Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. I mentioned Monday that we’re in the middle of answering a batch of apologetics questions on the life and work of Christ. And today’s question is one several of you have asked about — namely, why did Jesus have to leave earth after the resurrection? It seems like he could do some amazing ministry if he were still here on earth with us.

That’s Dalton’s question, and he speaks for many of you. “Pastor John, hello and thank you for the APJ podcast,” he writes. “A question I have for you is this. Why did Jesus leave earth after his resurrection? I understand that Jesus left to leave us the Holy Spirit, but couldn’t he have just stayed and continued his ministry as the risen Christ in tandem with the Spirit? Wouldn’t that have been more effective? Why did Christ leave the earth?”

A question like this can have value if we make it a stepping stone to insight into Christ’s present ministry from heaven — in other words, if it helps us understand the wisdom and the goodness of what is the case, and doesn’t just become an occasion for curious speculation of what might have been the case. Let’s tackle Dalton’s question that way, with that goal in mind.

The question is, Couldn’t Jesus have just stayed on earth and continued his ministry after the resurrection — and not gone back to heaven as the risen Christ — in tandem with, alongside the work of the Spirit? “Wouldn’t that have been more effective?” he asks. Why did Christ leave the earth? Here are a few thoughts.

1. Confusion Avoided

If the risen Christ remained on earth for all of church history, a serious competition would be introduced into global Christianity. Who has the risen Christ nearby? He would be spatially bound. He could not be in one place and another place and another place at the same time. The temptation would always be there to make the place where he was the sacred place.

His presence would introduce a serious confusion for how Christians are to relate to him. Some would be relating to him face-to-face at any given moment as he visits churches. Some would be trying to relate to him by the Spirit, but be put off-balance — knowing that he’s one hundred or ten thousand miles away on earth.

The role of the Holy Spirit in relation to Christ would be confused. If his role is to glorify Christ (John 16:14), would we seek the fullness of the Spirit in order to experience Christ by the Spirit’s revelation of him in the gospel, or would we seek the Spirit to bring him, say, from Chicago to Minneapolis? It would — in other words — be a confusing way to go about God’s work.

2. Authority Demonstrated

Christ’s post-resurrection role as the God-man ruling the cosmos is better signified if he’s sitting at the right hand of God than walking on the earth. His role as the head of the church would be misrepresented if he were part of the church on earth. Here’s the key text from Ephesians 1:

[God] raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:20–23)

This exalted role — as above all rule and authority in the universe and as the head of the universal church — would be obscured, wouldn’t it? It would be obscured if Jesus were still walking among us.

3. Coronation Accomplished

The exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God’s majesty is the fitting coronation for his triumphant work on the cross and his new incarnate superiority over angels. Hebrews 1:3–4: “After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”

If he had not taken this seat, the greatness of his achievement on the cross and the greatness of his new incarnate superiority would be obscured.

4. Intercession Enabled

The present intercession of Christ at God’s right hand would not be rightly exercised or exhibited if Christ were still here among us after the resurrection.

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 — more than that, who was raised — who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. (Romans 8:33–34)

It is fitting that Jesus be in the exalted presence of God as he intercedes for us and brings his sacrifice to bear on our behalf before God.

5. Spirit of Glory Given

The Holy Spirit that Jesus promised to send when he returned to the Father (John 15:26) is the Spirit of the risen Christ. And according to John 7:39, the Spirit of the risen Christ could not come until Christ was completely glorified — which included his ascension to the Father. Here’s what John said: “Now this [Jesus] said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). The glorification of Jesus at the right hand of God was essential, because the Spirit who would be sent by Jesus and the Father is the Spirit of the glorified Christ.

6. Climactic Appearing Arranged

God’s plan is that the risen Christ would get great glory at the end of this age, not by itinerating on the earth for two thousand years, but by descending from heaven in power and great glory, and defeating the man of lawlessness, and being marveled at by all his people.

The Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. (2 Thessalonians 1:7–8)

Then the lawless one will be revealed [the son of destruction], whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. (2 Thessalonians 2:8)

The second coming of Christ is the great climax of God’s way of glorifying his Son.

These are some of the reasons why Jesus did not stay on the earth after the resurrection, and there are many more. God’s ways are great. God’s ways are good and wise. Let’s revel in what he’s doing through Christ from heaven.

I can imagine several possible responses to an article with a title like this one.

“Oh great. Another extrovert clueless to the fact that God made people different.”
“Yes! A word of admonishment to the frozen chosen.”
“Come on. Just let people worship God undisturbed.”
“Why do we keep talking about this, anyway?”

It’s that last question I feel aware of most as I write another article on what we do with our bodies in congregational worship. Haven’t we talked about this enough? Aren’t people just going to do what they’ve always done? Isn’t it more important to focus on what’s happening in our hearts than what we do with our bodies?

Good questions. But the Bible doesn’t give us the option of minimizing or ignoring what we do physically when we gather as his people in his presence. It matters.

But why? Whether you lift your hands high on Sunday mornings or keep them below your waistline, God gives us at least three reasons why it’s important to display the worth of Christ with our bodies.

1. It Matters to God

Think about it. God created us as embodied souls, not bodiless spirits (Genesis 2:7). In the new heavens and earth, we won’t lose our arms, legs, feet, hands, and torsos. They will be glorified (Philippians 3:20–21). And until we enjoy that future, Scripture encourages and models a whole-being response to God’s greatness with the bodies we have.

My heart is steadfast, O God! I will sing and make melody with all my being! (Psalm 108:1)

My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed. (Psalm 71:23)

I appeal to you . . . brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1)

God repeatedly connects the thoughts of our hearts with the movement of our bodies. Of course, physical expressions aren’t the whole story. Lifted hands can be a mindless act or a shallow attempt to impress others with our spirituality (Matthew 6:2). We can jump around as a way to feed our emotions and “feel” God’s presence. And Jesus rebuked those who honored him with their lips while their hearts were far from him (Matthew 15:8).

Yes, physical expressiveness can be abused or misleading. But God still intends our bodies to respond to him in worship. From Genesis to Revelation, God’s creatures respond to his worthiness in external ways. They sing. They clap. They shout. They dance. They bow their heads. They kneel. They stand in awe. And yes, at times they even raise their hands. And God receives glory when they do.

Of course, bodily expression isn’t always possible. A woman in our church in the latter stages of ALS recently shared (through her daughter) how she is losing her ability to speak and move. But nothing keeps her from worshiping God with everything she has. She can’t sing, but she worships as others raise their voices. She can’t lift her hands anymore, but she rejoices as others do.

Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). As much as we’re able, that love is meant to be shown in and through our bodies.

2. It Matters to Others

God receives glory when we respond to his greatness with outward expressions of praise and dependence. But those responses send a message to those around us as well.

A Sunday morning visitor surrounded by church members mumbling lyrics or standing stoically with folded arms might have a hard time grasping that Jesus is a glorious Savior. Of course, the Holy Spirit can use lyrics alone to magnify Christ in someone’s heart. But the satisfying goodness of Jesus isn’t something we merely sing about. Our body language communicates to others our gratitude for who God is and what he’s done — or the absence of it. After all, “those who look to him are radiant” (Psalm 34:5).

God created us to be affected by what affects others. When people see my face instantly light up the moment my wife, Julie, walks into the room, they understand that I value her presence. They’ll be drawn to share in my joy and appreciation, even if they don’t know her well.

In a similar way, David says praising God with a new song will cause many to “see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord” (Psalm 40:3). Do people have the opportunity to “see and fear” as a result of observing us on Sunday mornings? Do our actions reveal that God has drawn us up from the pit of destruction and set our feet upon the rock of Jesus Christ (Psalm 40:2)? Could we be missing an opportunity to use our hands, arms, faces, and bodies to communicate that God is really present among us and that we’re amazed, humbled, and grateful?

3. It Matters to Us

Our bodily movements function in two different ways. First, they express outwardly an inward emotion or thought. Soccer fans jump to their feet and cheer when their team scores the winning goal. Parents clap and smile when their daughter takes her first step. Pro golfers raise their hands in jubilation after sinking the winning putt. A husband-to-be bends down on one knee as he prepares to place a ring on his future wife’s finger.

Why do we do these things? Because words alone aren’t enough. God gave us bodies to deepen and amplify what we think and feel. No one teaches us these bodily movements directly (although we learn a great deal through observation). Throughout the world, in all cultures, people respond outwardly to communicate what takes place inside of them.

“God is worthy of our deepest, strongest, and purest affections — and he intended our bodies to show it.”

But physical expressions function in a second way. They encourage us toward what we should think and feel. They help train our hearts in what is true, good, and beautiful. That’s one reason some churches’ liturgical practices include standing, sitting, and kneeling together.

In his commentary on Acts 20:36, pastor-theologian John Calvin elaborated on why Paul knelt to pray as he bid farewell to the Ephesian elders. His comments are as relevant in the twenty-first century as they were in the sixteenth.

The inward attitude certainly holds first place in prayer, but outward signs, kneeling, uncovering the head, lifting up the hands, have a twofold use. The first is that we may employ all our members for the glory and worship of God; secondly, that we are, so to speak, jolted out of our laziness by this help. There is also a third use in solemn and public prayer, because in this way the sons of God profess their piety, and they inflame each other with reverence of God. But just as the lifting up of the hands is a symbol of confidence and longing, so in order to show our humility, we fall down on our knees. (Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 19, trans. Henry Beveridge [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996], at Acts 20:36)

Calvin highlights three reasons physical expressions matter in our relationship with God (similar to the three reasons in this article). First, God receives glory through our entire being, rather than just a part of us. Second, physical expressions assist us when our affections don’t align with the truths we proclaim and cherish. Third, they inspire reverence in others.

I want to draw attention to the second point here. Sometimes we need to be “jolted out of our laziness.” Occasionally on a Sunday morning, I feel disconnected from what’s taking place. I find my thoughts and affections wandering or dull. In those moments, I have knelt down or raised my hands to acknowledge that God is God, and I am not, and that he alone is worthy of my reverence, obedience, and worship. Eventually, those actions help draw my heart to appreciate more deeply what I’m singing or hearing. I’ve done the same when I’ve been alone. In both cases, my body trains my heart to recognize what is real, what is true, what matters.

Eternal, Embodied Worship

Our bodies are a gift from God that he intends for us to use for his glory, the good of those around us, and our joy. He is worthy of our deepest, strongest, and purest affections — and he intended our bodies to show it.

Obviously, we only have space here to cover a few basic principles and expressions. I’m confident discussions about the physicality of worship in the gathered church will continue and bear fruit until Jesus finally returns. But then the discussions will cease. With every fiber of our being — every thought of our minds, every word of our lips, every act of our glorified bodies — we will endlessly worship the triune God who redeemed us.

What keeps us from starting now?

A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her is more precious than all the favors that all the other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love.” (Meditations in a Toolshed, C.S. Lewis)

Can you recall the enchantment? The intoxication of young love? Its gravity, its force, its demands? Perhaps we squint to remember what we thought we could never forget — the bottomless conversations, the nervous smiles, the rewatching in the mind moments just past. We may smile to ourselves, that was a lifetime ago. “Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life” — doesn’t that capture it?

But that was then. The spell wears off. The kids come. You’ve spent days and weeks and years together. You’ve seen her without the composure and the makeup; she’s seen you without the confidence and the strength. You’ve searched out this island called marriage; there is less to explore now. In love still, just a different kind. More realistic, we tell ourselves. The description above undergoes a revision.

A young man marries that girl. The world returns to normal a few years after. He seems to have remembered that thing that pestered him, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her seems next to impossible with young children. He is, as they say, “settled down.”

Much has been gained; something has been lost. You wish, at times, you could return to that first meeting, that first date, that first time telling her, “I love you.” The romance is still honeyed — when you make time for it. She is still beautiful, when you remember to really look at her.

She sleeps next to you now but seems, on some days, farther than ever. She is yours, but come to think of it, you miss her. You’ve grown: better friends, perhaps, better partners in the family enterprise, but are you better lovers? Has the poetry, requiring so much time and attention, turned into abbreviated text messages and generic emojis?

What a different vision for godly marriages the father of Proverbs hands to his sons:

Let your fountain be blessed,     and rejoice in the wife of your youth,a lovely deer, a graceful doe.Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;     be intoxicated always in her love. (Proverbs 5:18–19)

Husbands, “be intoxicated always in her love.” What a command. Literally, “be led astray” continually in her love. Be swept up. Lose track of time. Forget about your phone. Wander. Inebriate yourself with the dark-red of marital love.

Your wife, as the father crowns her, is a lovely deer and graceful doe. Do we need reminding? As familiarity threatens to blind us, as fights and frets and changing figures would cool us, the king bids his son memorize the lover’s irrepressible song, “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart” (Song of Solomon 4:9 KJV). She, not the adulterous woman, must be his addiction.

Led Astray to Her

We need this command, don’t we? We are so prone to be led astray by lesser things; we whose passions can somehow weaken with possession; we who dull with acquaintance and brighten at novelty. We need a father to tell us on our wedding day (and then again at our ten-year anniversary), My son, be led astray continually to her — away from the tyranny of good pursuits or worldly ambitions — be intoxicated always in marital love.

“In a blur of married and modern life, are we still awake to our beloved?”

Has your pool of passions stilled? Many of us remember being implored before marriage, “[do] not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (Song of Solomon 2:7). Natural sprinters we proved to be. Desires galloped prior to marriage — when Satan tempted and we ached while apart — but now that time pleases and heaven smiles down, how our love slouches and our once unsleeping passions can hardly keep awake past nine.

In a blur of married and modern life, are we still awake to our beloved? