God’s Pleasure in Election

Here are some texts to show you what’s meant by “election”:

Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day (Deuteronomy 10:14–15).

So when it says “the Lord set his heart”, “set his heart in love on your fathers”, that literally means “the Lord loved to love your fathers.” He set his heart and chose. It’s an amazing statement. The Lord loved to love your fathers, and chose them. He loved to love your fathers and he chose them. He was acting in the overflow of his joy. He was not constrained by anything outside himself like, “Oh, there’s a beautiful people, Israel, I’ll choose them because they’re so attractive.” That’s not at all what was going on. He acted freely. His election was unconditional.

It’s amazing how many people today love to talk about the unconditional love of God and don’t realize what they’re saying. These are people who say they love the unconditional love of God. And then you say, “So you believe in unconditional election?” They say, “No, no, no.” The word is just used willy-nilly about how patient God is with sinners, instead of thinking through, “Well, if it’s unconditional, then there’s nothing you did to get it, and nothing that would keep God from doing it to others, which he doesn’t do.” Or do you think he doesn’t love them because of some condition?

Listen to this, Deuteronomy 7:6–8. We’re talking about Israel now. This is God’s election of a people in the Old Testament for himself:

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples . . .

Now, before I turn the page here, look at this. He says, “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love . . .” So the question is, why did the Lord set his love on Israel? And he’s saying, “Well, it’s not because you were big and attractive.” Why then? Now, keep going:

But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Deuteronomy 7:7–8).

Why did he set his love on you? Answer: because he loves you. Is that an answer? It is. He loves you because he loves you. This is unconditional election. This is God coming down to Israel, among all the peoples of the Near East, and saying, “You’re mine.” If they say, “Why are you loving us?” his answer is, “Because I’m loving you.” Period. And you won’t get behind it. That’s what it means to be elect, to have no explanation in you of why you’re loved. I like the term unconditional but it has a very offensive and definite biblical meaning.

God’s Freedom in Choosing

God stays free in choosing who we are. He’s not locked into the ethnicity of Jewishness once he chooses Israel. So now he chose Israel for himself, for his people. What about Gentiles? What happens there? John the Baptist says:

Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham (Matthew 3:9).

Don’t think that just because you’re a Jew you’re going to escape the judgment of God. So already, before the Great Commission happens in Matthew 28, after the death of Jesus, when he says, “Go make disciples of all the nations,” already, John is showing what’s happening with the coming of Jesus. Don’t you Jews begin to think, “We’re Jews, we’re the chosen people, we can’t be judged. Don’t call us vipers, tangles. Don’t say God’s going to judge us. We have a covenant with God.” And John says, “God will keep his covenant, and if you are not, he’ll raise up stones and he’ll keep covenant with them.” So, don’t think you’ve got God cornered. God is never cornered. Don’t think he has to be faithful to any given individual because they’re boasting in their ethnicity, or their baptism, or their parents, or whatever they’re boasting in.

Romans 9:6–13 is one of the most important passages about election, and how God moved from being focused on Israel to being focused on the world, and choosing individuals all the way along for himself. So it goes like this:

It is not as though the Word of God has failed.

When he said that, he had just said, “I wish that I could be accursed from my kinsmen according to the flesh. They’re cut off from Christ” (Romans 9:1–3). So he is affirming in verse three of Romans 9, there are Jews who are lost forever, cut off from the Messiah, and his heart is breaking over this. But the bigger issue than his heart is, well, did the covenant fall? Did the promise fail? Is God’s purpose for Israel aborting? Is his election of Israel useless? And here’s his answer:

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel . . . (Romans 9:6).

There’s a fundamental statement. Not all who are in physical, ethnic Israel are Israel. Really? Whoa, where do you get that, Paul, from the Bible? And he’s going to show us. He’s distinguishing ethnic Israel and then a remnant that are truly God’s truly elect.

A Child of Promise

Romans 9:7 says:

And not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring . . .

He’s introducing a category of children of Abraham that’s not equal to offspring of Abraham. It’s not physical. Something more. And then he quotes Genesis:

But “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.”

So Ishmael is the offspring of Abraham. Paul’s studying these texts, and he’s seeing, “Oh, what God is showing us is that within Israel, the promise goes through one line and not another. God chooses within Israel and Isaac, not Ishmael.” He continues:

This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son” (Romans 9:8–9).

Abraham had said, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before you and be the heir of the promise.” And God says, “No. One year from today, your 99-year-old, barren, post-menopausal wife will have a son of promise.” That is all illustrative of the fact that the elect are supernaturally brought into being. They’re not the product of Hagar, as if to say, “We can make this happen. We can grow this church, we can get people converted with Hagar-like management.” Abraham said, “Go get your Hagar, and let me sleep with her, and then I’ll have seed and then the promise won’t abort.” And he did it. And he got Ishmael. He says, “Lord, let Ishmael be the promised one, the elect one.” And God says, “We don’t do it that way. I bring my children into being. So I’m going to use an old woman, a dead woman, a barren woman, and I’m going to have a child of promise here, not a child of the flesh.”

Jacob I Loved

Now Paul is tracing this out to see how it works in history. So now you’ve got Isaac, and Isaac marries Rebekah, and they conceive. And what’s in the womb? Twins. Jacob and Esau. Now, what’s different? Several things are different from the Abraham-Sarah production. You have the same parents for these boys, not two mothers. Somebody might say, “Well, of course this child of Hagar shouldn’t be the child of promise. He’s Egyptian.” That wasn’t the point at all. The point was that God supernaturally brought Isaac into being. So God needs to clarify that the problem with Ishmael is not that he was born of another mother. What is it? And he uses the next generation to illustrate:

And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad (it’s not based on their deeds) — in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls — she was told, “The older will serve the younger” (Romans 9:10–12).

Wait a minute. The younger’s supposed to serve the older. That’s the way it works. And God says, “Well, we’re turning everything upside down here to make clear that you see the way I elect the heirs of the promise is free and unconditional. It’s not conditioned by what they do, by their parents, nor by anything. He continues:

As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

That’s a quote from Malachi and it would be good to read it in context sometime. Go back and read it. It’s Malachi 1:1–5. It shows how God’s hatred, his opposition of Esau is just, given who Esau is and grows up to be. But the choice was made between Jacob and Esau before they were born, or had done anything good or evil, in order to make crystal clear election is unconditional. If you’re a Christian, God caused you to be born again, freely, before you had done anything, and that accords with your eternal election.

To the Praise of His Glorious Grace

What was God’s purpose in free and unconditional election? The praise of the glory of his grace. It was the upholding and display of his free and unmerited favor for the enjoyment of his people. And here’s the key text on that:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:3–7).

So now, follow the thought. He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. His purpose was that we should be holy and blameless before him. He predestined his elect ones for adoption as sons. He did it through Jesus Christ and his blood and resurrection. And the reason was “unto the praise of the glory of his grace.” So what is the reason God chooses people freely, before the foundation of the world? It’s so that they would know what grace is and praise it all their days. Sometimes Reformed theology is called “the doctrines of grace.” This is why. Grace is God acting to save us apart from anything in us, ultimately. When we were chosen, the way we should think about it is that it’s like Jacob and Esau. They hadn’t been born, they hadn’t done anything good or evil, and God says, “You’re mine.” You should feel stunned that God has made you his because it isn’t owing to anything in you.

Boasting Only in the Lord

Isaiah 43:20–21 says:

The wild beasts will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.

Here’s another statement of why he does it this way:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that (here’s the first reason) no human being might boast in the presence of God (1 Corinthians 1:26–29).

