Audio Transcript

Welcome back! On Monday we looked at whether or not life has morally neutral areas — those gray areas, areas in life where we make decisions that are not necessarily sinful or holy. And in that first episode of the week, APJ 1846, Pastor John defined sin for us. He defined sin with Romans 3:23, saying, “Sin is first the disposition of the human heart to prefer human glory — especially self-glory — over God’s glory.” We exchange God’s glory for something we prefer more. We sin by exchanging the glory of God with another glory. That’s verse 23. Then verse 24 gives the solution to this sin, that we must be “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

This pair of glorious verses, Romans 3:23–24 — one verse defining sin, the other defining God’s response to that sin — holds the key to how we become unshakable people in this world. Those verses are, according to Pastor John, “more important than ten thousand books written by man to help you solve your problems.” So much so, he says, “If you build your life on these two verses, make them the foundation of your life, you will be strong and stable in a hundred crises” of life. That’s the bold testimony of John Piper, who makes those very claims in today’s sermon clip, a clip from a 1999 sermon. Here’s Pastor John to explain.

Verse 23 describes the universal need of every human being. And verse 24 gives the all-sufficient remedy for that need. These two verses are more important than ten thousand books written by man about how to solve your problems and make your future better. These are the words of God through the apostle Paul, and they tell us about our true condition, and they tell us about what God has done to remedy that condition.

Gospel Gravity

If you will build your life on these two verses, if you’ll make them the foundation of your life, you will be strong and stable in a hundred crises. If you will put these verses and the truth of them at the center of your life, like the sun at the center of the planets of the solar system of your life, then this truth will hold the orbiting planets of all the concerns and aspects of your life in place.

But if you allow this truth of Romans 3:23–24 to begin to marginalize and slip out to the rim — say, where Neptune and Pluto are out there — you know what would happen. If the sun moved from the center to the periphery of the solar system, everything would be destroyed. Everything would be in chaos. Everything would be confusion and perplexity and weakness, which is why so many professing Christians coast and amble through life wondering why their lives are so strangely perplexed, so out of sync, and out of kilter, and out of order, and nothing seems to be working right.

It’s because the truth of this magnificent gospel, which I’m going to try to articulate, is not at the center anymore. It’s not the sun that’s holding everything in place. It doesn’t have the weight of gravity to pull all things. Something else is at the center. You should be asking yourself right now, “What’s that in my life? Something really grips me in my life, something I come back to again and again and again. I go there in the morning, and I go there at noon, and I go there at night, and it pulls on me. What is it?”

Lacking the Glory of God

Verse 23 says that the universal need in the world of every person has to do with sin. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). No exceptions. There’s no distinction. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We saw that from Romans 1:18–3:20.

And now he tells us a little something about this condition by saying, “If you’ve sinned, your present condition is that you are now falling short of the glory of God.” Literally, the word is “you are now lacking the glory of God.” What does that mean? “All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” Does that mean that we were supposed to be as glorious as God, and we fell short and didn’t arrive at that divine glory, and so we have fallen short? I don’t think that’s what it means.

You weren’t designed to be as glorious as God. The best way to put meat on the bones of this simple verse is to go back to Romans 1, look at the discussion of glory in the context of sin, and see what a lacking might mean in Romans. So if you notice in Romans 1:18, Paul said they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Everybody in the world is a truth-suppressor until God gets ahold of us. We suppress the truth in our unrighteousness. And then look at verse 23: “[They] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:23). In verse 28: “They disapproved of having God in their knowledge” — that’s a literal translation. “They disapproved of having God in their knowledge.”

So, the picture you get is that sin is a failure to embrace the glory of God and God himself as our highest treasure and make him the center and foundation and supreme value of our lives, and thus to exchange that glory for some other treasure in this world, and thus lack that glory as our treasure, and thus bring great dishonor upon God.

“Sin is mainly about God; it’s not mainly about hurting people.”

That’s what sin is and does. Sin is mainly about God; it’s not mainly about hurting people. Sin hurts people. It’ll hurt you in the end. But it’s not mainly about hurting people. It’s mainly about God and trading, bartering, throwing away his supreme value and glory in order that we might put something else at the center, and in the bank, and in the treasury of our lives that we love, and we lean on, and we find satisfaction in. And thus, he is belittled and despised, sometimes wittingly and sometimes unwittingly — the same effect in both cases.

