Audio Transcript

Authenticity is the theme of the week here on the podcast. On Monday, we heard from Mark, who struggled to reconcile how Jesus’s life and death could have been fully scripted out by God, fully acted out by Christ, and all be authentically lived out by Christ. It was a really interesting discussion to start the week.

But today we look at our own authentic living, living authentically with our affections. It’s a topic on the table because we read Romans 12:9–13 together today. Here’s the question it inspired in a young man, a 23-year-old listener named Francisco who lives in Mexico City.

“Pastor John, hello to you! I desperately want to be the type of man who exhibits Romans 12:9–13 in his life. ‘Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.’ I have sought to make this the mantra of my life for the next year. There’s a lot here to digest. As you read this text, what stands out to you? Are there any keys in here that you would see to help me live out such a godly life, not from duty, but from a genuine affection inside of me?”

Oh yes, there are some things in this text that I think are going to be very helpful. At least, they help me. I think they are designed by God to help all of us live the Christian life. And I love this question, Francisco (and greetings to Mexico City). I love this question because it gives me a chance to say some things about living the Christian life, things in this text that I think are broadly relevant to virtually everybody, not just you.

The list of thirteen commands in Romans 12:9–13, thirteen short commands, presents us with the very common question of how to go about obeying commands (thirteen commands) in a Christian way — a Christian way, not to earn salvation and not to fall into lawlessness and say, “Oh, commands don’t matter. It’s all grace. You don’t need to do anything.” Between those two mistakes, there’s a way to live the Christian life. So, that’s what I want to think about from Romans 12.

Affectional, Impossible Change

The first thing I notice is that six of these thirteen commands are directed straight to the affections, the emotions, the feelings, the heart — not to bodily action first. Don’t do something first, but rather, go straight to your heart. “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil. . . . Love . . . with brotherly affection. . . . Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit. . . . Rejoice in hope” (Romans 12:9–12). And the other seven are really specific ways to love.

Romans 12:8, the verse just before this paragraph, says that such merciful service, all these seven ways of loving, are to be done with cheerfulness. “[Let] the one who does acts of mercy [do them] with cheerfulness,” which is an affection and emotion. In effect, all these commands, every one of them, involve the heart, the affections, the desires. Paul is not commanding outward behavior that comes from a wrong kind of heart. He’s not interested in that. That’s why that first word is, “Let love be genuine” (Romans 12:9). And really, the word is anypokritos. You can even see it in English: an-hypokritos — not hypocritical. Let love not be hypocritical.

“This is the transforming power of the mercies of God. They take away fear.”

I hate sham love. In other words, I don’t like outward behavior that looks Christian but isn’t coming from a new heart. He never says just, “Serve,” but “Rejoice to serve.” He doesn’t say just, “Avoid evil”; he says, “Abhor evil.” He doesn’t say just, “Know about hopeful promises”; he says, “Rejoice in hope.” He doesn’t just say to Christians that they should love others; he says, “Love with brotherly affection.” These are just stunning commands, straight to our emotions, our affections, our heart.

One reason it’s crucial to see the necessity of changed feelings is that it confronts us with the impossibility of doing this without God’s supernatural power. That’s one of the points. You can put on a show at church, right? You can make yourself smile. You can make yourself sing. You can make yourself do stuff. But you cannot make yourself abhor what you don’t abhor, or love what you don’t love, or rejoice in what you don’t rejoice in. You can’t do it. So, these commands confront us with the impossibility of doing them without God’s supernatural help. By commanding our emotions, Paul is signaling that we must have a profound change from the inside out.

So, the way to pursue obedience to these commands, Francisco, is this: indirectly, we have to pursue a new heart, a new set of desires, a new constellation of preferences. That’s the work of God through his word, by the Spirit.

Preparing to Approve

This takes us back to the beginning of the chapter, because Paul knows what he’s going to do here, and he’s helping us prepare our lives to do it. Chapter 12 starts like this: “I appeal to you therefore” — and we’ll come back to that therefore — “brothers, by the mercies of God.” So, I’m appealing to you, in all these commands, “by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, [so that you approve] what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1–2).

That word “approve” (dokimazō) means more than “test and discern,” the way it’s translated in the ESV. It means “test and discern and approve.” It’s not just a mental calculation. It’s a heart evaluation. Paul is saying, “Be transformed with a renewed mind such that your mind and heart assess, evaluate, prioritize, and feel things differently — and approve of different things than the world does. Don’t be conformed to this age. Be deeply changed. Have new preferences. Approve and disapprove of different things than the world does, and which you once did.”

Romans 12:1 gives the key to how that happens: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God . . .” Don’t be conformed to the world. Be transformed. That is, be amazed and humbled and happy and empowered by the unspeakable mercies of God toward you in your unworthiness. Be so amazed, so humbled, so happy, so empowered that you are transformed with a mind and heart that have new affections, new desires, new preferences, new approvings and disapprovings.

Transforming Mercies

Then we notice the therefore. The whole section of Romans 12–15 begins with therefore — meaning, on the basis of Romans 1–11. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God” (Romans 12:1). That word therefore signals that Paul is saying to us, as we consider his several dozen commands in chapter 12, “Go back now. Go back now and review eleven chapters of God’s stunning mercies to you. Go back! Review God’s stunning mercies to you.”

Why does he make that connection? Because the way we are transformed is by seeing the greatness of the glory of the mercies of God toward us in our hopeless sinful condition. Romans 6:6: “Our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing.” It’s the truth of what happened to us in Christ that does away with our old affections of sin. Or in Romans 6:14: “Sin will have no dominion over you” — that means chapter 12 is going to come true for you — “since you are not under law but under grace.” You’re under these mercies of God that are laid out in chapters 1–11. Or Romans 8:3–4: “By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

So, when Paul says in Romans 12:12, “Rejoice in hope,” what is he referring to? He’s referring to the great Romans 8: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died” (Romans 8:32–34). In other words, nobody can separate us from the love of Christ or the love of God. These chapters 1–11 are the mercies of Romans 12:1: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God,” be transformed before you try to put on a show of outward godliness.

This is the transforming power of the mercies of God. They take away fear. They take away craving greed for the world. They take away craving for revenge. They make us deeply confident and happy in the care of God. And that changes everything.

Become What You Are

The thirteen commands of Romans 12:9–13 describe who we are — not just who we ought to be but really who we have become in the mercies of God, as we die with Christ and rise with Christ and are indwelt by the Spirit. “Become what you are,” Paul says several times in his letters. And 2 Corinthians 3:18 puts it like this: “Beholding the glory of the Lord” — that is, in this case, the glory of these precious mercies. Beholding these mercies, “[we] are being transformed . . . from one degree of glory to another.”

