"I believe some are afraid to say anything about this great doctrine…This doctrine stirs up your carnal pride, does it not? Men want to be somebody. They do not like to lie down before God, and have it preached to them that God can do just as he wills with them. Ah! You may hate this doctrine, but it is what the Scripture tells us.”
For this second installment, here is the truth I want us to consider: God's happiness is in Himself
What we have not yet explored is how this unshakable happiness of God is a happiness in Himself. We saw last week that God has the sovereign power to do whatever He pleases, yet we have not yet seen specifically what it is that pleases Him. God delights in His work of redemptive history, but why is it that contemplation and execution of His plan of redemptive history bring joy to His heart?
So, what makes God happy?
What is it about redemptive history that delights God’s heart?
In order to answer this, we must survey what God pursues in all of His works. If we could discover the one thing God pursues in everything He does, we will know what He delights in most and why He delights in it. Thus, we would find out what is uppermost in God’s own affections.
First, God delights in His glory:
When we look at Scripture and survey God’s work in redemptive history from the Old Testament to the New, we discover that God’s own glory is uppermost in His own affections. In everything He does, His purpose is to preserve and display His glory. When I say that God’s glory is the uppermost in His own affections, it means that He puts a greater value on it than on anything else. He delights in His glory over all things. We see that His glory is so important that the Scripture says the He will give it to no one else,
Isaiah 42:8 I am the LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, Nor My praise to graven images.
Isaiah 48:11 And My glory I will not give to another.
But what is meant by the word “glory”? This word is hard to define; hard to get a handle on. We could say that it is the beauty of His manifold perfections. It can refer to the bright and awesome radiance that sometimes breaks forth in visible manifestations of God’s person, with special emphasis on the impression that this manifestation makes upon others. It can also refer to the infinite moral excellence of God’s character. It is a description of the reality of God’s infinite greatness and worth. Therefore, God’s ultimate goal is to preserve and display His infinite and awesome greatness and worth- His glory.
We see God delighting in His glory in several major themes throughout Scripture.
Creation
Genesis 1:26-27 26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
I think I could probably write for an entire year and still not cover the depths and breadth of the doctrine of humanity and the Image of God, but let's just pause for a minute hear to examine something.
What is man’s purpose here? It is to image God. God made man like Himself in order that through his dominion over the world and his filling the world, he might display (image) God, who has ultimate dominion. He was given this status as image bearer so that he could reflect the glory of his Creator whose image he bears. God’s purpose in creation was to fill the earth with His glory. This is made known in Num 14:21,“all the earth shall be full of the glory of the Lord," as well as Is. 43:7, "the Lord refers to his people as those whom he created for his glory." God delights in His own glory in creation.
The Giving of the Law
Exodus 20:3-5 "You shall have no other gods before Me. 4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5 "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me."
When God says that we are to have no other God’s before Him and that He is a jealous God, He means that His first aim in giving the law is that we give him the honor that He alone is due. Now, He had just shown Himself abundantly gracious and powerful by delivering the people from Pharaoh, and now He demands in the law the appropriate response from his people- to love Him and keep His commands. To love God means to delight in Him and be captivated by who He is and to value Him above all things. It is about glorifying God. The giving of the law was about God's glory.
Jesus
First, we see that Jesus life and ministry were devoted to the glorifying of the Father.
John 7:18 "He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who is seeking the glory of the One who sent Him, He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.
John 17:4 4 "I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. Therefore, we see that Jesus all consuming desire was to glorify his Father by doing His will
His death and resurrection was about the glory of God:
John 12:27-28 "Now My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, 'Father, save Me from this hour '? But for this purpose I came to this hour. 28 "Father, glorify Your name." Then a voice came out of heaven: "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again."
Here, Jesus weighed the options of whether to escape the hour of death or to go through with it. He chose to obey, knowing that through dying, He would glorify the Father.
His second coming is about the glory of God:
2 Thessalonians 1:9-10 These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, 10 when He comes to be glorified in His saints on that day, and to be marveled at among all who have believed-- for our testimony to you was believed.
Revelation 21:23 23 And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.
John 17:24 24 "Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.
