Here’s a little review to make sure we know where we’re going and what we’re up to. The quote right there in the bold print is from Scougal: “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love”. I read that in 1987 and wondered if that could be true for God, even though he meant it for man and concluded it is true for God. The worth and excellency of God is measured by the object of his love. And to see his worth and excellency in a fresh way, in a clearer way, a more touching way, I surveyed the Bible looking for all the places where God delights in anything. And the upshot was the book, The Pleasures of God: Meditation on God’s Delight in being God. And you can see what the object of his love is. So last night we covered the first two objects of his love, the first one being himself or his full perfect reflected in the perfect image of himself in the Son.

This is an intra-Trinitarian pleasure that has existed from eternity. And the second one was God’s pleasure in displaying his glory, his holiness and his infinite value going public in the creation that he had made. So that’s where we’ve come so far. And now we’re at God’s pleasure in all that he does.

God’s Pleasure in All He Does

This is a hard one in one sense because many things that God does are very painful. Hence, we had the question last night about hell. I’m claiming here that God is a God of complete providence and does all that happens and therefore is glad and takes pleasure in all that is, but not in the same way. So you see the difficulties. An essential aspect of God’s glory is his freedom to do all that he pleases. He’s totally self-sufficient in the joy of the Trinity and doesn’t need anything to be God. Being uncreated, beholden to none, there are no constraints outside himself to keep him from doing what he ultimately delights to do.

So the reason you don’t do what you delight to do is because there’s things you fear will have consequences or there’s limits on you because you’re finite or whatever. God has none of those limits and you can see that here:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” (Romans 11:33–35).

The answer is nobody. Who has been his counselor? Nobody. Nobody has ever added any wisdom to God. So you can’t counsel him. He doesn’t come to you because he’s ever confused or troubled and needs your counsel. Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? Nobody. He already owns everything that you give him and therefore you don’t put him in your debt when you give him your praise or your prayers or your obedience or anything. He owns you and already has complete sway over everything. So we never enrich God with the expectation that now he owes me. He doesn’t ever owe you. Paul continues:

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen (Romans 11:36).

That is why I said an essential component of God’s glory is his complete self-sufficiency. He’s free. He’s not ever constrained by anything outside himself, which means he can do whatever he pleases. Therefore, he’s free and unconstrained by anyone or anything. So he delights ultimately when all is taken into account in all history from beginning to end in all that he brings to pass, and all that happens he ultimately brings to pass.

That’s huge. You have to take a deep breath if you’re going to understand that and then a deeper one if you’re going to believe it. So when I said that he delights, ultimately, when all is taken into account in all of history from beginning to end, I’m making the distinction between the narrow lens and the panorama, the mosaic. I think it was Corrie ten Boom who said life in this world — and she was in a concentration camp — is looking at the tapestry of history from underneath with all the ends hanging down. It’s not attractive from this side, but when it will be revealed and you see what he’s been weaving, then these dark threads that in and of themselves were just horrible, will have their place in the tapestry and you will say he has done all things well.

A Biblical Basis for God’s Delight in What He Does

Here are some texts to show that he does all these things:

For I know that the Lord is great,
     and that our Lord is above all gods.
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does,
     in heaven and on earth,
     in the seas and all deeps (Psalm 135:5–6).

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory,
     for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!
Why should the nations say,
     “Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens;
     he does all that he pleases.

We don’t, but he does. Isaiah 46:9–10 says:

I am God, and there is no other;
     I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
     and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, “My counsel shall stand,
     and I will accomplish all my purpose . . .”

That Hebrew word there is “all my delight.”

Ephesians 1:11 says:

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,

That’s perhaps the most sweeping statement in the Bible concerning God’s providence. He works all things according to the counsel of his will. Or Daniel 4:35 says:

He does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”

Amos 3:6 says:

Is a trumpet blown in a city,
     and the people are not afraid?
Does disaster come to a city,
     unless the Lord has done it?

The heart of man plans his way,
     but the Lord establishes his steps (Proverbs 16:9).

Many are the plans in the mind of a man,
     but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand (Proverbs 19:21).

“The lot is cast in the lap, but every decision is from the Lord.” That may be one of the most sweeping detailed statements.

So every spin of the roulette wheel in Reno, Las Vegas, every roll of the dice in your family board game, every reach into the hand for the Scrabble letter is determined by God. These are life-changing decisions you have to make, whether you’re going to believe this or not. The lot cast in the lap is like dice — every decision is from the Lord. The biblical writers, whatever problems are created by God’s sovereignty, did not flinch at God’s sovereignty. They didn’t, they just said it. And then we do the cleanup operations with our little puny brains trying to make sense out of how this all works out.

Meant for Evil, Meant for Good

Joseph spoke to his brothers after they had sold him into slavery:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today (Genesis 50:20).

Oftentimes I’ve heard this text misquoted. People say, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God used it for good.” That’s not what it says, and there’s a big difference. The difference is that there’s one mean-er (a person who means something), and there’s another person who means, and they both mean it. It’s the same word. And here it is going to Egypt. They think, “We’re getting rid of you. You’re going to Egypt.” And this is God’s meaning and this is their meaning and they meant evil and God meant good. It’s the same thing and it was slavery for Joseph. God didn’t watch it happen and then say, “What am I going to do with this? Oh, I’ll make him vice president of Egypt and we’ll turn it all around.” God never watches anything merely. He’s always sustaining and acting. And so he meant it.

In fact, you read in Psalm 105:17, it says God sent Joseph to Egypt. He sent him to keep people alive. God had a plan to keep people alive. And that’s the way sin works. Acts 4:27–28 says:

For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

That is a crux-like statement of God’s sovereignty in the Bible because what’s being spoken about is the death of Jesus. And without the death of Jesus, I’m lost. So how did the death of Jesus come about? What Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel did God predestined to take place according to his plan. And every one of those was sin — Herod’s mockery, Pilate’s expediency, the Gentiles driving the nails, and the peoples of Israel yelling, “Crucify him, crucify him!” It’s all sin predestined designed by God and scripted in the Old Testament, including Judas.

The Preordained Suffering of Christ

To me, that is paradigmatic of the fall in the garden of Eden. Satan, you meant that for evil to bring man to disobedience and ruin and God meant it for good. If you say, “You think God meant that to happen?” I say absolutely. I think he meant it to happen because we’re told in Revelation 13:8 there’s a book in eternity called “the Book of the Life of the Lamb who was slain” and names are written in it. Before Adam fell the book of the life of the Lamb who was slain had names written in it. That’s redemption planned by the death of a lamb (Christ) before there was any sin to redeem them from. And you think God didn’t plan any of this? It’s all planned, but it’s planned this way — you meant it for evil, but not God

His holy nature never sinned. This is the kind of paradox we must come to terms with to make sense out of the Bible, that God sovereignly ordains that things come to pass, which from the human standpoint are willed as evil and from God’s standpoint are willed as absolutely good for his final purposes. So that’s the fabric again, or the tapestry from the big purpose, that event in Eden, that event at Calvary, that’s the worst sin that ever happened. Adams is bad. The sin with Adam was worthy of death. The death of the Son of God is worse than eating the tree. To kill the Son of God is the worst thing that ever happened in the universe. And Acts 4:27–28 says it was meticulously planned by God. If you read the story, just watch how many times it says “in order to fulfill the Scriptures.” The spear went between the ribs because no bone will be broken, as it is written.

He was pierced for our transgressions with no bone broken. And when they come to smash his legs, they are not going to do it because God is in charge here. He was dead already. There’s nothing happening here without God’s incredible sovereignty: “Who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the most how high that good and evil come?”

The Complexity of God’s Emotional Life

Now here, the complexity of God’s emotional life is humanly beyond comprehension. And by beyond comprehension, I don’t mean you can’t understand anything about it, I just mean full comprehension belongs to him, not to our finite minds. But let me point you to the mystery.

So here’s the way my mind works. I’m tackling an issue like this. I’m arguing that he takes pleasure in all that he does and then I find a verse like this:

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live? (Ezekiel 18:23).

Now that seems to contradict my thesis, that he takes pleasure in all that he does. And now he’s just saying, “I don’t take pleasure in the death of the wicked.” He also says:

For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God; so turn, and live (Ezekiel 18:32).

However, on the other hand to these same people, he says:

As the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you. And you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of it (Deuteronomy 28:63).

So I have to figure out how to talk about the fact that he doesn’t delight in the death of the wicked and that he will delight in destroying you.

There’s also another tension: anger and grief every day.

God is a righteous judge,
     and a God who feels indignation every day.

Indeed, he does. God is angry every day, all day, which might make you say, “Well, that’s just not a God I can worship because I’ve known men like that and the last thing I want to do is be around them.” Or consider grief:

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:30).

