God's Passion for His Glory E-Book

John Piper

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Seitenzahl: 488

Beschreibung

In his essay The End for Which God Created the World, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards proclaimed that God's ultimate end is the manifestation of his glory in the highest happiness of his creatures. Pastor John Piper has devoted his years of ministry to exploring the implications of this stunning truth for life and ministry. Understanding that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him has made all the difference for John Piper-and can transform your life as well. Here Piper passionately demonstrates the relevance of Edwards's ideals for the personal and public lives of Christians today through his own book-length introduction to Edwards's The End for Which God Created the World. This book also contains the complete essay supplemented by almost a hundred of Piper's insightful explanatory notes. The result is a powerful and persuasive presentation of the things that matter most in the Christian life.

Leseprobe

God’s Passion for His Glory

Copyright © 1998 by John Piper

Published by Crossway BooksA publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from The New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1977, and 1995 by The Lockman Foundation, and are used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked AT are the author’s own translation.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked ESV® are from the ESV Bible (the Holy Bible English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked RSV are from The Revised Standard Version. Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

Cover design: Faceout Studio, www.faceoutstudio.com

Cover Photo: Dale Sanders/Masterfile

First printing, 1998

First trade paper edition, 2006

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Piper, John, 1946-God’s passion for his glory : living the vision of Jonathan Edwards with the complete text of “The end for which God created the world”by Jonathan Edwards / John Piper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-745-6 ISBN 10: 1-58134-745-61. Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758. 2. Creation—History of doctrines—18th century. 3. Glory of God—History of doctrines—18th century. 4. Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758. End for which God created the world. 5. Creation—Early works to 1800.6. Glory of God—Early works to 1800. I. Title.BT695.P57 1998 231.7'65—dc2198-19029

TOJONATHAN EDWARDS

“God is not the God of the deadbut of the living; for all live to Him.”

L U K E 2 0 : 3 8

The emanation or communication of the divine fullness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him, has relation indeed both to God and the creature : but it has relation to God as its fountain, as the thing communicated is something of its internal fullness. The water in the stream is something of the fountain; and the beams of the sun are something of the sun. And again, they have relation to God as their object: for the knowledge communicated is the knowledge of God; and the love communicated, is the love of God; and the happiness communicated, is joy in God. In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged, his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, and the middle, and the end.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

The End for Which God Created the World

T A B L E   O F   C O N T E N T S

Preface

Acknowledgments

P A R T    O N EA Personal Encounter with Jonathan Edwardsby John Piper

CHAPTER ONE: The End for Which God Created the World Why Publish an Old Book?A Personal and Public Concern

CHAPTER TWO: Jonathan Edwards, The Man and His Life Learning from an Unmodern Evangelical

CHAPTER THREE: Jonathan Edwards, A Mind in Love with God The Private Life of a Modern Evangelical

CHAPTER FOUR: Jonathan Edwards, Enjoying God and the Transformation of Culture The Public Life of a Modern Evangelical

P A R T    T W OThe End for Which God Created the Worldby Jonathan Edwards

A Note on How to ReadThe End for Which God Created the World

Concerning the Text Used in This Edition ofThe End for Which God Created the World

INTRODUCTION: Containing Explanations of Terms and General Positions

CHAPTER ONE: Wherein Is Considered What Reason Teaches Concerning This Affair

SECTION ONE: Some things observed in general which reason dictates

SECTION TWO: Some further observations concerning those things which reason leads us to suppose God aimed at in the creation of the world

SECTION THREE: Wherein it is considered how, on the suppositionof God’s making the aforementioned things his last end, he manifests a supreme and ultimate regard to himself in all his works

SECTION FOUR: Some objections considered, which may be made against the reasonableness of what has been said of God making himself his last end

CHAPTER TWO: Wherein It Is Inquired What Is to Be Learned fromHoly Scriptures Concerning God’s Last End in the Creation of the World

SECTION ONE: The Scriptures represent God as making himself his own last end in the creation of the world

SECTION TWO: Wherein some positions are advanced concerning a just method of arguing in this affair from what we find in the Holy Scriptures

SECTION THREE: Particular texts of Scripture which show that God’s glory is an ultimate end of the creation

SECTION FOUR: Places of Scripture that lead us to suppose that God created the world for his name, to make his perfections known; and that he made it for his praise

SECTION FIVE: Places of Scripture from whence it may be argued that communication of good to the creature was one thing which God had in view as an ultimate end ofthe creation of the world

SECTION SIX: Wherein is considered what is meant by the glory of God and the name of God in Scripture, when spokenof as God’s end in his works

SECTION SEVEN: Showing that the ultimate end of the creation of the world is but one, and what that one end is

A Note on Resources: Desiring God Ministries

O T H E R    B O O K S B Y    T H E    A U T H O R

Love Your Enemies: Jesus’ Love Command in the Synoptic Gospels and the Early Christian Paraenesis (Baker Book House,1991, orig. 1979)

The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23; 2nd Edition (Baker Book House, 1993, orig.1983

The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker Book House, 1990)

The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Multnomah Press, 1991)

Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (edited with Wayne Grudem, Crossway, 1991)

What's the Difference: Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible (Crossway, 1991)

Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions (Baker Book House, 1993)

The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in Future Grace (Multnomah Press, 1995)

Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Multnomah Press, revised 1996)

A Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer (Crossway, 1997)

A Godward Life: Savoring the Supremacy of God in All of Life (Multnomah Press, 1997)

P R E F A C E

T he longer I live, the more clearly I see my dependence those who have gone before. The more I know of what others have thought, the less original am content to have it so. For, at least in the realm of ancient Preacher does not overstate the case when he says: "There is nothing new under the sun"(Ecclesiastes 1:9)

This book is witness to my calling as a secondary teacher, a primary one. Jonathan Edwards is a primary teacher in Christian church; I am secondary. The difference was described Mortimer Adler in 1939:

[The secondary teacher] should regard himself as learning from the masters along with his [students]. He should not act as if he were a primary teacher, using a great book as if it were just another textbook of the sort one of his colleagues might write. He should not masquerade as one who knows and can teach by virtue discoveries. . . . The primary should be the primary sources and such a teacher functions honestly only if he does not aggrandize himself by coming between the great books and their. . . readers. He should not “come between” as a nonconductor, but he should come between as a mediator—as one who helps the less competent make more effective contacts with the best minds.1

This is the role I want to play in relation to Jonathan Edwards his book,2 The End for Which God Created the World. Jonathan Edwards is in a class by himself in American history, perhaps the history of Christendom. This will become plain in the pages that follow. Paul Ramsey, the editor of Edwards’s Ethical Writings in the Yale critical edition, agrees: “One studies the time and back-grounds of some men in order to understand them. Others have such rare greatness that one studies them in order to understand their times, or even to comprehend the deepest meaning of the intellectual and other influences that were effectual upon them. Jonathan Edwards was such an original.”3 It is not so much that Edwards dealt with new reality but, as Vergilius Ferm said, he “seemed to have had the powers and the drive to set his own stamp upon anything which came to his purview.”4

But even more important than making all things his own in unique ways was his riveted focus on God, and his unwavering passion to see all that could be seen of God in this life. “To live with all my might, while I do live”5 was his resolution. He applied it mainly to the pursuit of God. Thus he resolved again, “When I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can towards solving it, if circumstances do not hinder.” The channel where this passion for God flowed was the channel of unremitting, prayerful thinking on the truths of Scripture. Hence he resolved once more “to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.”

Which means in the end that Edwards too was a secondary teacher—as are all honest Christian pastors and theologians. “He was a man who put faithfulness to the Word of God before every other consideration.”6 Seeing the unlimited expanse of divine Reality that is really there in Scripture, not imagining new things, was his passion. Over every vast field of divine knowledge Edwards erected this banner: “I think the Word of God teaches us more things concerning it . . . than has been generally believed, and that it exhibits many things concerning it exceeding glorious and wonderful than have been taken notice of.”7 In simple modern English: we have scarcely begun to see all of God that the Scriptures give us to see, and what we have not yet seen is exceedingly glorious.

Thus, in the most profound sense we are all secondary teachers and secondary beings. Only One is Primary. Why he created us, and how to join him in fulfilling that end, are the most important questions in the world. Only he can reveal the answer. That is why Jonathan Edwards gave himself to the Word of God and wrote The End for Which God Created the World (printed as Part Two of this book), and that is why I take my stand on his shoulders and write about God’s Passion for His Glory.

For over thirty years I have been trying to see and savor this God-centered, soul-satisfying, sin-destroying vision of reality. Part One of this book is a focused glimpse into the roots of this vision as I have come to see it in the life and thought of Jonathan Edwards. In the vein of other concerned evangelicals in our day,8 Chapter One argues that modern evangelicalism is being doctrinally hollowed out by its love affair with pragmatism and numerical success. Edwards’s relentless God-centeredness and devotion to the Biblical contours of doctrine are profoundly needed in our day. In the second half of that chapter I offer fifteen summary statements of the implications of Edwards’s vision for Christian thought and life.

In Chapter Two the reader is given a mini-biography of Edwards. It’s a story that enables the reader to enjoy the man, and see his theology in the flow of his life and ministry. It puts flesh on the theological bones. Here you may meet “one of the most holy, humble and heavenly-minded men, that the world has seen, since the apostolic age” (Ashbel Green, President of the College of New Jersey, 1829), but also “the profoundest reasoner, and the greatest divine . . . that America ever produced” (Samuel Davies, 1759)—a man who was “greatest in his attribute of regnant permeating, irradiating spirituality” (John De Witt, 1912).9

In Chapter Three I take the reader on a personal tour along my thirty-year path of discovering the major writings of Jonathan Edwards. In this way I try to combine my own personal story with the life and writings of Edwards to show their meaning and relevance for at least one modern evangelical. My hope is that you will see at work in this chapter not just one, but two illustrations—one living and one dead—of “A Mind in Love with God.”

Finally, in Chapter Four, I take up Edwards’s radically God-centered view of virtue—which is, in fact, the end for which God created the world—and apply its scathing relevance to cultural transformation and world channelization. The rediscovery of Edwards’s God centered moral vision in The End for Which God Created the World is my aim. And I pray that this endeavor will serve the purpose of God in our day to fill the hollow sounds of our God-neglect and its fatal successes. May the Lord restore a passion for truth and a passion for his glory, which has largely “disappeared from the modern evangelical world.”10

1 Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), p. 60.

2 Strictly speaking, The End for Which God Created the World is half a book, since it was published in 1765 (seven years after Edwards’s death) as the first of a pair of treatises entitled Two Dissertations. The other of the two was The Nature of True Virtue. Edwards saw the two a pair and envisioned them published together. See Part One, Chapter One, footnote 3, p. 22 why I believe publishing The End for Which God Created the World alone is warranted.

3 Paul Ramsey, “Editor’s Introduction” to The Ethical Writings, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 12.

4 Vergilius Ferm, Puritan Sage (New York: Library Publishers, 1953), p. xiv.

5 The seventy resolutions of the young Edwards are found in Sereno Dwight, Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards, in: The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), pp. xx-xxi.

6 Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards, A New Biography (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987) p. 471. If the reader desires a good starting point in the study of the life and ministry of Jonathan Edwards, I recommend this biography very highly.

7 Jonathan Edwards, An Essay on the Trinity, in: Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. by Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co. Ltd., 1971), pp. 127-128.

8 For example, Os Guinness, Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do about It (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994); Os Guinness and John Seel, eds., No God But God: Breaking with the Idols of Our Age (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992); Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994); David Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993); Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994); Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), p. 26.

9 These quotes are taken from Murray, Jonathan Edwards, A New Biography, pp. vx-vxii.

10 “It is this God, majestic and holy in his being, this God whose love knows no bounds because his holiness knows no limits, who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world” (Wells, No Place for Truth, p. 300).

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

God’s gifts in this project have been many. Eric Johnson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Northwestern College (St. Paul, Minnesota), believed that Jonathan Edwards’s The End for Which God Created the World was worthy of publication because of its God-centered vision of reality. He encouraged me all along the way and said he hoped to use the book as part of his curriculum in helping students grasp the supremacy of God in all of their studies. Not only that, he worked through the complex thought of Edwards’s entire book twice, seeking the best way to handle its eighteenth-century features for the sake of modern readers. If more changes were not made to the original (see “Concerning the Text”, pp. 121-123), chalk it up to my stubborn commitment to stay close to Edwards’s own wording. Thank you, Eric, for your gentle and unwavering allegiance to the supremacy of God in all branches of learning and life.

The hard work of getting the actual words of Edwards from the Edward Hickman 1834 edition into electronic form for editing was done by Debra Lacher, whose work was as near to flaw-less as a human being this side of heaven can make it. I was simply amazed as I worked my way through it making comparisons with other editions. Thank you, Deb, for your love of the truth and the glory of God, and for channeling that love through the remarkable gifts God has given you for the sake of God’s people.

The actual edition of Edwards’s The End for Which God Created the World on which we leaned was The Banner of Truth republication of the Hickman edition (Edinburgh, 1974). Thanks to Mervyn T. Barter, General Manager of The Banner of Truth Trust, and the other members of the Trust for giving us permission to stand on your publishing shoulders. Your two-volume Works of Jonathan Edwards continues to serve the cause of Christ in extraordinary ways. I thank God that you keep it in print.

Thanks to Pedro Govantes, President of The Jonathan Edwards Institute, for inviting me to address the annual conference of the Institute in the summer of 1997. Chapters Three and Four of this book are adapted from those two lectures. It was an honor to be associated with an Institute devoted to exalting the God of Jonathan Edwards. In addition, thanks to the former editors of The Reformed Journal (November, 1978, Vol. 28, Issue 11, pp. 13-17) where some of the material in Chapters Two and Three was first published.1

The final preparation of this work was done during a four-week writing leave that I was generously given by my fellow elders of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I do not take this for granted, because all the staff and elders bear a greater load when one of us is not there. Thanks to all of you for loving what this book is about enough to rejoice in my being away—and for wanting me back.

I have in my library a photocopy of The End for Which God Created the World from an old edition that I bought during seminary days. It is now triple-marked in different colors, with worshipful slashes, checks and asterisks scattered throughout. I owe the purchase of this copy, and my introduction to the theology of Jonathan Edwards, to Daniel Fuller, who led me into the truth, not through the door of the eighteenth century, but through the first-century door of Romans and Galatians and The Sermon on the Mount, and tied it all together in the final class called The Unity of the Bible.2 The severe discipline of exegesis, proposition by proposition, sentence diagram by sentence diagram, and arc by arc, opened a window on a world of glory that has never been shut. Thank you again, Dan. The debt will never be repaid.

Rick Gamache tracked down obscure references for me and gave my four chapters such a careful reading that I was spared mis-takes that three other readers did not catch. Carol Steinbach stands ever ready to help me make every book as useful as possible by creating indexes. I’m a stickler for indexes for one simple reason: I want to know where the things are that I have written. Where is that great quote by Mark Noll? Just look up Noll in the index, and I have it! Carol and I assume a few others might want to do the same. Hence the labor of indexing. Thanks again, Carol.