Great Guilt

Now that’s a great guilt. The reason it’s a great guilt is because God created this universe, the whole universe, to display his glory so that we might see it, and value it, and love it, and enjoy it and reflect it in the world. That’s why the universe and you were created. It should not therefore be surprising to us that the world will go haywire when the world is in rebellion against the design of the world.

If God designed the world, according to Isaiah 43:7, to display his glory, and you are choosing to dispense with his glory to put something else at the center of your life and love it, and live for it, and think about it, and dwell on it, and value it, it’s not surprising that the design of God for a beautiful, holistic world would be destroyed in your life. There is dysfunction and chaos and misery all over the world because the whole world is in rebellion against valuing the glory of God above all things. That’s why the world and your life is in the condition that it’s in.

“There is dysfunction and chaos and misery all over the world because the whole world is in rebellion.”

Sin is contemplating God as the supreme value and rejecting him as the supreme value, and thus exchanging the glory of God for some kind of substitute image (think of what it is), and thus lacking the glory, and thus dishonoring the glory of God. And that is a great guilt. And that’s the universal condition of humankind in verse 23. It’s a massive problem now that we have.

Great Turn

And the problem is, since we’ve all done this, how can we get right with God when we have so belittled him? And that’s what verse 24 is about. This verse is so rich. A great turn has come in Romans 3:21: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” Some great event has happened.

“Now.” Do you hear that word now? “But now,” some great event has happened, and something new is happening in the world. No other religion knows of this great now, because it’s the now of the arrival of Jesus Christ and the redemption that is in him. So let’s read verse 24: “And [all] are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

Audio Transcript

First Peter 1:5 holds a very special place in your life, Pastor John — a precious text about God’s keeping power over his children, of those “who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” So precious. This is the promise that you wanted as a banner over the life of your mom, and so had a phrase from this text (in the King James Version) etched into her grave: “Kept by the power of God.” Ruth Piper was kept by the power of God in this life until her tragic passing in an automobile accident at the age of 56. You were 28 at the time of the accident, almost fifty years ago now. It will be fifty years ago in just a couple of months actually — on December 16. You told us about the life-altering phone call you got, back in APJs 1577 and 1936. No need to go back into that story here.

I mention 1 Peter 1:5 because the text also adorns our Bible reading from yesterday, as we start this new week. Melissa, a podcast listener, wants to know more about what the verse means. “Hello, Pastor John,” she writes. “What does Peter mean that we are guarded ‘by God’s power . . . through faith’? How exactly does God guard us by his power but through faith? Is he guarding us through our own faith? I don’t understand how this works. Is his guarding of me thereby ultimately dependent on me and my faith? This is a text that should give me great comfort and it doesn’t. Not yet.”

Here’s the passage, 1 Peter 1:4–5 — let’s get it in front of us so that we know what we’re talking about. We have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” One of the wonderful things about this promise is that there is a double guarding or a double keeping.

First, God is keeping or guarding an inheritance in heaven for us. Verse 4: we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept [or guarded] in heaven” by God for us. So, when we get there, the inheritance will be fabulous and not ruined or disappointing in any way. That’s the one keeping.

Here’s the other one. The other keeping is that God is guarding us for it. He not only keeps it — the inheritance — for us in heaven, but he keeps us for it. He guarantees that it will be there and that we will get there. That’s the double amazing thing in this verse — why it’s one of the favorites of many people, including me. “By God’s power [you] are being guarded [or kept] through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” In other words, you’re going to make it.

Who Sustains Our Faith?

Now, the key question for how we get strength from this — How do we actually apply it to our lives and draw down joy from this promise? — the key question is whether “kept by God through faith” means we sustain our own faith and then God responds by guarding or keeping us, or whether God sustains our faith and in that way he keeps us and guards us. In the first meaning, we are the decisive cause of our ongoing faith, and in the second meaning, God is the decisive cause of our ongoing faith. Which is it?