Grieved and Joyful

Now, I don’t think it’s the least speculative to say that’s happening every minute of every day throughout all of history. Some Christian somewhere is acting in a way that grieves the Holy Spirit, which means the Holy Spirit is grieving every day, all day, all the time. So God is angry all day and he’s sad all day, all the time. Can you handle that? Can you make sense out of that in a seminar called “The Pleasures of God” and that he delights in all that he does? I mean, this is just gobbledygook, right? It’s just nonsense that I’m talking about here. But on the other hand:

For the Lord takes pleasure in his people;
     he adorns the humble with salvation (Psalm 149:4).

I think that’s happening every day. There’s some wonderful saint somewhere in the world right now doing something that is really pleasing to God and God looks upon that person — maybe a thousand, maybe 10,000, right now — and is pleased. Maybe God is looking upon you. Maybe your heart right now is so right with God. He’s looking upon that particular act, thinking, “I love the way you’re thinking and feeling right now. I’m happy.” So I think God is totally happy all the time and sad and angry. Luke 15:7 says:

Just so I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.

I don’t think it would be speculation to say somebody is getting saved every hour on this planet. Do you think that’s an exaggeration? Maybe it’s every minute. Somebody is getting saved every minute given the planet. I mean, right now probably 50,000 people are sharing their faith in the world, I’d guess. You think one or two of those will have success in the next minute or two? Yes they will, which means heaven is partying all the time. We have a complex situation here. He is angry all the time, grieving all the time, and partying all the time.

Layers of Willing and Delighting

What’s the solution? God has levels of willing and delighting. He wills and delights in things in different ways so that approval and disapproval can coexist without being contradictory or without canceling each other out. I’m making a case here for infinite complexity in the mind and heart of God that is unfathomable to us, but we get little glimpses of it. I gave you one glimpse last night when I said that we in his image are told, “Be anxious for nothing” (Philippians 4:6). And Paul also says, “I am anxious every day for the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:28). And when he said it, I think God meant us to hear that as an act of love and a holy anxiety, not a carnal anxiety. It is somehow compatible.

Or we’re told, “Rejoice always, and again I say rejoice (Philippians 4:4), and then we’re told to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). Isn’t there somebody to be weeping with all the time? I mean, in a church this size, there’s always someone to weep with. You’re not always with them, you just know they’re sitting at home with a dying baby. It really tempers the way I think and feel all the time. And then 2 Corinthians 6:10 comes along and Paul says of himself, “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” I say, God, take me into the mysteries of the Christian life because they are a reflection of the complexity of the divine life. You are told to rejoice without ceasing and you are told to weep with those who weep, which means they must coexist, and they do. You’ve all tasted little things like this.

The most memorable one for me is when my mother was killed in a bus accident. I was 28 years old, I’m 66 today. So you can see how long ago this was and how unbelievably vivid this is for me as the most clear emotionally supercharged experience of this complexity. So I got the phone call that my mother had been killed in Israel. My dad was in the hospital and I didn’t know if he’d make it. I was 28 years old, a little two-year-old was holding onto my leg, watching me tear up on the phone and saying, “Daddy sad, daddy sad.” I hung up the phone and I gave the facts to Noël and went back to the bedroom, kneeled down at the bed, and cried for two hours. I loved this woman. What a mother I had. I had never sobbed like that in my life. As I was crying, I was happy for her.

I was happy that I had her for 28 years. I was happy for all the letters she wrote me while I was in Germany. I was happy that she spanked me as a kid. I had all kinds of thoughts of how great this woman was just flying to my mind, and it had an effect of making the sadness greater and the heaviness greater. I mean, you’ve been there, right? If you’re old enough, you’ve tasted what I’m talking about, the complexity of the human heart to taste seemingly contradictory emotions at the very same time. So, if we can taste little teeny tensions like that, how many more can God take? And here’s a text that points in that direction. He’s talking to Jerusalem that’s being destroyed and being raped by the Babylonians. So this is a horrible, horrible thing he’s looking at. Women are eating their children in Jerusalem. It says:

Though he cause grief, he will have compassion
     according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
     or grieve the children of men.

It’s often translated as “he does not afflict willingly.” I think the new ESV might have the literal, which says, “he does not afflict from his heart.” Now that’s not a big simple solution, but it’s a wonderful pointer to the place where the solution probably lies. Yes, God is sovereign over the grievous things of the world, but no, he doesn’t feel the same about each one. Not all of them come from the center of his heart. They come from aspects of his character that serve his heart.

A judge may say “guilty” and love his justice and then turn and weep because it’s his son and he just sent him to jail and he knows he’s doing the right thing and he knows that’s good. He feels good about the right thing that he just did and then he weeps his eyes out in the back room.