So, Francisco, the key to obeying these commands in Romans 12 is to come at them indirectly through the doorway of Romans 12:1–2, and through all the glorious mercies of God in chapters 1–11. Immerse yourself in these. Let these be your treasure. God will transform you into the kind of person that can gladly obey these verses in chapter 12 from your heart.

J.I. Packer wrote,

[John Owen] is by common consent not the most versatile, but the greatest among Puritan theologians. For solidity, profundity, massiveness and majesty in exhibiting from Scripture God’s ways with sinful mankind there is no one to touch him. (A Quest for Godliness, 81)

In an age of giants, he overtopped them all. (191)

The first volume of Owen’s collected works contains three major essays on the glory of Christ, which is my theme in this message. He wrote A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, Meditations and Discourses Concerning the Glory of Christ, Applied. No other works have increased my understanding and admiration of the glory of Christ more than these, with the possible exception of Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “The Excellency of Christ.”

So, as we focus together on the glory of Christ, the music playing in the background of my mind will be the music of John Owen. And every now and then, I’ll let you hear some of its remarkable strains.

Seeing Glory, Being Glorious

I share Owen’s conviction that the more clearly we see and savor the glory of Christ, the more freedom we will enjoy from the power of temptation. He based this largely on 2 Corinthians 3:18: “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Owen said,

Herein would I live [in beholding the glory of Christ], hereon would I dwell in my thoughts and affections, to the withering and consumption of all the painted beauties of this world, unto the crucifying all things here below, until they become unto me a dead and deformed thing, no way meet for affectionate embraces. (The Works of John Owen, 1:291)

In other words, the path of holiness is achieved by having such clear views of the superior beauties of Christ that lesser sinful attractions wither and die. Owen was always combining the highest views of Christ with practical holiness. “No man,” he said, “can by faith take a real view of [Christ’s] glory, but virtue will proceed from it in a transforming power to change him into the same image” (Works, 1:292).

I have a picture in my mind of the glory of Christ like the sun at the center of the solar system of your life. The massive sun — 333,000 times the mass of the earth — holds all the planets in orbit, even little Pluto, which is 3.6 billion miles away. And so it is with the glory of Christ in your life. All the planets of your life — your sexuality and desires, your commitments and beliefs, your aspirations and dreams, your attitudes and convictions, your habits and disciplines, your solitude and relationships, your labor and leisure, your thinking and feeling — are held in proper orbit by the greatness and gravity and blazing brightness of the glory of Christ at the center of your life. And if he ceases to be the bright, blazing, satisfying beauty at the center of your life, the planets will fly into confusion, a hundred things will be out of control, and sooner or later they will crash into destruction.

We were made to know and enjoy Christ as he really is. We were created to comprehend — as much as a creature can — the glory of Christ. And this comprehending, this knowing, is not the knowing of disinterested awareness, but the knowing of admiration and wonder and awe and intimacy and ecstasy and embrace.

“If there is anything worthy of praise anywhere in the universe, it is summed up supremely in Jesus Christ.”

We were made to see and savor, with everlasting satisfaction, the glory of Christ. Jesus prayed for this in John 17:24: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.” Owen said, “Such a manifestation of his glory unto his disciples doth the Lord Christ here desire, as might fill them with blessed satisfaction for evermore” (Works, 1:286). We were made for this “blessed satisfaction.” It is precisely the power of this superior satisfaction in the glory of Christ that severs the root of sin.

Immensity of Christ’s Glory

My prayer for this conference, and for all of you one by one, is that you will see and savor the glory of Christ — married or single, male or female, old or young, devastated by disordered desires or walking in a measure of holiness — that all of you will behold and embrace the glory of Christ as the blazing sun at the center of your life, and that the planets of all your desires will orbit in their proper place. Oh, that the risen, living Christ would come to us (even now) by his Spirit and through his word and reveal to us his glory!

The glory of his deity, equal with God the Father in all his attributes — the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his nature, infinite, boundless in all his excellencies
The glory of his eternality that makes the mind of man explode with the unsearchable thought that Christ never had a beginning, but simply always was — sheer, absolute reality while all the universe is fragile, contingent, like a shadow by comparison to his all-defining, ever-existing substance
The glory of his never-changing constancy in all his virtues and all his character and all his commitments — the same yesterday, today, and forever
The glory of his knowledge that makes the Library of Congress and the British Library look like little matchboxes, and makes all the information on the Internet look like a little 1940s farmers’ almanac, and makes quantum physics seem like a first-grade reader
The glory of his wisdom that has never been perplexed by any complication and can never be counseled by the wisest of men
The glory of his authority over heaven and earth and hell, without whose permission no man and no demon can move one inch — who changes times and seasons, removes kings and sets up kings, who does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, so none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”
The glory of his providence, without which not a single bird falls to the ground in the farthest reaches of the Amazon forest, or a single hair of any head turns black or white
The glory of his word that moment by moment upholds the universe and holds in being all the molecules and atoms and subatomic particles we have never yet dreamed of
The glory of his power to walk on water, cleanse lepers, heal the lame, open the eyes of the blind, cause the deaf to hear and storms to cease and the dead to rise — with a single word, or even a thought
The glory of his purity never to sin or to have one millisecond of a bad attitude or an evil, lustful thought
The glory of his trustworthiness never to break his word or let one promise fall to the ground
The glory of his justice to render in due time all moral accounts in the universe, settled either on the cross or in hell
The glory of his patience to endure our dullness decade after decade and to hold back his final judgment on this world, that many might repent
The glory of his sovereign, servant obedience to keep his Father’s commandments perfectly and then embrace the excruciating pain of the cross willingly
The glory of his meekness and lowliness and tenderness that will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick
The glory of his wrath that will one day explode against this world with such fierceness that people will call out for the rocks and the mountains to crush them rather than face the wrath of the Lamb
The glory of his grace that gives life to spiritually dead rebels and awakens faith in hell-bound haters of God and justifies the ungodly with his own righteousness
The glory of his love that willingly dies for us even while we were sinners, and frees us for the ever-increasing joy of making much of him forever
The glory of his own inexhaustible gladness in the fellowship of the Trinity, the infinite power and energy that gave rise to all the universe and will one day be the inheritance of every struggling saint, when he says, “Enter into the joy of your master.”