The answer to that question decides how we will answer this question: How can I be sure I will wake up a believer tomorrow morning? In one case, the answer would be, “God will see to it that I believe tomorrow morning. He will sustain my faith. He’s promised to sustain it, keep it, guard it. He’ll keep me believing.” In the other case, the answer would be, “I can only hope that my independent, self-determining will is not overcome tonight by my flesh or the devil or the world since the decisive, sustaining power must come from me.”

Five Reasons for Confidence

I see at least five reasons for thinking that Peter intended to strengthen and encourage us by teaching that God sustains our faith, and that’s how he guards us for final “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

1. The other view doesn’t make sense.

I don’t think the other interpretation — that we are the decisive sustainers of our own faith — makes any sense in this verse. I think it’s got a built-in contradiction. Suppose you — we humans — provide the decisive cause of sustaining your faith day by day. That’s what you provide. My question is, What’s left for God to do to guard you for your heavenly inheritance, your final salvation? You might answer, “In response to my faith, he defeats the destructive effects of Satan and the destructive effects of suffering and the pleasures of this world. That’s what he does in response to my self-sustained faith.”

But think about it. There’s only one way that Satan and suffering and worldly pleasures can prevent you from attaining heaven — namely, by destroying your faith, which you’ve already accomplished. So, God does not need to provide that. You’ve provided that. Satan’s accusations don’t keep you out of heaven. The pain of suffering doesn’t keep you out of heaven. The allurements of the world don’t keep you out of heaven. The only way Satan, suffering, worldly pleasures can keep you out of heaven is by causing you to turn away from Christ and stop believing in him as your supreme treasure. And that’s what you yourself have already by sustaining your own faith.

If you say God prevents the satanic destruction of your faith after or as a result of your faith, which you yourself have triumphantly and decisively sustained, that’s a contradiction. God doesn’t guard you from doing what you’ve already done. That’s a contradiction. What you are really saying is that you yourself protected yourself from the faith-destroying effects of Satan, suffering, worldly pleasure. That is, you have guarded yourself for the inheritance through faith, and God is simply not needed to get you there by guarding or sustaining your faith.

“God not only keeps our inheritance for us in heaven, but he also keeps us for it.”

So, I conclude that being guarded through faith by God’s power means God’s power sustains our faith, and that’s why Satan and suffering and pleasure do not succeed in destroying our faith. God’s power sustains our faith. He keeps us for the final salvation by keeping our faith. That’s argument number one. The other view doesn’t make sense. It has a built-in contradiction.

2. We believe ‘through him.’

In this same chapter, 1 Peter 1:20–21 says, “[Christ] was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God.” Now, I think “through him [you] are believers in God” means he is the cause and the sustaining power of your faith.

3. Faith comes by new birth.

Verse 3 says, “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). Now, we know that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is inseparable from hope. Hope is faith in the future tense, you might say. So, the way we became Christians was owing to no merit in ourselves. We didn’t do anything. We were dead. We had to be born again. God in “his great mercy . . . caused us to be born again.” That has caused us to have spiritual life, and that life manifests itself in hope and faith. That’s the way it remains all our lives, I’m arguing. Our faith was brought into being by mercy — undeserved mercy, totally lopsided, Godward mercy — and it is sustained by mercy.

4. God promises to keep us.

This interpretation fits with the promise of the new covenant in which Christians now live. This is who we are. We are blood-bought new-covenant people. And here’s how Jeremiah describes the new covenant, which is the experience of believers today. In Jeremiah 32:40, the Lord says, “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” That’s the promise of God-sustained faith. That’s the heart of the new covenant — the heart of it. God puts his fear — puts faith — in us, so that we don’t make shipwreck of our faith. That’s the promise and difference between the new and old covenant.

5. Jesus intercedes for us.

Finally, in Luke 22:31 there is a beautiful picture of how this faith-sustaining work of God happens — it happened then and happens now because of Christ’s intercession for us in heaven. Jesus says to Peter the night before his crucifixion, “Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat.” What does that mean? It means he’s going to squish you through the strainer and sift out all your faith. He’ll leave you there, and your faith will be stuck in the wires. That’s what he’s trying to do tonight. “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32).

In other words, I have asked your Father in heaven to sustain your faith. That’s what I do. “And when you have turned again” — not if you have turned again — when you have turned again. He knows it’s going to happen. He asks God for it. When you’ve repented, then “strengthen your brothers.” So, that’s a picture of how Christ intercedes for us today. He’s interceding for us, and that’s what he’s doing — he’s asking our Father to sustain our faith just like he did for Peter.