A Mind Like the Ocean

Now all those illustrations are inadequate because you can fault all of those illustrations and call God a schizophrenic and say, “Oh, he’s just a victim of as many emotions as we are.” Well, God’s not a victim of anything. Maybe one other picture in my head that has helped me. Take the Pacific Ocean as God’s mind, and if you take a helicopter while the winds are blowing say 80 miles an hour out on the Pacific Ocean, they’re whipping up waves probably 60 feet to 80 feet tall. These are scary big waves, and your helicopter is about 200 feet above that. This trip would feel very vulnerable. You could be bouncing around and you’d say, “That is one tumultuous mind of God.”

If you got in a rocket and then went into orbit and looked down on that very same Pacific Ocean, it would look as serene and big and calm as you could imagine. And it is from that perspective. You stand back, those little 60 to 80 foot waves look nothing compared to the seven-mile deep ocean that from another perspective is gloriously strong and deep and serene. So we have a God who often reveals himself as in tumult — angry or grieved or holding out his hands to a rebellious people — and then other times he takes us up and gives us glimpses of the absolute majesty and serenity of his sovereign mind. I would just plead that you not too quickly fault him for any one of those moments that he looks less than sovereign. He has sovereign control. So God is not easy to understand in his complexity, but he’s all we need in our trials.

He has sovereign control so that nothing is meaningless. God is merciful in all his severity and near the broken-hearted.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
     and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18).

God will win in the end and nothing will have been suffered in vain.

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life (Matthew 19:29).

When I stand back from a little lesson like that and I say, “What was the upshot of that?” It’s an invitation to you into a lifelong wrestling with the holy word of God. What you just saw there was a few years worth of effort to put together the Bible on the issue of God’s providence. It’s taking every sentence seriously, or trying to, which is not an easy task. God is God, I’m not. I expect the book to be that way. It’s a lifelong calling. It’s a joyful thing. Paul said, “Remember to bring the books and the parchments. I only have a few weeks to live and I still want to read.” Amazing.

God’s Pleasure in the Works of Creation

This one is really happy, that one was heavy and I feel like I’ve put on you or the heaviest things in the world in that one and this one is just toe-tapping interesting. At least it is to me. I’m arguing God takes pleasure in the work of creation, and I have mainly in mind whales and frogs and mountains and your nose. Chesterton said that when you walk down the street you shouldn’t be bent out of shape that people have big noses or flat noses or narrow noses or curled noses; you should just be stunned that people have noses. God decided we should have one of these really interesting things on our faces. I mean, why not just flat holes? It’ll keep the rain out. But sometimes you can’t think of a reason and he’s just having fun, maybe.

The material world is not a problem for God or a mere temptation for us, or a temporary starting point to be thrown away in the future. I’m distancing myself there from three heresies. The world is not a problem for God. He likes the world. He made it. It’s not simply there to tempt us to be idolaters, and it’s not going to be thrown away as though we’re going to heaven and “good riddance world” — that’s not Christianity. The resurrection of the body to live someplace where bodies can stand is Christianity. C. S. Lewis gets it right:

There is no use trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual, God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex or the body or pleasure were bad in themselves but they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body, which believes that matter is good; that God himself once took on a human body of all things; that some kind of body is going to be given us in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy.

That’s from Mere Christianity. You should read Mere Christianity and anything else that Lewis wrote.

Everything Created Good

That’s Lewis and here is the Bible. The Bible is more important:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer (1 TImothy 4:1–5).

It’s interesting. I can say some really provocative things here. Do you see what this means? God created food and marriage, and marriage means sex, right? The reason you want to forbid marriage is because sex is just so earthy, right? Why would anybody want to be married when sex is just so earthy? That may sound interesting or funny to you. I have sat with couples — two that I can remember — where the marriage died because the wife felt that way. There are all kinds of reasons why she felt that way. It was dirty and it was ugly. It just killed it. That’s demonic. That’s demonic to go into a beautiful marriage and for all kinds of historic reasons, parent reasons, whatever reasons, one or the other, usually the woman feels that sex is just to be tolerated, instead of the consummation of a whole person, mind and heart and body and then that aspect of physical union. That’s not the provocative thing that I’m thinking about.

Sex and food are being lifted up here as the two things that represent a material world that the demons say should be kept back from. And he says, “No, God created them to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” Here’s the provocative thing. Unbelievers have no right to sex. Unbelievers have no right to eat. It’s created for believers. Food and sex are created for believers. Everybody else is a prostitute. That’s provocative and true. God didn’t create this world to be inhabited by unbelievers. God didn’t create the sunshine to rise and be enjoyed by unbelievers.