What I owe to Jonathan Edwards is expressed in part by the existence of this book. My “personal encounter” with him has been a thirty-year-long journey into some very high places. He may not have been the ideal pastor, since he studied too much and mingled too little. But for all that, he has been a pastor to many of us hungry shepherds. And because of that I am sure the disgruntled saints of Northampton have long since forgiven him.

The same thirty years have been spent in marriage to you, Noël. You have read and shaped every book I have written. I am thankful for every one of the ten thousand suggestions you have made—even the ones I declined. You have gotten your Edwards distilled (imperfectly, I am sure) through your husband’s theological brewing. I do not doubt that, under God’s incomparable grace, this is one reason that we have an “uncommon union.”

1 John Piper, “A Personal Encounter with Jonathan Edwards,” The Reformed Journal 28, no. 11(November 1978): 13–17.

2 See the published fruit of that class in Daniel Fuller, The Unity of the Bible: Unfolding God’s Plan for Humanity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992).

P a r t O n e

A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER WITH JONATHAN EDWARDS

by John Piper

No man is more relevant to the present condition of Christianity than Jonathan Edwards.

D. MARTYN LLOYD-JONESThe Puritan Experiment in the New World

Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world-view or his profoundly theological philosophy. The dis-appearance of Edwards’s perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.

MARK NOLL“Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Philosophy, and the Secularization of American Christian Thought” in The Reformed Journal

It is my belief that the prayers and work of those who love and obey Christ in our world may yet prevail as they keep the message of such a man as Jonathan Edwards.

CHARLES COLSON

“Introduction”to Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections

The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.

JONATHAN EDWARDSThe End for Which God Created the World

The End for Which God Created the World [is] . . .unsurpassed in terms of its theological grandeur.

DAVID BRANDProfile of the Last Puritan

C h a p t e r    O n e

THE END FOR WHICH GOD CREATED THE WORLD WHY PUBLISH AN OLD BOOK?

A Personal and Public Concern

The message of Jonathan Edwards in The End for Which God Created the World is an intensely personal concern for me and a word of great public significance. In that book, a vision of God is displayed that took me captive thirty years ago and has put its stamp on every part of my life and ministry. But, more important than my own experience, is the immense significance of Edwards’s vision of God for the wider public of our day.

SECTION ONE

An American Tragedy

Jonathan Edwards is one of the great fathers of evangelical Christianity in America. But it is a great tragedy, as Mark Noll observes, that “the theocentric emphasis of Edwards has played a remarkably small role in the history of evangelical Protestants.”1 There are reasons for this. Partly it is because our whole culture is inhospitable to such a radically God-centered vision of life. Noll argues that since Edwards’s day 250 years ago,

evangelicals have not thought about life from the ground up as Christians, because their entire culture has ceased to do so. Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards’s perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.2

Unsurpassed in Theological Grandeur

This is why the publication of The End for Which God Created the World is a cultural, religious, and evangelical concern. Edwards’s book (together with True Virtue3), Noll suggests, is “perhaps the best place to encounter both the breathtaking vision of divine glory and the human strain required to take in that vision.”4 I agree. So does David Brand in his book, Profile of the Last Puritan. He says The End for Which God Created the World, is “a work which I have come to regard as unsurpassed in terms of its theological grandeur.”5

My prayer is that the evangelical church today would stand in awe of the “breath-taking vision of divine glory” declared with “theological grandeur” in The End for Which God Created the World. This is one reason why I have undertaken to publish the book below on pages 115-251.

Hard and Helpful for Impatient Pragmatists

The difficulties that stand in the way of seeing this vision are daunting, but hopeful. They are daunting because, as Noll hinted, “the human strain required to take in that vision” is immense. The book is hard to read. It was hard to read in its own day6 and it is harder today. Americans, as a whole (and evangelicals are little different in this), are not given to thinking much, let alone thinking at the level Edwards demands of us. This is especially true about doctrine. We are pragmatic. We demand quick solutions. We define success in measurable quantities. We have little patience with doctrinal precision. And we pastors who are infected with the pragmatic virus tend to justify our indifference to doctrine mainly by the fact that such reflection is not what the audience is looking for. Besides, it is stressful for relationships.

The recent lamentations7 over the drift of evangelicalism into pragmatic, doctrinally vague, audience-driven, culturally uncritical Christianity are, in my judgment, warranted and needed, in spite of the fact that, at the level of professional scholarship, there have been remarkable advances in the past fifty years.8 As a whole, and in the dominant shaping forces of evangelicalism, the criticism of Harry Blamires in 1963 is probably more true than ever: “There is no Christian Mind. . . . The Christian Mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness unmatched in Christian History.”9

The increasing abandonment of truth and moral absolutes10 in our culture, as militant diversity threatens all firm conviction, has dramatically influenced the evangelical mindset. The political spin doctors who specialize in deflecting attention away from truth onto feelings and relationships and styles have their counterpart in the evangelical tendency to avoid doctrinal disputes by casting issues in terms of demeanor and method rather than truth. Serious disagreements are covered over, while vague language and pragmatic concerns preserve hollow unity at the expense of theological substance and Biblical clarity and power.