Knowing the Incomprehensible Christ

If he should grant us to know him like this, it would be but the outskirts of his glory. Time would fail to speak of the glory of his severity, invincibility, dignity, simplicity, complexity, resoluteness, calmness, depth, and courage. If there is anything admirable, if there is anything worthy of praise anywhere in the universe, it is summed up supremely in Jesus Christ. He is supremely glorious in every admirable way over everything:

Over galaxies and endless reaches of space
Over the earth, from the top of Mount Everest (29,000 feet up) to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (36,000 feet down into the Mariana Trench)
Over all plants and animals, from the peaceful blue whale to the microscopic killer viruses
Over all weather and movements of the earth: hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, earthquakes, avalanches, floods, snow, rain, sleet
Over all chemical processes that heal and destroy: cancer, AIDS, malaria, flu, and all the workings of antibiotics and a thousand healing medicines.
Over all countries and all governments and all armies
Over the Taliban and Al Qaeda and ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah and all terrorists and kidnappings and suicide bombings and mass murders
Over Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Xi Jinping, and Netanyahu
Over all nuclear threats from Iran or Russia or North Korea or America
Over all politics and elections
Over all media and news and entertainment and sports and leisure
Over all education and universities and scholarship and science and research
Over all business and finance and industry and manufacturing and transportation
Over all the Internet and information systems and artificial intelligence

And though it may not seem so now, it is only a matter of time until he is revealed from heaven in flaming fire to give relief to those who trust him and righteous vengeance on those who don’t.

Ask, Seek, Knock, Behold

Oh, that the almighty God would help us see and savor the glory of his Son. Give yourself to this. Study this. Cultivate this passion. Eat and drink and sleep this quest to know the glory of Christ. Pray for God to show you these things in his word. Owen said that the main motive for contending for the Scriptures and resisting those who would take them from us is “that they would take from us the only glass wherein we may behold the glory of Christ” (Works, 1:316). Swim in the ocean of the Bible every day. And with all you’re getting — whatever it takes — get the all-satisfying glory of Christ at the center of your life.

“The deepest cure to our pitiful addictions is to be staggered by the infinite, all-satisfying glory of Christ.”

This is the blazing sun at the center of your solar system, holding the planet of mental health, family life, vocation, ministry, and sexuality in sacred orbit. This is the ballast at the bottom of your little boat, keeping it from being capsized by the waves of temptation. This is the foundation that holds up the building of your life. Without this — without knowing and embracing the glory of Christ — the planets fly apart, the waves overwhelm, and the building will one day fall.

Obstacles to Our Enjoyment

So, what stands in the way? What is the main obstacle to seeing the glory of Christ, with a deeply satisfying and life-transforming sight of that glory? The biblical answer to that question is this: the absolutely just and holy wrath of God. We cannot know Christ in our sin because the wrath of God rests on us in our sin. What we deserve in our fallen sinfulness is not the knowledge of Christ’s glory but the judgment of God’s wrath. And since we are cut off from the knowledge of Christ by the wrath of God, we are cut off from the holiness without which we will not see the Lord. God doesn’t owe us holiness; he owes us punishment. Therefore, we are hopelessly depraved and hopelessly condemned.

Except for one thing: the good news that Christ has become for us the curse to bear God’s wrath and the righteousness to meet God’s demand. This is the heart of the gospel. And it is the apex of the glory of Christ. Without it, there is no hope to escape God’s wrath and no hope to know Christ’s glory. But here it is for everyone who believes. Galatians 3:13 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” Romans 8:3 says, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” Colossians 2:14 says, “[God canceled] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

Of this saving work of Christ, Owen said, “An unseen glory accompanied him in all that he did, in all that he suffered. Unseen it was unto the eyes of the world, but not in his who alone can judge of it” (Works, 1:338). “For him, who was Lord of all universally, thus to submit himself to universal obedience, carrieth along with it an evidence of glorious grace” (Works, 1:339).

What could be more glorious than God himself in Christ enduring the condemnation of divine wrath, so that now every thought of God and every act of God toward us in Christ is designed for our eternal happiness! “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

And what is the greatest gift purchased by the glorious sufferings of Christ? The best gift is not the imputed righteousness of Christ. The best gift is not the forgiveness of sins. The best gift is not eternal life. The best gift is the everlasting, all-satisfying seeing and savoring of the glory of Christ himself. The glory of the cross achieved the enjoyment of the glory of Christ. Christ was the price, and Christ was the prize.

Souls Enlarged and Sanctified

To close, I want to circle back to where we began and recall the connection Owen made between seeing the glory of Christ and practical holiness. He said that the reason Jesus prayed for us in John 17:24 that we would see his glory is because this sight would “fill them with blessed satisfaction forevermore” (Works, 1:286). The reason that is so is because the human soul was made to see Christ, to know Christ, to love Christ, to enjoy Christ, and to be enlarged by the greatness of the glory of Christ. Without this, our souls shrink. And little souls make little lusts have great power. The soul, as it were, contracts or expands to encompass the magnitude or minuteness of its treasure. The human soul was made to see and savor the glory of Christ. Nothing else is big enough to enlarge the soul as God intended and make little lusts lose their power.

I know that vast, starry skies seen from a mountaintop in Utah, and four layers of moving clouds on a seemingly endless plain in Montana, and standing on the edge of a mile-deep drop in the Grand Canyon can all have a wonderfully supplementary role in enlarging the soul with the glory of creation. But nothing can take the place of the glory of Christ. As Jonathan Edwards said, if you embrace all creation with goodwill, but not Christ, you are infinitely parochial. Our hearts were made to be enlarged by Christ, and all creation cannot replace his glory.

My conviction is — and I think I learn it from Owen — that one of the main reasons the world and the church are awash in lust and pornography (by men and women) is that our lives are disconnected from the infinite, soul-staggering grandeur for which we were made: the glory of Christ. Inside and outside the church, modern culture is drowning in a sea of triviality, pettiness, banality, and silliness. It is inevitable that the human heart, which was made to be staggered with the glory of Christ but instead is drowning in a sea of banal entertainment, will reach for the best natural buzz that life can give: sex.

Therefore, the deepest cure to our pitiful addictions is to be staggered by the infinite, everlasting, unchanging, all-satisfying glory of Christ. This is what it means to know him. Christ has purchased this gift for us at the cost of his life. Therefore, I say with Hosea, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3).

Audio Transcript

This week we look at authenticity — living out the authentic life. Francisco, a 23-year-old from Mexico City, wants to embody the qualities of Romans 12:9–13 in his life over the next year. He asks for insights on living out this passage authentically, a life of genuine affection. That’s on Thursday.