So God chose freely without being bound to anybody’s wisdom, or power, or anything, in order that nobody would have a ground for boasting. When you stand before God and he asks you, “Why are you here?” start with the answer, “Grace, all grace. I’m here because of you.” There are other answers that are right, but that’s the foundational one. He continues:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that (here’s the second reason for election), as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Do you see? There’s a negative reason for why we’re elected and a positive reason. First, it’s to strip all humans of boasting. God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. He doesn’t like boasting, and so he saves us in a way to eliminate all boasting, and so that our boast will be in the Lord. And then there is this little phrase right here: “Because of him, are you in Christ Jesus.” So when we boast in the Lord, even our capacity to boast in the Lord is owing to the fact that God put us in the Lord. We wouldn’t have gotten there on our own, had he not put us there.

Implications of Election

First, it brings all praise to his grace and humbles man.

Second, it bestows on all who will have it the unspeakable blessing of God’s covenant love. He loved us, gave himself for us, like a husband obtaining a wife. There’s a covenant love that he has for his elect and for no one else.

Third, it assures us of success in evangelism, and the success of the gospel in missions. I remember John Alexander, who in 1967 was the president of InterVarsity at Urbana, when my wife and I were there, stood up and said, after 20 years of ministry in Pakistan, “When I went to Pakistan the first time, I said, ‘If I believed in predestination, I’d never be a missionary. People think God is going to save them anyway.’ And now, after 20 years there, I say that I could never be a missionary if I didn’t believe in predestination, because only God can save people who are dead and hard.”

John 10:15–16 says:

Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

That is sovereignty talking. If any of you plan to be in missions, you have a rock to stand on. He is saying, “I have other sheep among the unreached peoples of this world. I must bring them. I will bring them. They will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, there will be on Shepherd.” And if you say, “Well, what’s my place?” This is John 17:20:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word . . .

This little phrase right here “they will listen to my voice” is in your mouth. It’s not thunder. It’s the mouth of missionaries. This is sovereignty saying, “I have an elect people.” Or look at this, this is even more amazing maybe. Listen to Acts 18:9–10:

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.”

That’s what sustained Paul. The Lord said, “Don’t be afraid. I have a people here. You just lift up your voice, my sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me. So lift up your voice, herald of God in Corinth. My sheep will hear the voice of God, and they’ll come.” So, election secures the triumph of evangelism and global missions.

Assurance and Security

Fourth, it brings security to the heart of the believer because of the chain of certainty connecting election, predestination, calling, justification, and glorification. One of my chapters that I read this morning, my devotions, was Romans 8. I know Romans 8 by heart, I can recite the whole thing to you right now because it’s the most important chapter in the Bible. It’s glorious. Everybody should know Romans 8 by heart. Consider that middle section where it says:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified (Romans 8:28–30).

What’s the point of that? What’s the point of saying that to Christians? Foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and glorified, with no dropouts, none. What’s the point? Security is the point. Assurance is the point. He wants you to be massively confident in who you are and you can never perish, you can never be lost. Nobody can pluck you out of his hand. If you’ve been called, you’ll be justified. If you’ve been justified, you’ll be glorified.

There’s a solidity that comes under a person. I’ve heard so many people testify over the years that they’ve grown up in churches where everything’s loosey-goosey and the Bible is hardly talked about, everything just seems to be man-centered, and suddenly they walk into a world of Reformed theology, or the doctrines of grace, or texts like this, and sometimes the way they describe it is, “Everything got solid. I had something under my feet. Everything got big and strong and firm. I wasn’t just blown around.” I don’t want to oversimplify this, but it is amazing how many emotional difficulties can be remedied with a deep, deep sense of God’s electing love for you. It’s not just thrown out there, but has a theology under it from dozens and dozens of texts. They begin to reorient your brain and it reorients your heart, and old struggles you used to have that you could never quite figure out start to fade away.

God’s Love for the World

Fifth, because of the complexity of God’s emotional life, which we talked about, our election does not mean God does not have love for the world, or that they are not really responsible for their choices, or that we cannot offer the gospel freely to all people and say, “Whosoever will may come,” and, “If you will believe you will be saved and prove to be among the elect.” First Timothy 2:4 says, “God, desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

Now, I feel like I can say people who don’t like my theology usually use that text against what I believe. I feel like maybe I’ve laid enough foundation here of the layers of God’s desiring, willing, and his emotional life that when you read that, you’re open to the possibility he desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, and to say that’s true. And yet that desire may not rise to the level of volition or salvation in every case. What may stop it may not be free will (human ultimate self-determination) but may be God’s overarching purposes to do other things.

Or consider 2 Peter 3:9, which says:

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

Let me quote you one text, and then we’ll take another break for a few minutes. You know the Pastoral Letters include 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. They’re very similar. They’re clustered together, and they have a similar ring to them in the way they’re written. In 2 Timothy 2, this kind of language pops up again, only it points us in a direction how not to use this verse. Here’s 2 Timothy 2:24–26:

The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

The first one says that God desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. And this second text says he may grant repentance, so they can come to a knowledge of the truth. And he may not. Which means that this desire here is not absolute. In other words, it’s not God helplessly wanting all to be saved, and frustrated because you have so much willpower as to deny him his desire. That’s just not the case. He may grant repentance to some and he may not. In other words, God decides whether this desire here is fulfilled or not.

God’s Pleasure in Bruising His Son

This section is the fulcrum of the book, [The Pleasures of God} (https://www.desiringgod.org/books/the-pleasures-of-god). Up until now, we’ve been stressing almost entirely God’s pleasure in himself and his works. In the last two, it’s God’s pleasure in us as we hope in him, and in us as we act out of faith in public obedience. So the fulcrum is his pleasure in his Son, which enables him to delight in us. If there was no pleasure in the bruising of his Son, he could not delight in us but only condemn us, because we are outrageously God-ignoring. The outrage of the universe is that the most important being, the most important reality, is so belittled by humanity. And God would be perfectly just to sweep this planet out of existence in a minute with no heaven at all. Instead, he sends his Son into the world and bruises him. That’s the phrase from Isaiah 53:10.

We have three units to cover in 40 minutes. I’m going to skip a bunch of slides, I’m sure.

A Fragrant Offering

Isaiah 53:10 says:

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
     he has put him to grief . . .

The word “will” there is a word that means “to be pleased” or “to delight in.” It pleased the Lord to crush him. I skipped some slides about those today who call this divine child abuse, and mock the punitive, substitutionary atonement of God putting forth his Son, slaying him, and enjoying it. And they put that in the worst possible light, call it “divine child abuse,” heap scorn upon it, and then try to rescue the Bible back as some other good news. That’s not possible. If we can’t handle God loving us through the taking of the life of his Son, then the Bible and Christianity are over.

Here’s another striking statement of this pleasure:

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).

That means as God smelled the cross, it was fragrant. Well, it wasn’t fragrant in one sense, was it? To watch a man be crucified is as horrible as it gets. If you saw The Passion of the Christ movie, you got some glimpse of that. God stoops down over this altar of the cross and says, “That’s the most fragrant thing I have ever smelled in my eternity.” Therein lies your salvation. That the Father was so satisfied by what his Son did, that if you will just go to Jesus, you’re in. You’re just in. It was so completely sufficient for all the sins of the world that if anyone, anyone would come and just hold onto Jesus, what happened there at that moment would suffice for your salvation forever. It’s the pleasure that God took in the Son bearing the sins of the world and providing righteousness for the world. It was so beautiful to God.

Of course God saw the horror in it. God has enough complexity in his own being that he can weep with his Son’s weeping and pain and be thrilled at the Son’s obedience. Jesus says, “He loves me because I lay down my life for the sheep.” The Father and the Son met together (this is imaginary) in heaven and consulted in eternity about the salvation of the elect, and the Father proposes to the Son, “Will you bear their sins and provide their perfection in living a perfect life, dying a substitutionary death, rising again, and then reigning over a people? Will you do that?” And the Son says, “I will, Father.” And that, “I will, Father,” carried out, pleased the Father infinitely. He was a sweet sacrifice in his obedience.

To the Point of Death on a Cross

The faith-filled God glorifying obedience of his Son was beautiful to him, and it reached its climax on the cross. Philippians 2:6–9 says:

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. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name . . .

Do you see how the logic works? God is so approving, so thrilled, so pleased with that obedience, that he brought him to his right hand. The salvation of his sheep was beautiful to him. Jesus says:

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again (John 10:17).

For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life and I will take it up again.”

It’s not divine child abuse. Here’s what it is:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”(Galatians 3:13).

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh . . . (Romans 8:3).

Christ Became a Curse

Those are two of the passages of Scripture, along with Isaiah 53:10, which teach what people are rejecting today when they say that the penal substitution of the Son in our place, punished by the Father, is divine child abuse, and beneath the dignity of Christianity. Galatians 3:13 speaks about the way Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. The law said those who do such things will die. We have done such things. There is a curse on us. And behind the law is the voice of God. So God’s curse is lying on us. How shall we be saved? The biblical answer is, “Christ became a curse for us.” How? Where? When? It says, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” So my curse went on to Jesus. He became my curse, and the Father, who would’ve cursed me, puts that curse on Jesus as he hangs on the tree, because of his love for his own.

I think it’s perhaps even clearer here in Romans 8:3. It says:

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh . . .

Now, here’s the two questions: Whose sin is that? Jesus had the likeness of sinful flesh. He had no sin. The Son of God never sinned. So it wasn’t his sin that got condemned. And whose flesh was it? Tell me. Whose flesh was my sin condemned in? Jesus’s.

He was sent into the world to wear a body so he could die. And when he died, sin was condemned, it was punished. This is called “penal substitution” and it’s biblical. It is not divine child abuse. It is love at its height. God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God shows his love that way. God doesn’t show his divine child abuse. God shows his love for us, in that while we are yet sinners, Christ died for us, in our place, taking our curse, our condemnation. God looks upon that and he loves that. And aren’t you glad? Jesus didn’t have to coerce the Father. This is not about Jesus fixing God. This is about God sending his Son to fix us. It’s just incredible. This is the heart of the gospel. This is the heart of Christianity.

This is what makes Islam so tragic. Islam has Jesus. I stopped to witness to these guys I mentioned in the sermon last week. There were these three Muslim guys, and they agreed with everything I said, as far as Jesus. I said he came into the world. They said, “Oh yes.” I said he was coming again. They said, “Yes.” I said that he died for our sins, and they said, “No.” The very heart of Christianity is denied by all the religions of the world: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Secularism, Animism, New Ageism. All of them deny this. This is the heart of our faith. God sent the second person of the Trinity, whom he loved infinitely, “This is my Son, whom I love”, into the world to live the life we couldn’t live, die the death we should have died, and he rose. And for anyone who’d just believe and hold fast to this Jesus as their treasure, all their sins forgiven, and all their righteousness provided. This is the greatest religion in the world. It’s the greatest faith in the world. It’s the greatest story in the world. So God was happy with it, and I’m glad he was.

God’s Pleasure in Doing Good to Those Who Hope in Him

We’ve passed the fulcrum, okay? All that talk about God’s delight in himself, and his own works, and his own glory, and his fame. And now the fulcrum of the bruising of the Son, whereby we become the treasures of God, allows us to talk now about how God actually delights in us. It’s kind of why I wrote this book. I wanted to settle for myself that it’s good, it’s biblical, and it’s right. There’s a right way to talk about that, because I think Reformed people like me, who love to lift up the majesty of God, can sometimes downplay the stunning wonder that the God of the universe looks upon imperfect people like us, and finds pleasure in us. C. S. Lewis speaks about this in The Weight of Glory. The eight of glory is God saying to you, “Well done.” He said that’s a glory that will just about crush us, to hear the God of the universe say, “Well done.” Or, to use Lewis’s words, “To realize that you have become a divine ingredient in the divine happiness.”