A Voice of Lament from Sri Lanka

The lament over the pragmatic hollowing out of evangelical conviction may be felt with unusual poignancy when it comes, not just from the intellectual elite, but from a person like Ajith Fernando, who leads Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka. He not only delivers solid exposition around the world, but also works among the poor and has wept over the horrors of 50,000 casualties of insurgency in one year of Sri Lanka’s unrest. That was 1989, and he says, simply, “I struggled much with despair that year.”11

His strength, he says, came from the truth, and in that context he laments what he sees happening in the West: “A major shift . . .has taken place in western evangelicalism where truth has been replaced by pragmatism as the major influencer of thought and life. This path is suicidal.” He is heartened that voices are being raised, but then he says, “However, I feel that many evangelical leaders are so caught up in and blinded by this bondage to pragmatism that even though they may heartily endorse pleas to return to greater dependence on truth, endorsements make minimal inroads into their ministry styles and strategies.”12 There is simply too little patience with the particularities of Biblical propositions that embody precious, life-sustaining doctrine.

So Much of Man, So Little of God

Jonathan Edwards had a profound insight into this very state of affairs, and it has to do directly with the absence of God-centeredness: “It is one great reason why speculative points [of doctrine] are thought to be of so little importance, that the modern religion consists so little in respect to the divine Being, and almost wholly in benevolence to men.”13 In other words, the sickness that needs healing is the main hindrance to the remedy.

This means that Jonathan Edwards’s “grand style of feeling and thinking is not ours and is alien to our way of life.”14 Edwards’s utter seriousness—his “blood-earnestness,” as Thomas Chalmers called it—puts him out of sync with our chatty, humorous, entertainment-oriented, cartoon-illustrated spirituality.15 Edwards’s sense of the desperate condition of mankind without God is so weighty that it takes our breath away. H. Richard Niebuhr commented that Edwards’s awareness of the precariousness of life put him in a rare class: “He recognized what Kierkegaard meant when he described life as treading water with ten thousand fathoms beneath us.”16

We Need So Much More Than Benjamin Franklin

But at this very point the daunting difficulties in seeing Edwards’s great vision of God may give way to hope. It may be that the theological impoverishment of the American church, and the precariousness of life, and the weariness with “successful” superficiality will make the voice of Jonathan Edwards more compelling than he has been for centuries.

Several others have held out this hope as they have contrasted the influence of Edwards and his contemporary Benjamin Franklin. Randall Stewart argues that

Franklin started us on the road which has led to a gadgeteers’ paradise. But now that it is becoming startlingly clear that gad-gets can’t save us, and may all too readily destroy us . . . now that Dr. Franklin’s lightning rod begins to look, from one view-point, like a pathetic symbol of human pride and inadequacy, while Edwards’s soul-probings seem more searching to this generation of readers perhaps than they have ever seemed before, it is possible that Edwards will yet emerge, is already emerging, as the more useful, the more truly helpful, of the two.17

Perry Miller, who professed no share in Edwards’s faith, had a similar view of our condition: “[Edwards] is a reminder that, although our civilization has chosen to wander in the more genial meadows to which Franklin beckoned it, there come periods, either through dis-aster or through self-knowledge, when applied science and Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth seem not a sufficient philosophy of national life.”18 That statement, made in 1949, seems to me like a thunderous understatement as the century closes. Franklin’s pragmatism is theologically, morally, and spiritually bankrupt. That very cultural bankruptcy may awaken evangelicals from the folly of imitation.

Edwards vs. “Enlightened Human Intelligence”

In the heyday of nineteenth-century optimism, Oliver Wendell Holmes scoffed at Edwards’s convictions as

not only false, not only absurd, but . . . disorganizing forces in the midst of the thinking apparatus. Edwards’s system seems, in the light of today, to the last degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not have written with such old-world barbarism. . . . The truth is that [his] whole system of beliefs . . . is gently fading out of enlightened human intelligence, and we are hardly in a condition to realize what a tyranny it once exerted over many of the strongest minds.19

Edwards’s vision has not faded. It is being recovered and reconsidered more extensively and with more vigor today, perhaps, than at any time since his own day.20 The reason Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him off, and the reason there is hope that we may not, is that our century has shown Holmes’s “enlightened human intelligence” to be the factory of the greatest global evils ever perpetrated in human history. Mark Noll comments, “Since most of the 20th century has been such a [dark] period, we may be in a position to hear Edwards more clearly than was the progressive generation of Holmes.”21 In other words, in this case, the disease may make the remedy intelligible.

C. S. Lewis on the Necessity of Old Books

C. S. Lewis points to another reason we might see our darkening days as a hopeful opening to Edwards’s End for Which God Created the World. Lewis was born in 1898 and died the same day as John F. Kennedy in 1963. His life was virtually coextensive with the twentieth century up to that point. From that perspective he said, “I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them.”22 Yes, and if he had lived to the end of the century, he would have been even less enamored of his own century than at the halfway mark.

From this Lewis goes on to stress that he wants and needs to read books from outside his own century. His reasons may open the wise to read Jonathan Edwards.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. . . . This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. . . . Now this seems to me topsyturvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. . . . It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. . . . We all . . . need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century . . . lies where we have never suspected it. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness. . . . The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.23

If Lewis is right, the very foreignness of Edwards’s greatness is a hope-filled reason to read him. Yes, his way of writing is elevated; ours tends to be mundane and conversational. His thought is complex; ours tends to be elementary. His vision of reality is steadily God-centered; ours tends to be man-centered with occasional attention to God. He is relentlessly serious; we incline to lightheartedness and comic relief. He is truth-focused and cherishes the contours of doctrine; we tend to be feeling-focused and suspicious of the claim that doctrine has contours. Yes, but in spite of all that—and Lewis would say, because of all that—the effort to read Edwards would be well spent.

Mortimer Adler on the Necessity of Hard Books

Mortimer Adler would use another argument to persuade us. In his classic, How to Read a Book, he makes a passionate case that the books that enlarge our grasp of truth and make us wiser must feel, at first, beyond us. They “must make demands on you. They must seem to you to be beyond your capacity.”24 If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

Evangelical Christians, who believe God reveals himself primarily through a book, the Bible, should long to be the most able readers they can be. This means that we should want to become clear, penetrating, accurate, fair-minded thinkers, because all good reading involves asking questions and thinking.25 This is one reason why the Bible teaches us, “Do not be children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20, RSV). It’s why Paul said to Timothy, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything” (2 Tim. 2:7, RSV). God’s gift of understanding is through thinking, not instead of thinking.26

Adler underlines his plea for the “major exertion” of reading great books with the warning that such mental exercise may lengthen your life, and television may be deadly.

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. . . . And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that so many busy people die so soon after retirement. . . .Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are . . .artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from out-side. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect.27

The Climb Will Be Worth It

Making the effort to read Jonathan Edwards merely for the sake of living longer would be a great irony. His aim is not to help us live long, nor even to live forever, but to help us live for God and that forever. And since our media-intoxicated culture is neither given to thinking, nor to straining Godward, the challenge and the potential of reading Edwards is doubled. The End for Which God Created the World may prove to be a life-giving fountain in more ways than we know—all the better for its mountain-height, and all the strain to climb worthwhile.

Attempting a Luther-Like Copernican Revolution

In all this I long to persuade you to read and embrace Jonathan Edwards’s The End for Which God Created the World. The public significance of this vision of God, known and embraced, would be epoch-making. Mark Noll compares Edwards’s effort in this book to the aim of Martin Luther, who turned the world upside-down by restoring God to his rightful place. It “attempt[s] in the 18th century what Philip Watson once described as Martin Luther’s main concern in the 16th century—the promotion of a theological ‘Copernican Revolution’ in which anthropocentric instincts are transformed into a theocentric picture of reality.”28

Edwards is strongest where we are weakest. He knows God. He sees and savors the supremacy of God in all things. Our culture is dying for want of this vision and this food. And, therefore, the publication of The End for Which God Created the World is a matter of great public significance.

SECTION TWO

A Personal Concern

Publishing The End for Which God Created the World is also an intensely personal concern for me. As I said at the beginning, the vision of God displayed in that book took me captive thirty years ago and has put its stamp on every part of my life and ministry. I believe and love its message. My personal reason for making the book more accessible is to join God in pursuing the invincible end for which he created the world. That end, Edwards says, is, first, that the glory of God might be magnified in the universe, and, second, that Christ’s ransomed people from all times and all nations would rejoice in God above all things.

God’s Glory Manifest in the Happiness of the Saints

But the depth and wonder and power of this book is the demonstration that these two ends are one. The rejoicing of all peoples in God, and the magnifying of God’s glory are one end, not two. Why this is so, how it can be, and what difference it makes is what this book, and my life and Jonathan Edwards’s theology, are about. The first biographer of Edwards describes The End for Which God Created the World like this: “From the purest principles of reason, as well as from the fountain of revealed truth, he demonstrates that the chief and ultimate end of the Supreme Being, in the works of creation and providence, was the manifestation of his own glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.”29

“The manifestation of his own glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.” Virtually everything I preach and write and do is shaped by this truth: that the exhibition of God’s glory and the deepest joy of human souls are one thing. It has been a thirty-year quest, since I was first awakened to this vision through C. S. Lewis30 and Daniel Fuller.31 The quest goes on. But, over time, my most experienced and reliable guide in the Himalayas of Holy Scripture has been Jonathan Edwards. He said it like this: “The end of the creation is that the creation might glorify [God]. Now what is glorifying God, but a rejoicing at that glory he has dis-played?” 32 “The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.”33

The implications of this vision are far-reaching. After spending thirty years pursuing the high paths of God’s written revelation, I feel like I am just beginning to breathe the air of this lofty reality. Not to make you ferret out all the implications for yourself, I will mention in what follows fifteen of them. Keep in mind what I am illustrating. The further up you go in the revealed thoughts of God, the clearer you see that God’s aim in creating the world was to dis-play the value of his own glory, and that this aim is no other than the endless, ever-increasing joy of his people in that glory.