He created the sunshine to convert unbelievers into people who have a right to enjoy the sunrise. This is pretty radical stuff. Everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected. So if you want to say something significant about why public sex in movies is a bad idea, one of the most profound things you could say is they just have no right to be doing that, let alone doing it in public. It’s not made for them. They’re prostituting what God made as an expression of faith, as an expression of thanksgiving.

All His Works Are His Delight

Psalm 104:31 says:

May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
     may the Lord rejoice in his works . . .

There’s just a litany of interesting things about the created world. Animals and trees, they display his glory for man to see and praise.

Psalm 19:1–2 says:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

I’m arguing that one of the reasons God delights in wood and the workmanship of inlay like that is that it displays more of what he’s like and that’s the way we should look at them. God even delights in those works in creation that man does not see:

There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it . . . (Psalm 104:26).

That means out there in the oceans right now, there’s thousands and thousands of weird creatures, some of which have never been discovered yet. Read “Ranger Rick” or other magazines that constantly display God’s creation that nobody is seeing except God. As God watches these little shrimp at the bottom of the ocean with their electrical tentacles making little lights and forming rainbows as they swim around, he’s saying, “That’s awesome.” God is enjoying it. I mean, this is tacky to say, but if I write a poem — I know nobody cares about my poems — but I write them anyway and sometimes I read them and enjoy them.

Is that weird? And since I know nobody else likes it, it’s not that I’m craving your praise because I know none of you is into poetry. Poetry doesn’t sell and nobody cares. But I like it and I think that’s just a little teeny God-likeness in me. He made Leviathan to play in it. Well, nobody in Israel was watching these leviathans play out there. They couldn’t even see the ocean from where they were. The Philistines were in the way.

O Lord, how manifold are your works!
     In wisdom have you made them all;
     the earth is full of your creatures (Psalm 104:24).

None Like You

Now this is a problem. It creates a problem:

Whom have I in heaven but you?
     And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
     but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:25).

I love that text. I’ve recited that to myself at Bethlehem for 33 years. It’s just one of the most core texts and it seems to be in contradiction with delighting in stuff like marriage and food. It says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” What? Why is that?

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
     that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
     all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple (Psalm 27:4).

One thing, just one thing. We sing the song. Really? Only one thing have I asked? Have you never asked for food? “Give me this day my daily bread.” Here’s my answer to that seeming contradiction. I quoted this last night. It’s one of the most important sentences I’ve ever read:

He loves thee too little who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake.

I think that’s right, which means that God means for us to be married in every good sense and he means for us to eat food and enjoy it with thanksgiving if we can be married or eat for his sake. That is, in and through the material world of another human being or food, I am seeing God, loving God, knowing God, and serving God. Getting that right is a great challenge.

God is glorified by our use of the creation in these two ways: feasting to show our thanks to God and fasting to show that food is not our God. Jesus said, “He who would come after me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). And that means there are many, many pleasant things in the world you will deny yourself. Fasting is at the heart of Christianity. If you just treat fasting as letting something good (not evil) go for the sake of making an internal-external statement to God, it’s more important than that. If you could fast from sex, you could fast from television and you can fast from whatever that may be competing subtly with your affections for God. And then if you find yourself drifting towards an unhealthy asceticism where you’re going to wind up sitting on a pole somewhere for 30 years, you will go back and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, that’s demonic.”

In the last days there will come those who say, “Don’t eat and don’t get married and don’t have sex because that’s all idolatrous.” You have to find the way between feasting and fasting and the rhythm.

Questions and Answers

If God takes no pleasure in something like the death of the wicked, why does he ordain it?

The translation “takes no pleasure,” which I know is there in some English versions, is just a little skewed, I think. Literally, it’s that he “does not take pleasure” which may sound to you exactly the same but it might be a little different. “No pleasure” sounds like it’s ruling out that there could be any kind of pleasure that he might have in ordaining it. And we know from Deuteronomy the text that I read that he in fact delights to destroy. In other words, when God’s wrath reaches a certain level and his justice dictates punishment, even eternal punishment, God is not angry at himself or disapproving of himself when his justice makes that decision, even though that act itself at another level in his heart may cause his mercy to grieve. So I guess the short answer is there is when God does a thing like ordaining that the wicked perish, he has something about it that he delights in and you can mention his justice.

You get a picture of that at the end of the book of Isaiah where they look upon the death of the destroyed and they do not only grieve, they also rejoice. It’s very hard for us to grasp, especially for people we care about, and believe me there are people I care about who I fear may be lost. To put together in your own heart those emotions that you weep with those who are going to perish and you weep with those who weep and you say to God, “You are just, and shall not the God of all the earth do right? I delight in your justice and I submit to your justice.” Those are possible in us and in God I believe.