But today we have a question about the life of Christ and his authenticity: “Hi, Pastor John! My name is Mark, and I have a question for you that I’m having trouble putting into words, but I’ll try my best. When I read the Bible, I keep coming back to something Jesus says at Passover as he’s looking toward the cross: ‘The Son of Man goes as it is written of him.’ That’s Matthew 26:24. I don’t quite understand how the cross can be both fully planned out and still come from Jesus’s totally willing heart. I believe he ‘gave himself as a ransom for all’ (1 Timothy 2:6). But when I think of actors following a script, it doesn’t feel like they’re acting freely or authentically — it’s someone else’s will, not their own. So, how can Jesus’s life and death be fully scripted out and authentically yielded at the same time?”

Well, I probably should make the problem more difficult before I make it less difficult. Not only is the life of Jesus fully scripted, but so is Judas’s — indeed, so is every person’s life fully scripted by God. We’re all living, acting, speaking, thinking, feeling according to God’s providence, God’s decree, God’s script.

When Jesus had been betrayed by Judas and arrested (let’s just take Judas as an example), Matthew writes in Matthew 26:56, “All this has taken place that the Scriptures” — the script — “of the prophets might be fulfilled.” And Jesus said to the disciples about Judas at the Last Supper, “I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’” (John 13:18). So, everything is happening that night according to divine script.

Then there are the sweeping statements in the Bible that cover all people. Proverbs 16:1: “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.” In other words, our hearts are indeed significant in shaping what we say, but the will of the Lord is decisive as to what comes out of our mouths. And Jeremiah says, “I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). And Proverbs 20:24 says, “A man’s steps are from the Lord; how then can man understand his way?”

So, we have good reason to believe that when Paul says in Ephesians 1:11, “[God] works all things according to the counsel of his will” — that’s the script — he means “all things,” including the words and deeds of every person. All persons are acting out, speaking a script ultimately written by God.

Addressing a Reasonable Question

Mark’s question to us is this: I don’t quite understand how the cross can be fully planned and still come from Jesus’s totally willing heart. He says, “When I think of actors following a script, it doesn’t feel like they’re acting freely or authentically — it’s someone else’s will, not their own.”

“We’re all living, acting, speaking, thinking, feeling according to God’s providence, God’s decree, God’s script.”

Now, that’s, of course, totally reasonable. That last question is totally reasonable. If you conceive of an actor reading a script and memorizing it and speaking it in a play, then, clearly, what he says is not necessarily his own. He’s an actor; he’s playacting. He’s letting himself be totally and consciously — that’s important — governed in what he says by memorizing and repeating a script. And that’s the danger of all analogies. Analogies are wonderful and they’re horrible, aren’t they? They’re just so illuminating and so confusing.

There are true things about the analogy between God’s detailed providence and the script of a play. There’s an analogy there, and there are true things. And there are wrong things in the analogy between God’s providence and the script of a play. What’s true about the analogy is that God does indeed write the script for everything that happens in the world, and he sees to it that everybody acts according to his script. That’s the meaning of divine providence. But what’s not true about the analogy is that, in reality, no human being can read the script of divine providence before it happens. Nobody is reading and memorizing the script of divine providence and then acting it out like in a play. The script is secret in every individual life, until it’s acted out — except for Jesus.

Jesus is divine. He is God. His mind and his will are totally one with the Father. Jesus was there in eternity past, sharing in the act of writing the script when it was written for him. He wrote it with the Father. So, unlike everyone else, he did know in detail what he was to do at every moment, because he himself planned to do it. And so, he did not act against his will when following the script. It’s his script.

The words in the garden, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done,” did not mean that God the Son was out of step with God the Father (Luke 22:42). It meant that the truly human nature of Jesus found the prospect of the crucifixion horrific and undesirable in itself, but the unity of the will between the Son and the Father prevailed. So, there’s no sense in which Jesus was following a script contrary to his ultimate desires. He wrote the script together with his Father. He loved the script, and he wholeheartedly acted the script from his whole soul, eternity to eternity.

Addressing a More Difficult Question

But Mark’s question to us is much more difficult when it comes to Judas and everybody else. We didn’t write the script of providence. We can’t read the script of providence before it is acted. We don’t know God’s detailed plans for us the rest of this afternoon or this evening or tomorrow morning, but we will all act and speak in perfect accord with the script of providence.

Now, to deal with this — I have maybe one minute left, which is why I wrote a 750-page book to answer this one-minute-long issue. And so, I feel just a little bit of comfort that if somebody finds this next minute inadequate, I can at least say, “Would you please consult my book Providence, which has 750 pages of defense and explanation of this doctrine?” So, I take some comfort in that.

The essential mystery regarding providence, the divine script, is how — that’s the key question. How does God govern all things in such a way that human choices are still blameworthy or praiseworthy — that is, humans are still real moral agents and are really accountable for our actions? That God governs the world this way is clearly revealed in Scripture. How he does it is not clearly revealed in Scripture. So, let me close with two verses for you to think about in this mystery.

Second Corinthians 8:16–17: “Thanks be to God, who put into the heart of Titus the same earnest care I have for you. For . . . he is going to you of his own accord.” God put it in the heart of Titus to do something, and the result is that he’s doing it of his own accord. That’s the mystery.

You can see the same thing in Romans 6:17: “Thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart.” So, Paul thanks God, not the Roman Christians, that they have become obedient from their own heart — authentic, real, heartfelt choosing and obedience. It is really their choice, and God is the one who ultimately brought it to pass.

Oh, there is so much more to say, but I end with this. John Piper owes — this is why I love this doctrine — we owe our eternal lives to the sovereign grace of God to overcome our sinful will and make us new creatures in Christ, who is at work in us to will and to do his good pleasure.

One of the most fruitful places to see the intersection between Puritan theology and the glory of God is the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Question: What is man’s chief end?

Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Puritan fingerprints are all over the Westminster Standards, which is not surprising since among the Westminster divines were the likes of Thomas Goodwin, Jeremiah Burroughs, and Samuel Rutherford.

The implications of the way this first question is answered are more far reaching than some of us realize. We will see that the formulation “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” touches on the nature of God’s glory, the nature of the human soul, the aim of creation and redemption, and the consummation of all things. The implications of this formulation are vast and worthy of our most careful meditation.

Man’s Happiness, God’s Glory

B.B. Warfield gave himself to this kind of careful meditation on the first question of the Westminster Catechism. Let’s launch us into our own reflections by listening to his.

He highlights the peculiar content of the first question by contrasting it with Calvin’s Geneva Catechism.

Question 1: What is the chief end of man?

Answer: It is to know God his Creator.

Question 2: What reason have you for this answer?

Answer: Because God has created us and placed us in this world that he may be glorified in us. It is certainly right, as he is the author of our life, that it should advance his glory.

Question 3: What is the chief good of man?

Answer: It is the same thing.

Question 4: Why do you account the knowledge of God the chief good?

Answer: Because without it, our condition is more miserable than that of any of the brute creatures.

Calvin is content in his catechism to define the chief end of man and the chief good of man in terms of knowing God. This doesn’t mean there’s no place in Calvin’s theology for the enjoyment of God. In fact, he says in the Institutes, “The ultimate happiness is to enjoy the presence of God” (On the Christian Life, 52). But it does seem to mean that he doesn’t put the same weight on the subjective experience of God’s glory — namely, the enjoyment of it — that the Puritans did.

Warfield takes note of this and says that the Westminster divines “improve on” Calvin’s answer (The Works of Benjamin Warfield, 6:396).

Then he explains,

The peculiarity of this question and answer of the Westminster Catechism . . . is the felicity with which it brings to concise expression the whole Reformed conception of the significance of human life. We say the whole Reformed conception. For justice is not done that conception if we say merely that man’s chief end is to glorify God. That certainly: and certainly, that first. But according to the Reformed conception man exists not merely that God may be glorified in him, but that he may delight in this glorious God. It does justice to the subjective as well as the objective side of the case. The Reformed conception is not fully or fairly stated if it . . . conceiv[es of] man merely as the object on which God manifests his glory. . . . It conceives man also as the subject in which the gloriousness of God is perceived and delighted in. No man is truly Reformed in his thought, then, unless he conceives of men, not merely as destined to be the instrument of the divine glory, but also as destined to reflect the glory of God in his own consciousness, to exult in God: unless he himself delights in God as the all-glorious one.

Then Warfield brings his meditation to a close with these ringing words about the relationship between glorifying God and enjoying God:

The distinction of the opening question and answer of the Westminster shorter catechism is that it moves on this high plane and says all this in the compressed compass of felicitous words: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Not to enjoy God certainly without glorifying him, for how can he to whom glory inherently belongs be enjoyed without being glorified? But just as certainly not to glorify God without enjoying him, for how can he whose glory is his perfections be glorified if he be not also enjoyed?

But if you look at those words very carefully, you realize that Warfield does not come right out and say what some Puritans were saying and what Jonathan Edwards made crystal clear — namely, that God is glorified by our enjoyment of him.

Spiritual Affections

For example, Puritan pastor John Howe (1630–1704) wrote a long treatise titled Delighting in God, in which he said,

We are to desire the enjoyment of [God] for his own glory. And yet here is a strange and admirable complication of these with one another. For if we enjoy him, delight and rest in him, as our best and most satisfying good, we thereby glorify him as God. (The Works of the Reverend John Howe, 1:559)

There is debate about how the Westminster divines understood the connection between glorifying God and enjoying God (even though John Howe was clear on it), but it is provocative, to say the least, that their formulation was singular, not plural: man’s chief end (not ends) is to glorify him and enjoy him. If that singular word “end” doesn’t unite the two, it at least makes them inseparable. Some Puritans — and Edwards after them — make explicit that we glorify God by enjoying him. More on that later.

What is obvious at this point from the first question of the catechism is that the affections of the human soul are elevated to a place of importance that is far higher than most people realize. The enjoyment of God is essential to the right worship of God and thus the end for which God created the world. We are in another world from those who treat spiritual emotions, spiritual affections, as marginal or incidental or secondary. That is not the Puritan world.

According to the Westminster Catechism, the Puritans, and Edwards, spiritual affections are as important as the glorification of God himself, because they are part of that glorification, which is the reason that the universe exists.

It’s not surprising then that, as the Reformed movement matured and deepened, the Puritans became keenly aware of the centrality of the workings of the human soul in the glorification of God. And they instinctively then became doctors of the soul as well as doctors of theology. This is one of the things that puts them in a class by themselves. They put such a high premium on what’s going on in the human heart. And it’s not surprising why they would do that given the answer to the first question of the Westminster Catechism: glorifying God and enjoying God is the end for which man was created. That is, what’s happening in the soul makes or breaks the purpose of creation and redemption!

Essential Reflection of God’s Glory

What I want to do in the rest of our time together is to press into some implications of the first question of the Westminster Catechism as it relates to God’s glory. Warfield referred to the objective and the subjective side of God’s glorification. God is glorious whether anybody sees it or enjoys it. That’s the objective reality of God and his glory. He is infinitely great, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely valuable. This is true objectively. And God created the world to set forth and manifest that objective glory. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Isaiah 43:6–7 says, “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth . . . whom I created for my glory.”

Then there is the subjective reflection of that glory in man’s perception and enjoyment of it. Ephesians 1:5–6 says, “He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace.” He objectively manifests the glory of his grace, and we subjectively praise the glory of his grace. And in that objective and subjective glorification, God’s purpose in creation is achieved.

“The enjoyment of God is essential to the right worship of God.”

What the first question of the catechism does not make explicit is that the right enjoyment of God presumes the right knowledge of God. Calvin made this explicit when he said that the chief end of man is to know God. The Westminster divines assume that and put all the emphasis on the enjoyment of God. Edwards makes both ways of glorifying God explicit:

God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to . . . their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts. . . . God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 13:495)

Implicit in that statement of Edwards — which I think is fully biblical and is also implicit in the Westminster Catechism — is the implication that the glory of God is the ground of the mind’s certainty and the goal of the soul’s satisfaction. In other words, if you ask, “How does the human mind come to know God with certainty?” the answer is, “By the revelation of the glory of God.” And if you ask, “How does the human heart come to enjoy God with satisfaction?” the answer is, “By the revelation of the glory of God.” The glory of God reveals itself to be inescapably real to the mind and incomparably rewarding to the heart.

The Place of God’s Glory

This has an amazing implication concerning the place of the glory of God in the Christian life, and I’ll state it three ways:

The quest for truth and the quest for joy turn out to be the same quest.
The path to unshakable conviction and the path to unending contentment are the same path.
Knowing for sure and rejoicing forever happen by the same discovery of the glory of God in the word of God.

This was simply astonishing to me — that the self-authenticating revelation of the glory of God turns out to be both the ground of my most confident knowing and the ground of my most satisfying enjoyment.