How Does Edwards Say It?

Let Edwards speak again for himself on this issue. How are God’s glory and your joy related? He says it in many ways:

God in seeking his glory seeks the good of his creatures, because the emanation of his glory . . . implies the . . . happiness of his creatures. And in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself, because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God’s glory. God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself, and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused . . . he seeks their glory and happiness.34

Thus it is easy to conceive how God should seek the good of the creature . . . even his happiness, from a supreme regard to him-self; as his happiness arises from . . . the creature’s exercising a supreme regard to God . . . in beholding God’s glory, in esteeming and loving it, and rejoicing in it.35

God’s respect to the creature’s good, and his respect to himself, is not a divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at is happiness in union with himself.36

Thus the exhibition of God’s glory and the deepest joy of human souls are one thing. The implications of this are breath-taking. I mention fifteen in acorn-form. Any one of them could become a great oak tree with book-length branches.

Two Great Passions Not at Odds

Implication #1. God’s passion for his own glory and his passion for my joy in him are not at odds. God’s righteousness37 is not the enemy of his mercy. His commitment to uphold the worth of his name does not consign me to destruction, though I have besmeared his name by indifference and distrust. Rather, in the death of his Son, Jesus Christ, God conspired to vindicate his righteousness and justify sinners in one act. Which means that his zeal to be glorified and his zeal to save sinners are one.38

God Is Committed to the Joy of the Saints

Implication #2. Therefore, God is as committed to my eternal and ever-increasing joy in him as he is to his own glory. This gives us a glimpse into the massive theological substructure beneath some of the sweetest promises in the Bible—the ones that say God exerts omnipotent zeal to do us good. For example, 2 Chronicles 16:9, “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show his might in behalf of those whose heart is blame-less toward him” (RSV). Psalm 23:6, “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue39 me all the days of my life” (AT). Zephaniah 3:17, “The LORD your God . . . will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.” Luke 12:32, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (ESV).40

The Essence of God’s Love for You

Implication #3. The love of God for sinners is not his making much of them, but his graciously freeing and empowering them to enjoy making much of him. As Edwards says, “God is their good.” Therefore if God would do us good, he must direct us to his worth, not ours. The truth that God’s glory and our joy in God are one radically undermines modern views of self-centered love. God-centered grace nullifies the gospel of self-esteem. Today, people typically feel loved if you make much of them and help them feel valued. The bottom line in their happiness is that they are made much of.

Edwards observes, with stunning modern relevance, “True saints have their minds, in the first place, inexpressibly pleased and delighted with . . . the things of God. But the dependence of the affections of hypocrites is in a contrary order: they first rejoice . . . that they are made so much of by God; and then on that ground, he seems in a sort, lovely to them.”41 In other words, in his view, the bottom line of happiness is that we are granted to see the infinite beauty of God and make much of him forever. Human beings do, in fact, have more value than the birds (Matt. 6:26). But that is not the bottom line of our happiness. It simply means that we were created to magnify God’s glory by enjoying him in a way birds never can.

What Is the Essence of True Virtue?

Implication #4. If the exhibition of God’s glory and the deepest joy of human souls are one thing, then all true virtue among human beings must aim at bringing people to rejoice in the glory of God. No act is truly virtuous—that is, truly loving—that does not come from and aim at joy in the glory of God. The ground for this truth is laid in Edwards’s The End for Which God Created the World, but the exposition of it was given in The Nature of True Virtue which Edwards wrote at the same time (1755) and intended to publish bound together with The End in one volume. There he said, “If there could be . . . a cause determining a person to benevolence towards the whole world of mankind . . . exclusive of . . . love to God, . . . it cannot be of the nature of true virtue.”42

The reason for this sweeping indictment of God-neglecting “virtue” is not hard to see in Edward’s God-centered universe: “So far as a virtuous mind exercises true virtue in benevolence to created beings, it chiefly seeks the good of the creature, consisting in its knowledge or view of God’s glory and beauty, its union with God, and conformity to him, love to him, and joy in him.”43 In other words, if God’s glory is the only all-satisfying reality in the universe, then to try to do good for people, without aiming to show them the glory of God and ignite in them a delight in God, would be like treating fever with cold packs when you have penicillin. The apostle Paul warns that I can “give all my possessions to feed the poor, and . . . surrender my body to be burned,” and still “not have love” (1 Cor. 13:3). The final reason for this is that man is not the center of true virtue, God is. So “whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

Sin Is Sacrilege and Suicide

Implication #5. It also follows that sin is the suicidal exchange of the glory of God for the broken cisterns of created things. Paul said, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom.3:23). Sinning is a “falling short” of the glory of God. But the Greek word for “falling short” (husterountai) means “lack.” The idea is not that you shot an arrow at God’s glory and the arrow fell short, but that you could have had it as a treasure, but you don’t. You have chosen something else instead. This is confirmed in Romans 1:23 where people “exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image.” That is the deepest problem with sin: it is a suicidal exchange of infinite value and beauty for some fleeting, inferior substitute. This is the great insult.