Singing Over us

The Lord your God is in your midst,
     a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
     he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

That is almost too good to be true. Isaiah 65:19 says:

I will rejoice in Jerusalem
     and be glad in my people . . .

Here’s just a little hermeneutical device, if that phrase means anything, it doesn’t matter. When you read something like this about the Old Testament people of Israel, you may say, “Well, that’s them. Can I really get any comfort from that? I’m a Gentile in the 21st century.” Here’s what you should think. This is 2 Corinthians 1:20: “All the promises of God are yes in Jesus.” Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel. He’s the totality of everything good that was promised to Israel. If you are in Jesus, by faith, you’re in the Messiah, which means you’re part of true Israel, which means every one of the promises counts for you.

That’s the way I read my Bible. I have this exegetical, hermeneutical understanding that enables me to just enjoy all the Bible. All the promises of God are yes in Jesus. I could give you a bunch of other arguments, but just enjoy this as a Gentile Christian. God says:

I will rejoice in Jerusalem
     and be glad in my people;
no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping
     and the cry of distress.

Oh, for the day when all weeping is over, and we don’t just rejoice, but we are rejoiced over. Amazing.

My Delight Is in Her

Isaiah 62:4 says:

You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
     and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
     and your land Married;
for the LORD delights in you,
     and your land shall be married.

Why is that good news? Someone might say, “Why would you ask that? Of course it’s good news!” Here’s the wrong answer: “It’s good news because at the bottom of my joy is that I like to be made much of. I’m happy to be God-centered, as long as God is me-centered.” You could hear all those verses and enjoy them for dead-wrong reasons. You could think, “Oh, he enjoys me? I’m a diamond in the rough. He found me!” Here’s the right answer: “God is totally for me in Christ, totally committed to my ultimate good, my ultimate joy. Therefore, he is totally committed to removing every obstacle to my fullest enjoyment of him.” This is what he is doing, and this is what he delights to do and delights to see in me. My fullest enjoyment of him is what he delights to see in me. In Christ, he sees this as already done. I am perfect, in that I already share the perfection of Christ, because I’m united to him by faith.

Incremental Changes for God’s Delight

But there’s more. In my earthly life, I am being changed incrementally into the kind of person God delights in fully. The me he enjoys is the me that is becoming totally satisfied in God. The me he enjoys is the me in whom he is my highest treasure. You see, the point of talking like this is to make sure that when God’s joy rests upon me, when I become “a divine ingredient in the divine happiness,” I don’t become valuable, distinct from my valuing him. I’m not out there as an independent value source which God finds and draws into himself as a satisfying ingredient of his happiness. It’s not the way. I’m out there, bankrupt. God finds me. He changes me so that I am finding in him my supreme treasure. When I do, he is totally, one billion percent on my side, and delighting in me, which means his delight in me is very God-centered.

I am happy with that. I should be happy about that. I shouldn’t want to compete with God as a source of his joy. He is the source of his joy. I am made a reflector of it by delighting in it. The me he enjoys is the me in whom he is my highest treasure. You get the idea. God delights in me inasmuch as I delight in him. In this way, his delight in me is both my highest joy and his greatest glory.

Psalm 147:10–11 says:

His delight is not in the strength of the horse,
     nor his pleasure in the legs of a man,
but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,
     in those who hope in his steadfast love.