Ground of Enjoying God

Let’s take these one at a time. First, consider the glory of God as the ground of our most satisfying enjoyment.

The Bible makes clear that the fullest and longest pleasure is found only in God. Psalm 16:11 says, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” There is nothing fuller than full, and there is nothing longer than forever. Therefore, the enjoyment of the presence of the all-glorious God cannot be exceeded. It is inconceivable that there be a joy greater than full or a pleasure longer than forever.

Therefore, the Bible continually tells us not to be idiots, but rather commands us, “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4). “Be glad in the Lord” (Psalm 32:11). “Rejoice in the Lord” (Philippians 4:4). It tells us that when a man finds the treasure of God’s glorious kingdom hidden in a field, “then in his joy he goes and sells all he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). And so, it tells us to long for the Lord:

As a deer pants for flowing streams,     so pants my soul for you, O God.My soul thirsts for God,     for the living God. (Psalm 42:1–2)

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;     my soul thirsts for you;my flesh faints for you,     as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. . . .Because your steadfast love is better than life,     my lips will praise you. (Psalm 63:1, 3)

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,     that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. (Psalm 90:14)

What is obvious from the Bible is that God intends for his glory — himself — to be the ground of our fullest and longest happiness. Human beings were created with an insatiable desire to be happy. This is because God designed that he would be the end of that quest. And being the end of that quest, he would thus be shown to be supremely glorious. Being satisfied in the glory of God is not icing on the cake of Christianity; it is the essence and the heart of experiential Christianity. It is the end. The chief end of man is to enjoy God and thus make plain his all-satisfying glory.

Christianity is not a religion of willpower and decisions to do things we don’t really want to do. We are not more virtuous for overcoming our real preferences to do what we don’t want to do just because of some pressure to do what is right. That is not Christianity. That is Stoicism. Christianity is a life lived from a supernatural new birth of the human heart to want God more than we want anything. Desires for God are not peripheral. They are demanded, and they are essential.

And what makes the universal human quest for happiness God-glorifying rather than self-exalting is that, by the new birth, the glory of God becomes the ground of our joy. We do not make a god out of joy. We show to be God what we find most joy in. And when the glory of God is the end of our quest for joy, God is exalted, not us.

Ground of Knowing God

That’s the first half of the amazing implication implicit in the Westminster Catechism and in the Puritan mind — namely, that the glory of God is the ground of both knowing and enjoying God. Knowing God for sure and rejoicing forever happen by the same discovery of the glory of God in the word of God. And we have seen that the glory of God is indeed the ground of our most satisfying enjoyment. It is the end of the human quest to be happy.

Now we turn to the other half of the implication — namely, that the glory of God is also the end of the human quest for assured knowledge. The glory of God is the ground of our most confident knowing. The way that God has planned for us to know for sure what is true, and the way he planned for us to find our all-satisfying treasure, are the same — namely, by seeing the glory of God in the word of God.

Let me try to show what I mean by this and how I came to see it.

From 1751 to 1758, Jonathan Edwards was pastor of the church in the frontier town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and was a missionary to the Indians. His concern for Indian evangelization extends back into his pastorate at Northampton. And you can see this in these comments from Religious Affections, which were written about ten years earlier. His concern is this: How can they come to a justifiable knowledge of the truth when they know so little?

Miserable is the condition of the Houssatunnuck Indians and others, who have lately manifested a desire to be instructed in Christianity, if they can come at no evidence of the truth of Christianity, sufficient to induce them to sell all for Christ, in any other way but the [path of historical reasoning]. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:304)

What then?

The mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory. . . . Unless men may come to a reasonable solid persuasion and conviction of the truth of the gospel, by the internal evidences of it, . . . by a sight of its glory; it is impossible that those who are illiterate, and unacquainted with history, should have any thorough and effectual conviction of it at all. (2:299, 303)

Edwards is arguing that the path to a well-grounded conviction of the truth of the gospel, and of the Scriptures that tell that story, is a path that the poorest people in your country, with little education — and the Papuan tribesmen and the “Houssatunnuck Indians” of the eighteenth century — can follow. It is the path of seeing the glory of God in the word of God.

Edwards bases this contention on 2 Corinthians 4:4: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” The gospel — the story of how God came to save sinners — emits a “light” (Edwards calls it a “divine and supernatural light”) to the eyes of the heart. Paul calls it “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Christ’s self-authenticating glory shines through the gospel. To make it possible for the darkened human heart to see this, God shatters the blindness. Paul describes how God does this in 2 Corinthians 4:6: “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

That is what happens in the creation of a Christian. We are given eyes to see the glory of God in the gospel. This is how the most uneducated person, with the least background in history, logic, or biblical doctrine, can be so convinced of the truth of the gospel that he is willing to die for it and not be a fool. He is not a fool, because he sees real grounds for the divine truth of the gospel. His faith is warranted on good grounds. He sees “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Thus, the gospel is vindicated by the divine glory it reveals.

Door to Certainty and Satisfaction

Thus, the glory of God proves to be both the ground of the soul’s grateful satisfaction and the ground of the mind’s deepest certainty. I said that this is implicit in the Westminster Catechism and in the Puritan mind. I base that on question 4 of the Larger Catechism, which says this:

Question 4: How does it appear that the Scriptures are the Word of God?

Answer: The Scriptures manifest themselves to be the Word of God, by their majesty and purity; by the consent of all the parts, and the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God; by their light and power to convince and convert sinners, to comfort and build up believers unto salvation: but the Spirit of God bearing witness by and with the Scriptures in the heart of man, is alone able fully to persuade it that they are the very Word of God.

I think that phrase “the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God” is essentially what I’m saying — namely, that the glory of God stands forth from the Scriptures in a self-authenticating way that gives the regenerate mind good evidence of divine reality. The glory of God becomes the ground for solid conviction as well as the ground of solid satisfaction.

I conclude, therefore, that seeing the glory of God with the eyes of the heart is the door to full satisfaction in God and full certainty of God. The glory of God is the ground of both. In creating a Christian, God reveals to us in the gospel his glory in the face of Christ, which becomes both the ground of the mind’s certainty and the goal of the soul’s satisfaction.

In one miracle moment, the sight of his glory implants solid conviction and sweet contentment. The quest for the fountain of truth and the fountain of joy is over. They are the same fountain — the glory of God.

Here’s one last observation: when the first question of the Westminster Catechism parallels the glorification of God and the enjoyment of God rather than paralleling the glorification of God and the knowledge of God, it is choosing, I think, to say that the knowledge of God is not man’s chief end. Knowing is a means to enjoying, not the other way around. The chief end (final, eternal end!) really is the happiness of the people of God in the glory of God.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have joined us in reading the Bible together this year, thanks for joining us in that as well. We use the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, a schedule you can find online and print off. As we read the Bible together, a lot of questions emerge, as you can see in this email from Matt in Concord, New Hampshire, who writes in based on what he saw last year in the Bible reading plan. He puts together five texts that we are again encountering over the next three weeks. That’s gotta be a record!

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for the APJ podcast. I have a question about how much of the Christian faith is revealed and how much of it is hidden and not revealed. Of course, we are told that the secret things belong to God, things he does not reveal. But there are some things he reveals to us. That’s Deuteronomy 29:29. We read that Paul says, ‘The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.’ That’s an eager anticipation of a future revealing, in Romans 8:19. And Jesus promises us that we will ‘see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.’ That is in Matthew 26:64, a revelation of Christ’s physical radiance in the future, as I understand it.

“But as Paul did ministry, he celebrated the gospel as ‘the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations.’ That’s Romans 16:25–26. And he talks about imparting ‘a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory,’ in 1 Corinthians 2:7. That secret wisdom, the secret of the gospel — long held — is now out. So, how much of the faith is revealed? And how much of it remains a secret unrevealed?”

My answer would go something like this: Our knowledge of God now in this life is limited, true, enough, and glorious. And our knowledge of God in the age to come will be immediate, eternally inexhaustible, ever-increasing, glorious, and all-satisfying. So, let me try to show from the Bible why I describe our knowledge this way.

The Knowledge We Have

So, first, the knowledge we can have now. Jesus prayed in John 17:24, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.” So, Jesus has a glory today in heaven, which we do not see the way we will when he comes. Our knowledge, therefore, of his glory is limited. It’s real, but it’s limited. Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). And John says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Paul says again in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

But even though it’s clear from those passages that our knowledge of God is limited now, it’s true. It’s real knowledge if we stay true to what is in the Bible. Proverbs 30:5 says, “Every word of God proves true.” If you stay with the word, you can have true knowledge.

“Nobody has ever reached the limit of seeing the glory of what God has revealed to us already in this life.”

And third, it’s enough. This knowledge is limited — it’s true — but it is enough. So, enough for what? Enough for salvation and for leading a life of obedience pleasing to God. That’s really clear from 2 Timothy 3:15–17: “The sacred writings . . . are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for” — and here’s the key word — “every good work.” Now, that word every means not that you do every conceivable good work that somebody’s doing on the other side of the world. Every means every good work that God would expect of you in your situation. You have what you need in the Bible to equip you to do it. So, for a life fully pleasing to God, it is enough.

And not only is our knowledge limited and true and enough; it’s glorious. The limitations are such that nobody has ever reached the limit of seeing the glory of what God has revealed to us already in this life. Nobody has exhausted the Bible. It would be absolute folly to say, “Well, God has restricted what we can know here, so there’s no point in digging into the Scriptures to see what more glorious things there are to find.” That would be insane. That would be crazy — utter foolishness. Paul said in Ephesians 3:8, “To me . . . this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles [now] the unsearchable riches of Christ.” So, the riches of the glory of Jesus Christ are unsearchable — not meaning they can’t be searched, but they can’t be searched to the end because they’re inexhaustible. They are being preached now through the inspired words of Scripture.

So, even though in this life we see through a glass dimly, nevertheless, what we are given to see is so glorious that never in this life will we get to a point where we can say, “There’s no more to learn, no more to see till we get to heaven.” The Bible is like an ocean without shores and no bottom. Nobody has come close to seeing everything there is to see of God and his ways in the Bible.

The Knowledge We Will Have

Second, what about the knowledge we will have in the age to come, when all of our sin is banished, there are no hindrances of our sin anymore, and we inhabit the glory of Christ’s presence? And I said that knowledge will be immediate, eternally inexhaustible, ever-increasing, glorious, and all-satisfying.

By immediate, I mean the difference between knowing Christ through his word and knowing him face-to-face. Paul said in Philippians 1:23, “My desire is to depart” — that is, to die — “and be with Christ, for that is far better.” In other words, our knowledge of him and our fellowship with him will be more immediate after death than it is now. It is precious now. But Paul says it will be better when it is immediate. “We shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

And not only will our knowledge in that day be immediate; it will be eternally inexhaustible. One of the most amazing promises in the Bible is in Ephesians 2:7, where Paul says, “In the coming ages” — that’s a lot of ages; they’re all coming, and they last forever — “[God will] show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, since the riches of God’s grace are infinite — since he’s God — Paul calls them immeasurable. You can’t measure them. You never can get to the end of measuring them.

And since we are finite and cannot contain all the infinite riches of God’s grace, it appears that this is why we will have ages upon ages upon ages of being shown them. Eternal life — it will take all of eternity. Paul calls it “coming ages” in which God continually reveals more and more and more of the riches of his grace forever and ever and ever. That’s what it means for us to be finite and him to be infinite. The revelation of the glory of his grace goes on forever.

Which also implies, thirdly, that we will be ever-increasing in our knowledge. God takes us further and further into the storehouses of his own riches, which are immeasurable. This increase begins in this life, and then goes on and on forever and ever, because the love of Christ passes knowledge. You remember that amazing, staggering prayer in Ephesians 3:14–19: “May [you] have strength” — he’s praying — “to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” We will know what surpasses knowledge. I take that to mean that our knowing of the inexhaustible love of Christ will go on and on forever, ever-increasing. So, it remains comprehensively unknowable, and yet we’re growing in the knowledge of it all the time. I love this picture of our future. It’s just the necessary implications of God being God.

And not only will our knowledge be immediate, eternally inexhaustible, and ever-increasing; it will be glorious. Paul said in Romans 9:22–23, “[God desired] to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy.” Our knowledge will be the knowledge of infinite greatness and beauty and worth. That is glorious. God has chosen “to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

Finally, not only will our knowledge of God be immediate, eternally inexhaustible, ever-increasing, and glorious; it will be all-satisfying. “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy” — that’s where I get the idea of all-satisfying — “at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” — and there, I get the idea of satisfying forever (Psalm 16:11).

I think the practical upshot of all of this is that today, in this life right now, God has given to us the revelation of Jesus Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). And he did this, he gave us this, to set us on a quest starting at our conversion that will last forever and will prove to be eternal and all-satisfying as we go “further up and further in” to the immeasurable riches of God’s grace.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

Audio Transcript

A week ago, in APJ 2129, we heard from Bethany, an eighteen-year-old wrestling with how she could have been an enemy of God despite her lifelong Christian upbringing and lack of any conscious opposition to him. Pastor John, you related to her story. It’s your story too, and you explained how enmity with God is both a human and divine issue and that our true condition outside of Christ is revealed not merely through personal memory but through God’s word, which exposes the depth of our sin and separation from him, even if we don’t feel it.

That episode last Monday connects to today’s question on this Monday from Monika, a twenty-year-old woman from Albania, reflecting on our Bible readings from the first ten days of March. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for leading us through the Bible on the podcast and through Romans in March. I am new to the faith and joined my first Bible reading with you last year and am doing it again in 2025. This discipline reminds me there’s so much I don’t understand.

“But one thing I do know is that sinners refuse to come to God. That became clear in last March’s readings, including Psalm 53, Romans, and Matthew 23. Of course, the gospel is a wide-open offer to all, as I read in Romans 1:16. But God looks down to find someone who seeks him, and none do, according to Psalm 53:2. The same point is repeated in Romans 3:11: ‘No one seeks for God.’ Romans 5:10 even says we were enemies of God. And in the Gospels, we see Jesus weep over Jerusalem because they refused to come to him (in Matthew 23:37–38). To be a sinner seems hopeless. If there’s such a strong theme of sinners who cannot come to God, how does salvation even happen?”

Some of our listeners will think, Wow, that’s a really basic question. And it certainly is. And I think it is really good for us to regularly turn to very basic questions and see whether or not we have moved so far beyond the basics that we’re not able to explain the basics anymore. That’s a real good test.

Free Gospel, Enslaved Soul

Monika has read her Bible carefully enough to see that sin is really serious, not only because it offends God but because it enslaves people. She sees that. So much so that Romans 3:11 — she points out — says, “No one understands; no one seeks for God.” And so, she asks, “Well, if there’s such a strong theme of sinners who cannot come to God” — those are her words — “how does salvation happen?” And it is a really good question because Jesus says in John 6:37, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out,” in John 6:35, “Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst,” and in Revelation 22:17, “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (KJV).

“The reason anyone comes to Christ is that God, in his undeserved grace, overcomes our deadness and draws us.”

So, Monika sees accurately in the Bible that, on the one hand, there is a free gospel offer, and we must exercise our will and come to Jesus in order to be saved and have eternal life. She sees that. It’s there. And on the other hand, she sees that sin is so deep and so powerful, and our will is so anti-God, so enslaved to sin, that we cannot come. Our will not has become a cannot. It is so deep. Romans 8:7 says, “The mind of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” That’s how deep the will not has gone to become a cannot, a moral cannot.

Monika is asking an absolutely basic and important question. Amen. Thank you. It was good for me to think about this. And in the history of the church, this question has been answered two different ways.

View 1: Man Has Decisive Power

One way is to say that it’s just a mistake to believe that the Bible says humans are so enslaved to sin that they can’t use their wills to believe. That’s a mistake. Or a variation on this view is to say that, yes, the will is that enslaved, but God provides a kind of universal grace to everybody and overcomes that impossibility of believing for everybody and puts everybody in a position where they are now able to use their ultimately self-determining will to believe or not to believe. So, both of those versions of that view insist that human beings must have ultimate self-determination. Or another way to say it would be that humans must have decisive self-determination in order to be responsible moral human agents.

Now, that’s an assumption. It’s a presupposition, and it governs the view. Or to put it another way, the view says that man must be finally decisive in the creation of his faith, not God. And decisive is the right word. Decisive is an important word here because I’m not saying that they deny divine influence. But at the moment of conversion, when a person passes from death to life, from unbelief to belief, whose influence is finally decisive? And they say the human person performs the decisive action, not God.

I think that view is not what the Bible teaches. I think that view is governed by a presupposition, an assumption brought to the Bible, not gotten from the Bible — namely, the assumption that human beings simply must have ultimate, decisive self-determination, at least at the point of conversion, if they are going to be morally responsible. And I think when you bring that presupposition, that assumption, to the Bible, it distorts what the Bible teaches. It forces the Bible to say things that it does not say, and it denies that the Bible says things it does say.

View 2: God Has Decisive Power

The other view of how we get saved when our sin is so deep and so powerful that it makes coming to Christ humanly impossible, is — and this would be what I believe the Bible teaches — God overcomes that impossibility and brings us decisively to faith and to union with Christ for salvation. In other words, from start to finish — eternity to eternity — our salvation is a gift of God, a work of God.

“God overcomes the humanly impossible and brings us decisively to faith and to union with Christ for salvation.”

And by calling it a work of God, we don’t mean there’s nothing we do, like believing and living a life of faithful obedience. Rather, what we mean is that our believing and our obedience are enabled, worked in us, by the Spirit of God. Hebrews 13:21 says God is “working in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” We believe this because of texts like these. Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. . . . No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. . . . This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” That’s John 6:37, 44, and 65 — a really important chapter.

So, we must come in order to be saved. And the reason anyone comes to Christ is because God, in his undeserved grace, overcomes our deadness and draws us to Christ. That’s the miracle of the new birth (as the New Testament calls it), and that new birth makes faith happen. Here’s 1 John 5:1: “Everyone who believes” — that’s faith; everyone who has faith — “has been born of God.” The new birth, which God performs by the Spirit, precedes and brings about believing, and that’s a work of the Spirit.

We were dead. We could not make ourselves alive, and he made us alive. Ephesians 2:4–10: “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ” because of “the great love with which he loved us. . . . For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. . . . We are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” We don’t cause ourselves to be born. We don’t cause ourselves to be created. We don’t make ourselves alive. This is the work of God’s saving grace.

Saved to the Glory of His Grace

So, Monika, the way your salvation happened, the way all salvation happens, was that when you were dead in your trespasses, before you were born again, before you were a new creation, before you had been made alive, you were willfully resistant to God’s truth, whatever age you were. And your inability to come to him was blameworthy and deserving of wrath. “But God” — that great phrase in Ephesians 2:4 — in his “great love” for you, you in particular, “made [you] alive,” caused you to be born again, made you a new creation, gave you the gift of repentance (as it says in 2 Timothy 2:25) and the gift of faith (as it says in Ephesians 2:8).

And he did it this way so that you and all of us, all of his people, would not take any credit for our salvation but would praise the glory of his grace forever and ever.