” is the blessed God. It’s the word “happy,” which is the same word as in the beatitudes — “Blessed are the meek,” and, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It means profoundly satisfied and content. God is self-sufficient. He has no deficiencies, no needs. He’s full and without defects. So it goes, happiness means God is internally happy. It’s the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. It is a glorious thing to be God with no needs, so that all his acts outside himself are not intended to shore up weaknesses, but to display strengths and beauties for the enjoyment of all who will welcome him as their treasure.

God never acts out of need. He has no needs. He’s always overflowing. Regarding the word “gospel,” it is the “gospel” of the glory of the happy God. This is good news for weak and undeserving people. It means there is hope that God is for us, even though we do not deserve it. We don’t have anything to offer him. There’s no way we can negotiate with him or barter with him or increase his sufficiency. His happy, glorious deity proves to be the overflowing fountain of the grace we need, which is why it’s gospel. So if you ask, “What’s the bottom of the gospel?” Deep down into God’s heart it’s that God is God. That is God has no needs and therefore what he gives, he gives freely. He’s never saying, “Well, I need this and if you supply it, I’ll give you this.” There’s never any sense of such bartering in God. It is free or it’s non-existent. So, he gives us himself freely.

Therefore, let’s probe this happiness of God. What is the basis of God’s joy? The next thing we’re going to look at, after we take the break, is God’s pleasure in himself reflected in his Son.

Questions and Answers

I have four questions that have been handed to me here, and I’ll take those first I think, and then I was going to say in the introductory word about my sermon this weekend and see how many of you might be here for that or not before I do.

How does a Christian explain God as their all satisfying treasure to non-believers?

Well, one of the greatest things about Christian Hedonism is that I know for a fact that the deepest desire of my life, the deepest reality of my soul, is shared by everybody in the world, namely the desire to be happy. So, you have a common ground at the level of craving and desiring. The human heart is a desire factory and therefore you can stand together at that juncture of passion, longing, aching, and desire. And then the Bible says, “Always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), that is, for the joy that you expect to see consummated in God.”

Here’s one possibility, if I had known this question was coming, I would’ve brought my little pictures of the Grand Canyon and the Nature Valley granola bar advertisement with the man standing on the peak in a very vulnerable position. He is 1,000 feet up in the air with his arms stretched out and rope on one side and he’s just conquered the mountain and it makes your knees weak just to look at him, and this is advertising Nature Valley granola bars or trail mix or something. At the top it says, “Never felt more alive, never felt more insignificant.”

I would take that to work with my unbelieving coworker and I’d lay that down. I’d tear it out of “National Geographic,” which is where I got it, I’d lay it down on the table and I’d say, “That’s weird. Can you explain that? Does that make any sense to you? ‘Never felt more insignificant, never felt more alive’? Who’s writing stuff like that to sell granola bars? You’re appealing to people’s love of insignificance?” That’s just a great conversation starter because those people are not stupid at General Mills or whoever makes those things. They’re not stupid. There is something deep in every human soul that knows it was made not first to be great, but to see great, to stand on the top of a mountain feeling absolutely vulnerable and small with vast stretches of terrain in front of you and something in your soul just explodes with a sense of joy.

That’s all about God. Unbelievers don’t know that, but you can point them to it. That’s one way, and another would be to talk about how persons and personal qualities, not the rush of drugs or the ecstasy of sex, are really what deeply satisfies the soul. It’s having a friend who’s got character qualities that you just totally admire and to be with him is such an honor and a joy, and then you point through that to Christ and through that. You can talk about all the things about what really makes the soul happy. It’s amazing how much common ground there is with unbelievers.

If God knows or ordains that people will go to hell, how does that make him happy?

This is the hardest question. I knew it would come, so I’ll just say it and maybe I think we will tackle it way more fully tomorrow when we talk about God’s pleasure and all that he does. Let me give you a text to think about until tomorrow. This is Romans 9:22-23:

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory . . .

I wrote a whole book on that called The Justification of God, because this question is so tormenting and I needed to understand Romans 9. That’s still in print. You can get it and slog through it, though it’s really heavy going. But what this text says is that the revelation, the making known of God’s wrath is like this, “Desiring to show his wrath and make known his power . . .” So God desired to show his power and his wrath because that’s part of who he is. In other words, in the constellation of God’s characteristics, his attributes, one of them is holiness and justice and wrath. Therefore, he ordains a world in which people will justly deserve it.

Now, that’s probably beyond human comprehension because as soon as I say the word justly, you say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I just don’t see how that can be. He ordains a world in which people justly deserve his wrath?” But he intends to display it because the full revelation of his glory for the vessels of mercy is what makes him happy. So, here’s maybe one last thing and then we’ll tackle it in greater detail tomorrow. I believe that just like we can do this in some measure, God does it perfectly. He has two lenses. The narrow lens can look through like this and zero in on a pinpoint of suffering, in which case God can grieve and does grieve. God’s grief is not incompatible with his infinite happiness. He describes us as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. So if we can be sorrowful yet always rejoicing, somehow that can be true of God and then he can open his lens up and that dark, sad, grievous piece is now seen in a mosaic that he approves and delights in. There’s much more to be said. Meditate on those words in Romans 9:22–23 and we’ll talk more about that tomorrow, Lord willing.

If God has no needs, why did he create man?

That is a very profound question. Why did he create at all if he has no needs? Jonathan Edwards said, “It is no sign of the defect of a fountain that it is prone to overflow.” That’s my answer. It is no sign of the defect of a fountain that is so full that it is prone to overflow. In other words, creation is driven not by need — that is, deficiency — but by fullness. And this whole course is designed to answer that question about God creating the universe in order to put on display his being. I brought this along just in case it might fit somewhere. It fits here. I was listening to CS Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer while I was working out a couple of weeks ago and heard this. I said, “Whoa, stop. Write that down. Save it until I get home.” Here’s Lewis:

God will do nothing simply of himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because he is a giver and he has nothing to give but himself.

Now, each one of these sentences is jarring. I thought, “I’m not sure. I’m not sure, I’m not sure.” Lewis says, “He has nothing to give but himself.” And I thought, “Life, breath, and everything? Like the Bible says?” Lewis is not stupid. So what did he mean? And I think he meant when he was contemplating creation, he didn’t look around at all the nice things he could give people because they didn’t exist. There was just him. And if he contemplated, “I’m going to be a loving, gracious God in creating, I will create to give myself to people.” He keeps going. I’m trying to interpret Lewis here:

He has nothing to give but himself. And to give himself is to do his deeds, and on varying levels, to be himself through the things he has made.

Now that blew me away. So I wrote three pages thinking about this in my journal, trying to figure out what that meant. That sounds right to me. And it sounds dangerously right, like pantheism. Let me read it again:

To give himself is to do his deeds, and on varying levels, to be himself through the things that he has made.

There was nothing but God. God being a giver resolves, “I have myself. That’s all I have. I will now create matter, souls, and stuff that is non-God in order to be for them through that.” So when it says the heavens are telling the glory of God, we are to see that as radiant with God-likeness, God-ness. I was talking with Marshall on the way over here about this being one of the biggest challenges I think for us to get right. I challenge all of you younger thinkers to take it farther than I have. How to describe the rightness of enjoying non-God without being idolaters. That’s what Lewis is struggling with here. He gives himself, and in some sense is himself, through the things that he has made.

He didn’t have any needs. The question is, “If God has no needs, why did he create?” He created to be there for you so that you could enjoy him forever. What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.

How would you distinguish between the words “joy,” “pleasure,” and “happiness”? Are they synonymous?

Words are words. They’re just what you want them to mean. That’s what Alice in Wonderland said, and that was right. But convention limits what you can make. You can’t make yes mean no, unless you give me a clue that’s what you’re doing, otherwise we won’t communicate. I’ll hit you in the nose when you say, “Don’t hit me in the nose.” I’ll say, “Oh, I thought you meant do it.” And you don’t like that kind of misunderstanding, so you will give me a clue that when you say, “Hit me in the nose,” you mean, “Don’t hit me in the nose.” See, you’re not totally free to just do anything you want with language, but you could if you just had it set up a certain way, you could make yes mean no if you just agreed that that’s what you do. That’s all language is convention, okay? All that to say in my use of the words, yes, I basically use them interchangeably — joy, pleasure, and happiness. And I’ll tell you why because as far as I can tell, the Bible does.

So I just invite you to get your little computer programs chugging and do a word search on “pleasure,” do a word search on “happiness,” do a word search on joy, and you will not find them neatly divided into joy is deep and not related to circumstances, and happiness is light and superficial and related to circumstances, and pleasure is physical and has do with sex. Totally not true. None of those statements is true. And so I just think we need to, as we talk about those words in the context in which we talk about them, make sure that we make as clear as we can what we mean. So when I’m talking about God’s pleasures, I don’t mean he’s having an orgasm, although he did create that for something about himself. I won’t go there right now, maybe later.

Sustained by Books

How many of you are going to be hanging around to come to Bethlehem and hear the sermon this week? How many will not be able to do that? There’s no criticism at all. You just got to go because you’re from another church, for goodness sakes. We have folks who can’t come, which is good. You have to go where you got to go. There’s a part of tomorrow’s text. Tomorrow because I preach tomorrow night in 2 Timothy that has to do with what I wanted to say to start this session. I’m going to do so much introduction here, we won’t get through, but this is fun. I like to do this. In the middle of my text for tomorrow morning is this statement. This is Paul to young Timothy. Timothy is probably in Ephesus and Paul is in prison in Rome, halfway across the empire. He says:

When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments (2 Timothy 4:13).

I created two big sermon points out of that verse, and one has to do with the cloak and one has to do with the books. Is it not amazing? I’m going to say this, so sorry, I’m wrecking the surprise. Isn’t it amazing that the apostle Paul, who is an apostle, an inspired spokesman of the living God, the most prominent spiritual leader in Christianity in the world, and he’s dying. He just finished his first trial. It didn’t go well, and soon he will be put to death. He says, “I am being poured out. The time of my departure has come.” And he says in this text, “Jesus stood by him.” So he’s not just an apostle, not just inspired by God, not just on the brink of eternity, but Jesus is so real to him it’s as though he’s standing at his side and he writes to Timothy and says, “Bring my books.”

It’s books or scrolls and parchments, plural. It’s probably not just the Bible. It might be his own writings and notes. It might be other people’s books. I don’t know. What I know is you read books. He wanted to read something and think about it and do something with it and he’s almost dead, which means, among many things you could draw out, God has ordained that the most spiritually in-tune person with the living God there is should be nurtured and sustained by human agency like books, okay?

There’s so many people who think, “If you’ve got Jesus, if you’ve got the Holy Spirit, if he’s standing right there by you, if you’re an inspired spokesman for the living God, phooey on books.” Now, if it was me and my books, phooey would be okay. But the apostle Paul, a few months before he dies, wants books in prison? That’s worth thinking about. The lesson I was going to use to lead into this is that it’s not a bad thing to have a few human agents that you love. I’ve got Jonathan Edwards. I love him. I want to cry sometimes when I think about him. I’m going to meet him. I’m 66. I’ll meet him in what, 10, 15, or 20 years? My dad died at 86. I have no idea if I’ll live that long. I’m going to meet him. I’m going to thank him, really going to thank him.

I say that because the next section here about the pleasures of God himself reflected in the Eternal Son is about the Trinity. I was shown this by Edwards. Get his little book called Essay on the Trinity. So here we go. I’m just paying tribute to one of my patron saints and using the Bible to justify my bent. And I’m eager to preach that sermon tomorrow night. All right, back up.

God’s Majesty

The Father looks upon the Son and he’s always looked upon the Son with infinite delight and infinite joy. That’s the argument. My argument in this one, this section right here, is that God is a happy God in his essence because the Father and the Son are thrilled with each other, and that’s the Holy Spirit. That’s Jonathan Edwards talking. You need to see that in the Bible. Here we go. Here’s his majesty at the Mount of Transfiguration:

And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light . . . He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:2–5).

You should feel great force in that. John 3:35 says

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.

If God loves the Son, he has always loved the Son, and the energy of that love is infinite because it’s God’s. Colossians 1:13 says:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son (the son of his love) . . .

I love that phrase. “The son of his love” is the literal translation. We’re still on his majesty. Hebrews 1:3 says:

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature . . .

So now you see what God is loving as he loves his Son is the panorama of his own perfections standing forth in another person in the Trinity, okay? It’s his radiance — the glory of God and the exact imprint of the Father’s nature. So when the Father is loving the Son, he’s loving himself, standing forth in the person of the Son.

In the Form of God

Philippians 2:5–7 says:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

He had it, but he didn’t hold on to it. He was willing to lay aside its external manifestations and become a servant. So he’s equal with God and he has the form of God so that when the Father is loving the Son and delighting in the Son, he’s loving in his form and his equality. He’s the image of the invisible God. This is 2 Corinthians 4:4–6:

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God . . . For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

So it’s “the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.” Now compare 2 Corinthians 4:6, which says “the light” which corresponds to the other “light.” And it’s the light of the “knowledge,” which corresponds with “gospel.” And it’s “glory,” which corresponds with “glory of God.” Now here it was “glory of Christ” and in the third line there it’s “glory of God.” But there it was Christ who is the image of God and now it’s God in the face of Christ. So Christ comes in here. Now, the point of that is that the image of God is Christ in the gospel. When God loves Christ’s work on the cross in the gospel, he loves the display of his own image. It’s the working out of his own image.