That’s what I was just trying to say, only it’s in the Bible. So, the eyes of the Lord are taking pleasure in certain people. Who? Those who hope in his love. It’s those who say, “You’re my hope, you’re my treasure.” So God treasures people who find in him their greatest treasure. In other words, the essence of the Christ-likeness that God is producing in us and enjoying in us is our finding him to be our greatest treasure. “Hoping in him” means that we are treasuring all that he is and promises to be for us. When we hope in God’s action on our behalf, what makes us most glad about that action is that it reveals more of him and helps us see and savor him more fully.

God’s Pleasure in the Obedience of His People — Especially Love

Now, what we’re doing here is moving from those who hope — which is an act of the heart — to behaviors. This is about God’s pleasure in the obedience of his people, especially their public acts of love. Samuel said:

Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
     as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
     and to listen than the fat of rams (1 Samuel 15:22).

I take that to mean, no. He has much greater delight in obeying. So God delights in the obedience of his kings and the obedience of his people.

If faith, hope, and treasuring Christ — I’m taking all those as one — is the disposition that magnifies God’s worth, then the obedience, the sacrificial love for people that overflows from that faith, hope, and treasuring is most pleasing to God, because it fulfills his purpose to display his glory openly and fill the earth with it. In other words, the behavior that God delights in is the fruit of the hope that God delights in and the faith that God delights in. Section number seven was that God takes pleasure in those who hope in his steadfast love, but hope is invisible. I can’t see into your hearts right now and see what you’re hoping in. Faith is invisible. I can’t tell what you’re trusting in. It’s only when you start to do things and say things that I start to say, “Oh, I see what’s coming out. I see the kinds of words that are coming out and the kinds of actions that are coming out.” Which means your faith is going public, or not.

The point of this section is God likes for his glory to be publicly displayed, not just internally. God can look into your heart. If you’re paralyzed, lying in the hospital and unable to do a single thing for him, maybe not even blink your eyes, he totally sees your faith and loves it. You don’t have to do a thing in order to be right with God. It’s just, “I’m lying here, I can’t move a muscle, and I trust you.” And he sees it and loves it. But if you’re not paralyzed and all you do is lie around all day, something’s wrong between what’s in your heart and what’s out in public. God means for the invisible faith that he loves, delights in, and approves of, to go public with fruit.

Faith Working Through Love

Where does our behavior come from? Galatians 5:6 says:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

So there it is. Faith, which is invisible, becomes visible through acts of love. So I go home today and take my 16-year-old girl out for lunch. How will I talk to her? If I’m trusting in Jesus, resting in Jesus, knowing myself a sinner forgiven by Jesus, not consumed with myself and the need for her but wholly there for her, then I will probably say things and act things in a way that if somebody were watching, they’d say, “That’s good fruit.” But if I’m not believing, I’m not trusting, all anxious, all self-centered, I’m probably going to hammer her, or put some expectations on her. Do you see how that works?

First Timothy 1:5 says:

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and good conscience and a sincere faith.

So, love is the aim from sincere faith. It’s the same as Galatians 5:6. Second Thessalonians 1:11 says:

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power . . .

So faith produces the work by God’s power. Romans 1:5 says:

Through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith . . .

Obedience comes from faith. Or listen to Romans 14:23:

Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

That’s amazing. Why does it matter that we move from the internal to the external? Because God being glorified publicly matters. God wants to be known as great publicly. Matthew 5:16 says:

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

The Father in heaven wants to be publicly known as glorious. So, a Christian who’s all private — doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything, “just me and Jesus” — is not what God is after in the world. He wants people saved and then go public with their deeds and their words.

How Faith Produces Love

How does faith and hope and treasuring Christ produce that? We’re shown that it does. It’s faith working through love. But how does it? And here’s a beautiful illustration of how it does:

For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part (2 Corinthians 8:2).

My question for those people is, where did a wealth of generosity come from? Because that’s public. If you’re known by your peers as an incredibly generous person, you’re just a giver. You’re just ready to loan, ready to share, ready to give your time, ready to give money, you’re just there for others, people are going to wonder, “Why’d you get like that?” And the answer here is it wasn’t the absence of affliction and it wasn’t the absence of poverty. Well, what was it?

It was the “abundance of joy,” overflowing with generosity. Section seven was that God delights in those who hope in his steadfast love. Section eight is that God delights in the public acts of obedience. And the reason those go together is because this joy is what produced this generosity. The generosity is public. Paul was using it in the letter to the Corinthians, because he had seen it in the Macedonians, and he wanted to stir up the Corinthians by that amazing demonstration of what? Of satisfaction in the grace of God, this joy.

Here’s another picture of it. Hebrews 10:32–34 says:

But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property . . .

Now, I want to know where that comes from. Here’s the situation. The gospel had come, people had believed and been enlightened. Some of them had been imprisoned for their faith. And the other group had to decide, “Will we show compassion and risk our houses and lives to go identify with the prisoners? Because they’ll know we’re with them if we go.” And it says they did and they did it joyfully. So they’re walking to the prison singing Martin Luther’s song (1500 years before it was written), “Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still.” They said, “We’re going to the prison. That’s what love does.”

How? How did they do that? There’s the answer right there in that logical word:

Since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

That is simply saying they hope in the steadfast love of God. And when they hope in God more than they hope in stuff, they’re released to love. Love is public, and God gets glory, both for the invisible that he can see, and the visible that others can see. When I see people living like this, I stand in awe of the grace of God. I just love the grace of God when I see this kind of service coming from people who I know, in themselves, are selfish.

For the Joy Set Before Him

Jesus was driven the same way:

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2).

How did he endure the cross? For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross. The cross was the most loving act in history, and it was sustained, driven, and carried by hope, or joy, that was set before him. That’s exactly the way it’s going to work for you this afternoon, if you get what I’m saying. You will be tempted to be selfish this afternoon in some way, and you will either be selfish, because you need the pleasures that come from whatever choice of action you’re choosing, like not helping somebody or whatever. Or you will be unselfish, carried by a sense of deep, restful contentment that God is for you and he’s on your side. You have infinite treasure in front of you and you don’t need it all now. That’s the way you get freed for love.

The words, “Enter into the joy of your master,” will reach their final and fullest expression. We will sit with him on the throne of God. We will not be God, but we will share as much in God and his joy as it is possible for a finite, saved creature to know. And we will sing with the energy of a co-ruler of the universe the praises of God’s excellency forever.

The Father’s Good Pleasure

Here’s the conclusion: The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love (Scougal) God’s worth and excellency is supreme, because all of his delight is ultimately delight in the greatest excellency, his own. Because when you are acting in love — like Hebrews 10, or Jesus in Hebrews 12, or the Macedonians in 2 Corinthians 8 — because of the overflow of the abundance of joy in God, what that love shows is that God is all-satisfying, and God delights in being seen as all-satisfying. So at every stage, at every delight, all over the Bible, I’m arguing God ultimately delights in the manifestation of his glory.

It’s almost too good to be true, we’re two minutes over, and we’ll take three more minutes, maybe. This text right here is a good place to end:

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom (Luke 12:32).

Fear not, Bethlehem, fear not, all you guests who are here. Don’t fear, even though you’re little, even though you’re a flock, which means you’re sheep, and sheep are stupid — no offense, I am too — and you’re threatened with fear, let’s just all walk out of here in two minutes fearless. Why? Because our God takes pleasure in something. He’s our Father. He’s our king. He’s our shepherd. Isn’t that remarkable? How many of those images are included here? We’re a flock, so he’s a shepherd. We’re children, and he’s a Father. We’re subjects, and he’s the king.

What he takes pleasure in is to give you the kingdom. God is not begrudging, he’s not stingy, he’s not arm-folded in the corner of the universe, thinking of how few he can give the kingdom to. He is lavish and his pleasure is to give you the kingdom. The only people he is furious with are the people who won’t have it. But that’s not you, I hope. It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. The pleasures of God are your salvation.