How does God’s pleasure in himself help us in the pursuit of holiness?

I’ll just repeat the couple of things I said last night. When I am aware that God is eternally and infinitely a happy God and his happiness in himself — the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father — and then he tells me that I am welcome into the joy of my master, my hope is infinite and hope is what kills sin, right? If you have no hope, you will give way to pornography. If you have no hope, you’ll give way to bitterness and anger and unforgiveness. You won’t have any resources inside to constantly return good for evil. But if you have a hope that’s just over the horizon that says God is infinitely happy and will welcome you into it, that hope can sever the roots of all kinds of cravings in this life that will enslave you, that’s just one way to talk about the answer to that question, there are others.

If God finds so much pleasure in himself, how do we explain that he isn’t selfish?

This is the question I’ve spent most of my life trying to unpack and the answer is this. God’s delight in himself is not selfish because it’s a delight that he means to share. The greatest gift that God has for you is himself. He can’t think of anything better to give you because there isn’t anything better. So, if God loves you, the thing that he will give you is best for you and what’s best for you is himself. And when he gives you the best gift for you, he wants you to enjoy it to the full and enjoying something to the full means you praise it, speak well of it. To stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon or to stand before your new little baby and be told that you can enjoy this to the fullest but you can’t say “ooh” or “ah” or “wow” or “oh my” or “look here!” your joy will be smaller and therefore he calls us to praise him so that our joy will reach its consummation.

We are unlike this. I am not God. My best gift for you is not me, it’s God. And God’s best gift for you is not me, it’s God. God is stuck with being the best gift in the universe. So defining what is selfish for God and what’s selfish for me aren’t the same. It would be very selfish for me to say the reason you’re all here is to know me and exult in me. The reason that would be selfish is because it’s cruel. I’m concealing from you your true happiness. It’s not me, it’s God. And God, if he’s not going to be cruel, cannot conceal from you your happiness, namely himself. We tend to take what selfishness is for us and transplant it over onto God, not realizing that God is God. God is infinitely valuable. Therefore, when he gives himself to you, he’s loving you. If I give myself to you as your supreme treasure, I’m hating you.

You have said that creation is the overflow of God’s joy. What is the biblical basis of that statement?

I argued from the first lesson that God finds his Son supremely pleasing. He says, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” So there’s a text that shows me that inside the Trinity, the Father and the Son are really, really excited about each other. So there’s joy in the Trinity and there are a lot of other texts I could go to, but there’s one. Then you go to John 17:26, which says:

Oh, righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I’ve made known to them your name and I will continue to make it known that the love with which you loved me may be in them.

So God means for this joyful love between the Father and the Son to be in creatures. So that’s what I’m saying. He made the world for that to happen. He didn’t make the world for another reason and said, “Oh, that would be a good thing to do also.” He made the world so that the love that the Father and the Son have for each other could be in his sons and daughters and they would be infinitely happy forever. So he created out of the overflow of what he is to share it with other people. There’s lots of other ways to go about giving biblical foundations for that as well.

How would you counsel a believer who is struggling with a lack of love or affection for the Lord, especially in light of your comment last night that the Holy Spirit will cause us to love the Lord?

Here’s the simplest answer and we’re all in this together. There’s not two groups of people out in this audience, like those who have strong affections for Jesus and those who don’t really. There’s a continuum. There may be somebody in this room that has no affection for the Lord because you’re not a believer and then there’s another person who’s just so full of the Holy Spirit because God touched you this morning when you got up, you can hardly sit still and then all of us are all over this thing, right? There’s not two kinds of people, there’s a billion kinds of people. There’s a billion levels of affection for Jesus. So we’re all in this together and we’re moving around on this continuum every day, every hour of every day. There are certain points in this seminar where your affections are greater and other points where you’re almost asleep and finding it boring. We’re just moving around all the time in that regard. All that to say, take heart. You’re asking the right question.

If I’m right about Romans 5:5 that the Holy Spirit has been given to us and in being given to us the love of God has been poured into our heart and you’re not feeling it at all, the first thing you do is say to him, “I’m not feeling it at all.” In other words, you have to be honest with God because he knows everything anyway. Number two, you say, “I’m sorry.” A lot of people won’t tell you to say that because they’ll say feelings don’t matter. I’m saying if you don’t feel the love of God, tell him you’re sorry. I do it all the time. I never have emotions that are sufficient to measure up to the goodness of God to me ever. Love God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, all your might, all the time. Anybody do that? No, so we should repent every day.