There are many more examples of God’s work in redemptive history, but these are the high points. What can we conclude from this? That God’s chief aim is to Glorify God and enjoy Himself forever. God does have many other goals in what He does, yet none of them are higher than this: His passion is to exalt the value of His glory. This is why He seeks to display it and to oppose those who belittle it. God infinitely loves His glory. In other words, God loves Himself infinitely. As we stated last week, God would be unrighteous and sinful if (just like us) if He valued anything more than that which was supremely valuable. And since He Himself is the supremely valuable, He must delight in His own worth. For the scriptures do refer to Him as the King of Glory
Second, God delights in the glory of His Son:
Naturally, because the Son is part of the Godhead, it makes sense that God, who delights in Himself, would delight in the Son. Because the Son is God, when the Father beheld the Son from all eternity, He was beholding the exact representation of Himself (Heb 1:3; 2 Cor 4:4). What is amazing is that in looking at these Scriptures, we come to understand that through all eternity God the Father has beheld the image of His own glory, perfectly represented in the Son. Therefore, one of the best ways to think about God’s enjoyment of His own glory is to think of it as the delight He has in the Son who is the perfect reflection of that glory (Jhn 17:24-26).
Within the relationship of the Godhead, God is the uppermost in His own affections for all eternity. This is His very nature! He has begotten and loved the Son from all eternity. Therefore, God has been supremely and eternally happy in the fellowship of the Trinity.
Third, God delights in the glory of His Work:
Psalm 19:1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.
One author states (I think it might have been John Piper) that in creation, God “went public” with the glory that reverberates joyfully between the Father and the Son. In other words, there is something generous about the fullness of God’s joy that inclines it to overflow. The joy that God has in Himself does not stay in Himself. The very nature of it demands that His joy wants to share itself. It is unselfish joy. This is the impulse that caused God to create the world. In other words, God did not create because of some weakness within Himself, rather, He created as an overflow of His joy.
Jonathan Edwards once stated about creation,
"All his works praise him, and his glory shines brightly from them all."
Why is it so important to understand God’s glory and His desire for it?
Because if we want to worship properly and live properly, the desire for the glory of God must be uppermost in our affections, since it is uppermost in His. As we will talk about later, all of life is worship. Therefore, all of life must be about the glory of God. If we come into the service time and are doing this for any other reason than for the glory of God, we are missing it! Worship is not about us or about how we feel, or about what we can get out of it. It is not about the type of music. It is about giving glory to God. It is about letting our hearts focus on all of His manifold perfections and taking the utmost delight in them.
God is not glorified in our half-hearted devotion. Some folks have no passion to be in the worship service because their focus is totally wrong. Some come only when it is beneficial or expedient. Some see church as a religious activity or something to check off a list. Part of the reason our devotion and passion becomes almost non-existent is because we have ceased to focus on the glory of God and the joy that comes to us when we enjoy Him. We then become so self absorbed that we totally forget that it is not about us.
This is so important in worship. When we start to hunger and thirst after God and His glory, things change. There is a new dynamic to our life, a new passion, and a new reason for being. We cease being stale and become alive and full of the fire of God.
If we want to worship correctly, we must first grasp this key concept: The glory of God is always the issue, for it is the uppermost in His affection. Where the glory of God is not first and foremost, the presence and experience of God- the manifestation of His glory, will be lacking. Our desire should be that we have churches that are full of the glory of God. The only way that this will happen is when disciples develop a one track mind that is intently focused on God being glorified. This is our reason for being. This is why we are alive, this is why we have been redeemed- for the glory of God.
Finally, God has called us to share in his glory. Though God does not give His glory to another, He has called us to share in it- to experience it first hand,
The eternal state will be one of total enjoyment and experience of the glory of God. Because God is an all-loving being, the joy that He has in His glory causes Him to want to share that joy with others. God wants you to experience His glory. He wants His character and His manifold perfections to make such a life changing impact up on you that you become absolutely ruined. You become good for nothing else except displaying the glory of God. So how do we do this? It is rather simple, yet can only be done by the enlightening and empowering of the Holy Spirit. The way that we do this is to simply take that thing which God values most- Himself and His glory, and make it our supreme value as well.