Colossians 2:9 says:

In him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

Okay, so that’s majesty. All that to say, God says, “I love you, Son, I delight in you, Son, I’m well pleased with you, Son, because you are me. You are the fullness, the radiance, the exact image and imprint of myself.” So God has nothing greater to love than himself. If he is to love before the creation of the world, he must love himself. And the fact that he exists in a Trinitarian reality is why that is so plain.

God’s Meekness

Now consider his meekness. God not only loves Jesus’s majesty. John 10:17 says:

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.

The Father watches the Son do his obedient work. He loves it. He just loves it. He says, “Look at him. Look what he’s doing. Isaiah 42:1–3 says:

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
     my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
     he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
     or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
     and a faintly burning wick he will not quench . . .

If Tom or Patrick in the Shriner family is watching, just know we’re praying for you. Diane Shriner’s brain is bruised because of a bike accident earlier this week, and she’s in the hospital there in Louisville. And I wrote to Tom when he wrote and said, “Pray about the bruising of my wife’s brain so that she’ll recover the ability to speak and function.” And I wrote to him, “He will not break a bruised reed.” Now, I just thought of that and just wanted to speak into the camera mainly that somebody might tell Tom tonight that we are praying for him.

God is delighted with this. His soul delights in that. God is thrilled with his Son’s meekness. Romans 8:32 says:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give all things.

So God didn’t spare him. That is he gave him up to death. Jonathan Edwards describes the beauty of Christ as consisting most in the juxtaposition of diverse excellencies. I love this sermon. This is a sermon about the excellency of Christ. He says:

In the person of Christ meet infinite highness and infinite condescension, infinite justice and infinite grace, infinite glory and lowest humility.

It just occurs to me as I’m reading this that one answer to this first question — “How does a Christian explain God as their all-satisfying treasure?” — is to take this quote right here and sit down with a friend and say, “Can I just read you something from a 350-year-old preacher? It sounds a little weird.” And when you read this and you say, “Does that ring true to you that when you meet somebody, they’re not all one thing? You meet a woman and she’s not all coquettish, but there’s these strong character traits to her, and yet she’s feminine and strong? Does that appeal to you more than just weak and just strong?”

The Beauty of Christ’s Diverse Excellencies

You just go down the list of how that’s the way it is in life. We like people that are complex, that are not simple. They bring together traits that you don’t expect to be brought together there. We think, “Whoa, you’re unusual.” Jesus is really unusual and they just might be motivated to read the Gospels. You’re reading this to them:

[Christ has] infinite glory and lowest humility . . . infinite majesty and transcendent meekness . . .deepest reverence towards God and equality with God . . . infinite worthiness of good and greatest patience under sufferings of evil . . . an exceeding spirit of obedience with supreme dominion over heaven and earth . . . absolute sovereignty and perfect resignation . . . aelf-sufficiency and entire trust and reliance.

I’m a Christian because of this. Meaning, if you push on me, why do you believe? We can show you problems. Why do you believe? My answer is when I read the Gospels, this Jesus is compelling to me. He’s way more compelling than you are. I don’t know anybody that’s more compelling than Jesus. If I was talking to you, I’d say, “You’re not compelling. Jesus is compelling.” The portrait of Jesus is so compelling. I don’t think it could have been created by human ingenuity. That’s why I’m a Christian. This is so beautiful to me. This person is so beautiful with these inexplicable paradoxes in his life that I would stake my life on him. So that’s Edwards talking. He says:

Thus, God loves the son, that is, delights in the Son with infinite joy because the sun is the perfect representation of the divine radiance.”

The Blessed Trinity

Here’s the trinity. So this is what you’d get if you read that little 30 page essay. Edwards says:

I suppose to be the blessed Trinity that we read of in Holy Scriptures. The Father is the deity subsisting in the prime unoriginated most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence.

That’s the Father, the most absolute direct, unoriginated existence. He continues:

The Son is the deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of himself and subsisting in that idea.

So from eternity, the direct existence of God has had an idea of himself and that idea is so full of himself that he subsists in that idea as a person. Now, of Holy Spirit he says:

The Holy Ghost is the deity subsisting in act or divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God’s infinite love to and delight in himself.