We should say, “I’m sorry, thank you for the gospel.” This is why you love the gospel, right? This is why we love Jesus. He died for people who don’t love God with all their heart. There aren’t any other kinds of people except one, Jesus. So you say you’re sorry and the next thing you say, “Please restore to me the joy of your salvation.” That’s the way the psalmist prayed. The psalmist struggled. I’m so glad there’s Psalms in the Bible. They say, “Help me. Help restore my joy.” And you may mean restore it from five years ago because you’ve been blank for four years, or it may mean, “Restore it from the last hour first.” Right now you’re feeling really threatened and you want to push the pornography button and get a rush. And so you’re pleading, “God, give me joy. Let me know how beautiful and great and kind and good and wise you are. Satisfying me in the morning with your steadfast love that I may rejoice and be glad in you.”

The fourth thing you do (and maybe doing it all along the way) is that you go to his word and you consciously look for beautiful things about God. That’s why I’m on a crusade every morning. I read my Bible all the way through every year using the Robert Murray M’Cheyne plan. So I have a set reading, but I’m looking for stuff in my readings. I’m just randomly reading. I want to do both. I want God to just surprise me with things and there are things I’m after. I need to taste and see that the Lord is good, because otherwise my mouth gets out of taste and I start tasting the bait of Satan, which is on the hook of sin. And the reason you don’t bite the bait of Satan on the hook of sin is because you’re satisfied with something God gave you this morning. He satisfied your souls. I’m looking for that. I’m on the crusade to find something in the Bible to satisfy my soul.

You heard me pray for it this morning. I read there in one Samuel 10 that a band of men followed Saul, men of valor whose hearts God had touched. That’s a little sentence. I read five chapters of the Bible this morning because there were two Psalms. That’s all I remember. I mean, if you pushed me, I could probably remember something else, but right now that’s all I remember from five chapters and that’s all I need because I’m pumped thinking about God’s finger touching a human heart and producing men of valor. Now I’ll forget that and that will be gone out of my head in two or three days. It’ll be gone, and next year when I read First Samuel, I may see it again or I may just breeze right over it, but tomorrow I’m looking for something else.

Do you see how that works? At least this is John Piper talking. If you know other saints who fight it a different way and succeed better listen to them by all means. But I’m just on a crusade to beat down my depression and my unhappiness and my self-pity every day and kill it with the word of God and to build up my riveting focus on Jesus so that I can enjoy him. And I’m asking, “God, show me yourself as I read the Bible.” And a good text to warrant that is 1 Samuel 3:21 where it says, “There weren’t many visions in that day, but the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.” That’s an amazing statement. The Lord revealed himself to Samuel by the word of the Lord. That’s the way he does it for me. The heavens are telling the glory of God, that’s true. But I mainly am seeing God with my ears and my eyes as I read words in this book.

Can a Christian delight in God’s creation rightly if he’s not immediately and consciously focused on God?

This is why I said to you I would like a few hundred of you younger men and women thinkers to help me. I’m 66, I haven’t been able to figure lots of things out in life and in the Bible and I don’t know the best way to answer this. I am hesitant to say no, but I think I probably should say no. I think no is probably the wrong answer, but you probably should say it.

You don’t even know what I mean by no. “Can a Christian delight in God’s creation rightly if he’s not immediately and unconsciously focused on God?” I mean, if the answer is not yes, then we’re all cooked and we’re all idolaters because I know for a fact yesterday you enjoyed something without thinking about God. You did. There were a few minutes when you saw something, tasted something, felt something, and you liked it and for those few minutes God didn’t enter your head. And this question is about that. I think that’s what this question is. Is that right? I should probably just stop and say, go figure that out.

I think that in the new heavens and the new earth, when I have a new body and a new mind and everything is fixed and I’m not a split heart, when I’m not a Roman seven kind of guy, my guess is my mind will be so wired that that will simply not be an issue and that I will have a God-consciousness in all of my earthy enjoyments. That’s just my guess, which means that probably we should try to get there but not beat ourselves up that we can’t here.

It’s like asking the question, are you a Christian when you’re asleep? You’re not thinking about God, you’re not believing. So if you’re not believing you’re not saved. Well, no, that’s not right. Everybody knows that’s not right. So what happens when you sleep? The answer is God knows who you are when you’re sleeping and he knows that you’re born again. You have a new nature and part of the new nature in a body is that it sleeps. It just goes unconscious. It doesn’t think about God at all. Well, if you’re saved when you’re sleeping and you’re not thinking about God at all, then you’re saved if there are hours during the day when you don’t think about God. Now, that’s not to say it’s a wonderful thing not to think about God when you’re awake. That’s not a very satisfactory answer, is it? I would say pray that everything you enjoy would somehow in a way that maybe you can’t even conceive is woven through with sweet gratitude and God-consciousness.