So, for those five reasons at least — there are more — I think we can rejoice. Indeed, I think we should leap for joy that not only is God keeping a treasure for us in heaven secure; he is also keeping us secure for heaven. “By [his] power . . . through faith” — this is through sustaining our faith.

Does theology serve doxology? It ought to. God means to be worshiped, but not in ignorance. He wants to be known and enjoyed and praised for who he is. Which is why he doesn’t just demand the worship of his creatures, but first reveals himself to us so that we might know him, and therefore delight in him. Theology, our study of God, serves doxology, our worship of God.

Jonathan Edwards, known for both his Reformed orthodoxy and his creative expression of it, helps us with a fresh way to approach God’s attributes, in service of our worship. From a few basic truths — God is simple, God is incomprehensible, God is happy, and God creates — we see more of what God is and, by his grace, are freed to marvel at him even more.

God Is Simple

Begin with the statement, “God is simple.” Understanding divine simplicity is not simple; it’s complicated. Think of it this way: created things are made up of parts; we can break them down into things more fundamental than they are. A person is composed of body and soul. We can distinguish what you are (your essence) from the fact that you are (your existence). We can distinguish things that are essential to what you are (like being a rational creature) from things that are non-essential or accidental (like having red hair). We can do the same sort of composition with all sorts of attributes and qualities.

Divine simplicity essentially says, “God is not like that.” That is, he is not composed of parts. You can’t break him down into things that are more fundamental than he is. There is nothing behind God that makes God what God is. He simply and absolutely is. Even his old-covenant name, revealed to Moses at the burning bush, testifies to this: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

A popular theological way to express divine simplicity, both in Edwards’s day and our own, is “everything that is in God is God.” In other words, God doesn’t have attributes in the way that you and I have attributes. He’s not composed of attributes or qualities or excellencies or perfections. Whatever God has, God is.

God Is Incomprehensible

Now, this is difficult for us to comprehend. That’s why theologians also say that God is incomprehensible. Simplicity and incomprehensibility go hand in hand. Because God is simple (and we are not), we can’t comprehend him. That is, we can’t wrap our minds around him. Our knowledge of him is always creaturely — finite, limited, and partial.

“We can know God truly, though not fully.”

Of course, we can know him, because he reveals himself to us. And he reveals himself to us in ways appropriate to our creaturely limitations. To put it simply, God speaks human to humans, and humans always speak about God according to our way of conceiving. We can know God truly, though not fully.

God Is Happy

Not only is God simple and incomprehensible; God is also happy. In fact, he is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy. He is free from all need, want, and lack.

This happiness is an infinite happiness in himself. From all eternity, God has perfectly beheld and infinitely rejoiced in his own essence and perfections. He has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.

“From all eternity, God has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.”

Thus, God has always beheld a perfect, full image of his perfections. This image is so perfect and full that a second person stands forth in the Godhead. In other words, God’s knowledge of himself is so rich that by eternally thinking of himself, a second person is eternally begotten. This is the Son of God, the image of the invisible God and exact imprint of his nature (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3), the eternal Word who is with God and is God (John 1:1), the eternal Son who is always at the Father’s side (John 1:18).

More than this, the eternal and mutual love between Father and Son is so rich and full that this love stands forth as a third person in the Godhead. In other words, God’s love for himself is so rich that by loving and delighting in himself, a third person eternally flows forth from the Father and the Son. This is the Holy Spirit, the breath of the living God (Psalm 33:6), the supreme joy and delight of God in God (Luke 10:21), the infinite river of his eternal delights (Psalm 36:8).

And each of these persons is truly and fully God. The whole divine essence truly and distinctly subsists in each, and yet there is only a single, simple divine essence. This too is incomprehensible: one glorious and happy God eternally subsisting in three distinct persons.

God Creates

Thus far, we have spoken of the simple, incomprehensible, and triune God as he is in himself. The triune God lives in himself, knows himself, and loves himself, and thus possesses unchangeable happiness in himself. But the living and triune God did not remain by himself. In his perfect freedom, he chose to communicate himself outside of himself by creating the world from nothing.

With creation in view, we can now speak of God in himself and his triune being (as we’ve done above), as well as God in relation to his creatures. This relation to his creatures generates a myriad of attributes, perfections, and excellencies, according to our human way of conceiving. Thus, God’s “absolute (or real) attributes,” as Edwards calls them, flower into God’s “relative attributes.”

In this way, we may now speak of God’s power, which is simply the fullness of divine being in relation to the things God does and can do. God’s wisdom is simply God’s own knowledge directed to finding appropriate means to accomplish God’s purposes. God’s love for his creatures is simply God’s love for himself as it is brought in relation to the creatures who reflect and image him.

Flowering of Divine Excellencies

This flowering of relative excellencies continues as God creates, sustains, and governs the world. God’s faithfulness is his love as it bears upon the promises that he makes. God’s righteousness is his knowledge and love as they rightly order and structure reality in fitting proportion, according to the proper value of every created thing. God’s mercy is his supreme love for himself as it encounters weak, pitiable, and broken sinners. God’s wrath is this same supreme and holy love as it collides with stubborn, stiff-necked, and idolatrous rebels.

Again and again, God’s absolute excellencies — his being, his knowledge, and his love — are brought into relation to all aspects of the world, its creatures, and its history, and thereby generate God’s relative excellencies, according to our way of conceiving.

Many of these relative excellencies identify the perfection of qualities that we know in and from creation. Thus, as creatures, we come to know goodness in the world and then follow this created goodness back to the God who is the Supreme Good. So with wisdom, majesty, mercy, grace, faithfulness, justice, power, and other positive relative excellencies. We see the creaturely echoes of these divine properties all around us, and we follow them back to their ultimate source, where they dwell in their fullness and eminence.

Negative Attributes

On the other hand, some of God’s relative excellencies are “negative attributes.” If “positive attributes” take creaturely goods and trace them back to their infinite divine origin, negative attributes take creaturely limitations and deny that God is limited in this way. Consider the negative terms that we ascribe to God: infinite, immutable, eternal, and the like.

Each of these speaks of God by denying to him some creaturely property. Divine infinity denies that God is limited and finite as creation is. Divine immutability denies that God changes the way that creation does. Divine eternality denies that God is bound by time. Divine ubiquity (or omnipresence) denies that God is limited by space. Even the two attributes that began this essay — simplicity and incomprehensibility — are negative attributes, the first denying that God is composed of parts, and the second denying that the infinite God can be contained by the finite mind of man.

God and No Other

God’s attributes aren’t merely qualities that he happens to have. They are essential to him. They are our descriptions of his being, his essence, his very nature, his God-ness. Because he simply is who he is. Everything in God is God.

God is light — pure, simple, white light. God is. God knows. God loves. More specifically, God is himself, God knows himself, and God loves himself. He is the triune God, absolutely full and happy in himself.

Then, this God, the living God, freely creates the world. And when he does, the pure, simple, white light of his being, knowledge, and love shines through the prism of his creation. The white light is refracted into all the colors of the rainbow, as God himself is brought into relation to every aspect of the world he has made. This refracting is what enables us to know him. The flowering of God’s relative excellencies in creation is so that clay pots can have some idea of what the Potter is like. Like Moses, we see the glory of God “from the back.” We grope and we strain and we labor to find words to describe our Lord, who is God and there is no other.

Infinity Clothed in Flesh

And then, wonder of wonders, this God — infinite, eternal, and unchangeable; simple, incomprehensible, and happy — does the unimaginable. The God who lacks every creaturely limitation freely chooses to clothe himself with such limitations, uniting his infinite and eternal being to finite and temporal human nature.

If the excellencies of the simple, incomprehensible, and happy God blow our minds, how much more when this God takes on flesh and dwells among us? And not only dwells among us, but loves among us, suffers among us, dies among us?

The heights of God’s absolute and relative attributes, and his positive and negative attributes, lead us to the depths of his love as the Son comes down from heaven for us and for our salvation. The glorious excellencies of his deity are united to the diverse excellencies of his humanity so that, in Christ, the full range of perfections, both human and divine, are united in one person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is worthy of all worship.

And so, our theology — careful, rigorous, and detailed — leads to doxology — full, overflowing, and abounding with joy.