So he;s not the idea, but love and delight. He continues:

I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine idea (the Son) and divine love (the Holy Spirit), and that each of them are properly distinct persons.

This is not heresy. It’d be easy to make it heresy: “Oh, the Son’s just an idea. Oh, the Spirit is just a feeling.” No, when God has a feeling between the Father and the Son, it stands forth with so much, carries so much of the fullness of the persons themselves, it stands forth as a third person. We say it whether we understand it or not because that’s what the Bible presents to us. The Spirit is a person, the Son is a person, and the Father is a person, and yet they are one.

I’ve never read anything more helpful to me in imperfectly, humanly conceptualizing the mystery of the Trinity and what it unlocks in the nature of human beings, why and how he created the world, and the fact that pleasure and truth are at the core of reality because they are at the core of the deity. God knows truly and he loves duly, and he has from all eternity. Now you being made in his image have two great quests in life: know him truly, love him duly. Maybe sometime we should do a seminar on the Trinity, but that’s it in a nutshell. If you can put the Trinity in a nutshell. That sounds blasphemous, but language is inadequate.

Conclusion: The gospel is the “gospel of the glory of the happy God.” Joy is at the bottom and the aim of all reality. The destiny of those who receive God as their supreme treasure is to enter into the joy of their master. This is into the very infinite joy that the Father and the Son have in each other. This is finally how we fulfill God’s aim, that we magnify his glory. His glory consists largely in his joyful self-sufficiency. Therefore, we magnify his glory by experiencing his joy in himself as our joy in him, that is, by being satisfied in him as our supreme joy.

God’s Pleasure in the Display of His Glory

Remember, here’s what we’re trying to do. The excellency of a soul is revealed (shown) by the nature of the object of its love. Of the seven or eight illustrations we’re going to give, the first one has been that God delights in himself and has for all eternity. Another way to say it is God delights in his Son as the perfect display of his perfections. The Holy Spirit is the embodiment (inadequate word) of the love and joy that flows between them. This is the kind of thing that you’d see if you read Edwards. Here’s Romans 5:4-5:

Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Now, Edwards would say the reason Paul says God’s love has been poured through the person of the Spirit who is in us, is that the Holy Spirit is the love of God. When we are given the Holy Spirit, God comes into our life and the person that comes in is the love of God for God, which is why you love God if you’re born again. If you’re born of the Spirit, God is loving God in you.

What makes the Trinity in its energy of infinite delight so important is it explains how free of need God is. He’s so happy from all eternity that what happens in creation is the explosion to share that and to reveal that. In moving from the intra-Trinitarian pleasure of God in his Son through his Spirit, we deal next with the most foundational pleasure of God outside the Trinity: the pleasure he has in going public with his intrinsic worth. God’s supreme zeal in creation is to display his glory in all that he does.

Holiness and Glory

Let me define these two words and show how they relate in this. Try anyway. Holiness is pretty much impossible to define as we talked about on the blog recently. Holiness is God’s intrinsic worth, his being unique, one of a kind, and therefore infinitely valuable. So that’s my definition of holiness. God’s intrinsic worth. I think R.C. Sproul’s definition is God’s transcendent purity, and by “transcendent” he means to capture the absolute otherness and uniqueness of it.

He’s not out there and you choose from three. Transcendent means he’s absolutely above all and there pure, and I’m stressing that that is infinitely valuable because it’s unique. If you have three diamonds that are just alike, really big ones like this, they’re worth about $500 million or whatever, and they both look alike, they would be less valuable than if there were only one of them. Then the price would go way up. That’s the way it is with God. There’s only one. So I think God’s holiness is his intrinsic worth, his uniqueness, his transcendence. He’s infinitely valuable.

Now, glory, the radiance of that worth. So here’s his worth intrinsic to himself, and when that radiates towards creation, it is glory. It is the going forth of his holiness to be seen as the greatness and the radiance of the moral beauty, the transcendent purity that he is. Now here’s how this works in Isaiah 6, which is what people think about when they think of holiness. Isaiah 6:1–3 says:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his holiness!”

That’s not what he said. And my question is, why not? That’s what you would expect, wouldn’t you? “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord. The whole earth is full of his holiness.” No, it’s because the word “glory” is the holiness of God gone earthly, gone public, gone radiant. At least that’s one of its basic uses in the Scriptures.

The Display of God’s Glory in Isaiah

Let’s take Isaiah as an example of this second kind of God’s pleasure, namely pleasure in displaying his glory and just tick off these incredible texts. There may be four of my books where I make the point of God pursuing his own glory. I think the longest collection of texts is in Let the Nations Be Glad, the missions book. So if you want to see all the texts that I’ve gathered together to show this you can, but I’m just going to do Isaiah and then we’ll be done for tonight.

Isaiah 63:14 says:

Like livestock that go down into the valley,
     the Spirit of the Lord gave them rest.
So you led your people,
     to make for yourself a glorious name.

That’s why he’s giving them rest. Regarding creation, Isaiah 43:6–7 says:

I will say to the north, Give up,
     and to the south, Do not withhold;
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,
     whom I formed and made.

He says, “I made them for my glory.” This is God exalting in acting according to how much he loves his own glory. So he’s doing everything, giving rest, and creating for his glory. Isaiah 48:9–10. I think this is probably the most thudding, self-exalting word of God in the Bible:

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.

So there are six times he makes it crystal clear: “I act for my glory.”

For His Name’s Sake

Regarding his mercy, Isaiah 30:18 says:

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
     and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you . . .

Now if that sounds contradictory to you, if it is emotionally jarring, then there’s a call on your life to immerse yourself in the Bible until that ceases to be awkward. God showing you mercy to exalt his name will no longer feel like a ripoff, but gospel. The way it works as gospel is if God showed mercy to you because of your worth, the foundation would be flimsy; if he shows mercy to you because of his worth, the foundation is infinite.

But you have to be okay with God getting the glory and you just get the mercy, like infinite eternal mercy. Most humans don’t want that deal. They want the glory and they don’t want mercy, and so God is not attractive to them, but if you’re born again, the world turns upside down. Regarding forgiveness, Isaiah 43:25 says:

I, I am he
     who blots out your transgressions for my own sake,
     and I will not remember your sins.

He is saying, “I forgive you for me.” Regarding defense, Isaiah 37:35 says:

For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.

So he defends the city, he blots out transgressions, and he shows mercy, all for his own name and glory. Regarding righteousness, Isaiah 60:21 says:

Your people shall all be righteous;
     they shall possess the land forever,
the branch of my planting, the work of my hands,
     that I might be glorified.

You who are Christians are being sanctified. You’re a branch, you’re becoming righteous. Why is he doing that? So that his creative sanctifying hands would be glorified. It says in 2 Thessalonians that he will come on that day to be marveled at among the saints and glorified by those who believe. So he’s preparing you to enjoy making much of him. Because standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or on the peak in Yosemite Park, you learn that your fullest joy is not being able to lift the mountain, but stand on the mountain and be amazed at it. You weren’t made to be God; you were made to enjoy God. All the enjoyments in this world are little foretastes and echoes. When we turn them into our god, we’re the worst idolaters imaginable and we deserve hell. We should always be getting beyond the sexual pleasures, the drink pleasures, the food pleasures, the sleep pleasures, the fun-play pleasures, and the relational pleasures to the giver, the maker of all those things.

Then we turn around, like C.S Lewis said, “If you go for God, you get everything else thrown in. If you make a non-God to be God, you lose it and God.”

Exalted in Abundant Joy

Isaiah 55:12–13 says:

For you shall go out in joy
     and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
     shall break forth into singing,
     and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
     instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the Lord,
     an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

Now what is this “it”? I think the “it” is that glorious end time restoration of creation to what God designed it to be in its perfection for our enjoyment. “It” shall make a name for the Lord, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. I remember preaching on that at Wheaton College years ago when I first saw this. I was just so absolutely blown away that all of this, the mountains and the hills breaking into singing, that’s the banner God wants to lift for his name. All the trees of the field clapping their hands, that’s what God wants to lift for his name. Instead of the thorn, the cypress coming up, that’s the name of the Lord being lifted. Do you see what he’s doing? This is incredible. He could do it another way and not have any of that joy be what he does to make a name for himself. Isaiah 55:1–2 is the invitation at the end of all that:

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?

So leave behind the pleasures that you think are ultimate and come to the ultimate one.

Here are some closing implications. He gets the glory, we get the joy, and the way to get him the glory is to agree with that and live that for our highest joy in him. The hope that God might act to save sinners not yet fully explained in the Old Testament, will rest finally not on our worth, but his worth. He will do it for his glory or not at all. If he does it for his glory, the foundation of it will be unshakeable.