My small group is studying the second section of Mere Christianity. C. S. Lewis makes some statements about free will, risk, and joy that I’m having some trouble with. Can you help? Lewis writes:

Free will is what has made evil possible. Why then did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes any love or goodness or joy worth having. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way. Apparently he thought it worth the risk. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will, then we may take it; it is worth paying.

Lewis is perplexing and says lots of things that baffle me. He doesn’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and he says some really deplorable things about mistakes the Lord Jesus himself made and I don’t think he gets free will right. The word “risk” here is certainly not right. In other words, if God knew (because he says he did) that Adam would fall, there was no risk involved. Risk is when you don’t know what’s going to happen and you take a risk. If you know what’s going to happen, you’re not risking anything because it’s exactly what’s going to happen. You know what the outcome will be. You know what you’re going to do with the outcome. That’s not called risk in any language that I know of. So “risk” is the wrong word.

What he means by free will, I don’t know for sure. What I mean when I say I don’t believe in free will is ultimate self-determination. That’s my definition of the kind of free will I don’t believe in. If what you mean by free will is genuine choice for which you will be accountable, that exists. People use the term free will in all kinds of ways. This is just in your conversation with anybody and as you’re trying to decide whether it’s in the Bible. Get a clear definition and then look to see if it’s in the Bible. One definition is there but the other is not there. I don’t think humans have ultimate self-determination and that is the strict use of it, say in a person like Greg Boyd who’s in open theism. That is the definition he would be happy with and I think it is non-existent and he thinks it is existent.

The last answer to that question is that in September 2013 our plan is to celebrate the anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s death by having the entire national conference devoted to C. S. Lewis. It’s a Reformed appreciation and response. So that will be tackled 13 months from now along with a lot of other things that he said that seem perplexing.

The dietary laws were a big struggle for the early church. Why did God forbid good things like bacon or catfish, but then later declare them good, acceptable, and permissible? Well, he did indeed. In Mark 7, Jesus declared all foods clean. That’s a statement. Jesus declared all foods clean. So whatever was going on in the Old Testament with the “don’t eat what doesn’t have a cloven hoof” and “don’t eat what doesn’t have scales” and whatever was going on there, it’s over. Now what was going on there? Well, it’s not just food.

It also says don’t wear a shirt that’s knitted out of two kinds of fibers. Most of us are sinning right now, unless that’s over. Well, it is over. In the New Testament, those ceremonial rules were replaced and there’s lots of reasons you can give for that as you trace the course of redemptive history. My guess is that what God was doing was choosing guidelines and rules for these little Semitic people surrounded by masses of pagan unbelieving peoples and giving them ways to show that they are distinct from all the peoples of the world. He said, “Don’t do this, do this, do this, do this,” and he defined them with their circumcision and their Sabbath-keeping and their food laws and their clothing laws and all kinds of laws. There were 600 of these laws that are defining these people because these people are a showcase to the nations. Now, Jesus comes into the world and instead of fitting into that and saying, “Okay, now the Messiah of the little showcase people is here. Nations look at us. Come on in. You can have it if you want.” That’s not what happened

He came to his own and his own did not receive him, and he turned to the Gentiles and he said, “Go make disciples of all those nations out there.” And when he did that, he changed all the stuff that gets in the way. You don’t go to a people and carry with you all the baggage of the food laws and all the baggage of the clothing laws. In order for this faith of mine to be translatable it has to be flexible and fit into cultures all over the world. The New Testament is a missions manual and the religion of the Old Testament is a “come see” religion. The religion of the New Testament is a “go tell” religion. There are rules that are appropriate for a “come see” and there are rules that are not appropriate for a “go tell.”

How can you help me not make an idol of you? How do you keep Jonathan Edwards from being an idol for you?

Well, just pay attention to sin, or talk to my wife, or talk to some elders, or hang around Bethlehem for a while and see all the flaws and all the warts and all the struggles. Ask God to give you eyes to see. He who plants and he who waters are nothing but only God who gives the growth. So preach to yourself a good theology of God’s sovereignty. Give thanks for the good you see anywhere, and don’t overestimate anybody. There are only sinners in the world, and if you knew them better, you wouldn’t be as impressed.