In the words of Jeremiah, God calls it appalling. “Be appalled, O heavens, at this, and shudder, be very desolate, declares the LORD. For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:12-13). What is the essence of evil? It is forsaking a living fountain for broken cisterns. God gets derision and we get death. They are one: in choosing sugarcoated misery we mock the lifegiving God. It was meant to be another way: God’s glory exalted in our ever-lasting joy.

Ever-Increasing Joy in an Inexhaustible God

Implication #6. Heaven will be a never-ending, ever-increasing discovery of more and more of God’s glory with greater and ever-greater joy in him. If God’s glory and our joy in him are one, and yet we are not infinite as he is, then our union with him in the all-satisfying experience of his glory can never be complete, but must be increasing with intimacy and intensity forever and ever. The perfection of heaven is not static. Nor do we see at once all there is to see—for that would be a limit on God’s glorious self-revelation, and therefore, his love. Yet we do not become God. Therefore, there will always be more, and the end of increased pleasure in God will never come.

Here is the way Edwards puts it: “I suppose it will not be denied by any, that God, in glorifying the saints in heaven with eternal felicity, aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence, by the bestowment of a good [which is] infinitely valuable, because eternal: and yet there never will come the moment, when it can be said, that now this infinitely valuable good has been actually bestowed.”44 Moreover, he says, our eternal rising into more and more of God will be a “rising higher and higher through that infinite duration, and . . . not with constantly diminishing (but per-haps an increasing) celerity [that is, velocity] . . . [to an] infinite height; though there never will be any particular time when it can be said already to have come to such a height.”45 This is what we see through a glass darkly in Ephesians 2:7, “[God seats us in heaven with Christ] so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” It will take an infinite number of ages for God to be done glorifying the wealth of his grace to us—which is to say he will never be done.

When Creatures Refuse to Be Happy in God

Implication #7. Hell is unspeakably real, conscious, horrible and eternal—the experience in which God vindicates the worth of his glory in holy wrath on those who would not delight in what is infinitely glorious. If infinitely valuable glory has been spurned, and the offer of eternal joy in God has been finally rejected, an indignity against God has been committed so despicable as to merit eternal suffering. Thus, Edwards says, “God aims at satisfying justice in the eternal damnation of sinners; which will be satisfied by their damnation, considered no otherwise than with regard to its eternnal duration. But yet there never will come that particular moment, when it can be said, that now justice is satisfied.”46 Of the love of God and the wrath of God, Edwards says simply, “Both will be unspeakable.”47

The words of Jesus and the words of his apostle confirm this: it will be unspeakable. Thus the Lord said, “Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels. . . . These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:41, 46). And Paul said that when Jesus returns, he will come “dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus [which means joyfully trusting the all-sufficient love of God in Christ]. These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thess. 1:8-9).

Evangelism: Laboring to Waken a Taste for God

Implication #8. If the exhibition of God’s glory and the deepest joy of human souls are one thing, then evangelism means depicting the beauty of Christ and his saving work with a heartfelt urgency of love that labors to help people find their satisfaction in him. The most important common ground with unbelievers is not culture but creation, not momentary felt needs but massive real needs.48 Augustine’s famous prayer is all important: “You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you.”49 If a person realizes that the image of God in man is man’s ineffably profound fitness to image forth Christ’s glory through everlasting joy in God, then he will not gut the great gospel of its inner life and power.

The gospel is not the good news that God makes much of me; it is “the gospel of the glory of Christ.” And evangelism, Paul says, is the outshining of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). And when, by the agency of prayer and witness and the illuminating grace of the Holy Spirit, unbelievers suddenly see the glory of God in Christ and rejoice in hope, it is because the Creator of the universe “has shone in [their] hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Our evangelistic task is not to persuade people that the gospel was made for their felt needs, but that they were made for the soul-satisfying glory of God in the gospel.

Preaching: Luring out People to God

Implication #9. Similarly, Christian preaching, as part of the corporate worship of Christ’s church, is an expository exultation over the glories of God in his word, designed to lure God’s people from the fleeting pleasures of sin into the sacrificial path of obedient satisfaction in him. If preaching should aim to magnify God, and if God is magnified when his people prefer him over all the “riches and pleasures of this life” (Luke 8:14), then preaching must aim to expose the suicidal pleasures of sin and waken fullness of joy in God. The ever-present refrain will be,

Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters;And you who have no money, come, buy and eat.Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost.Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy?Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And delight yourself in abundance.Incline your ear and come to Me.Listen, that you may live.(Isaiah 55:1-3)

When Edwards pondered the aims of preaching for the glory of God he said, “I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.”50 High affections rooted in, and proportioned by, the truth—that is the goal of preaching. The truth is the manifold glory of God in his word; and the high affections are the delight of knowing God and the dread of not being happy in him. “Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and a glad heart . . . therefore you shall serve your enemies” (Deut. 28:47-48).

Corporate Worship: The Heart Hunger That Honors God

Implication #10. The essence of authentic, corporate worship is the collective experience of heartfelt satisfaction in the glory of God, or a trembling that we do not have it and a great longing for it.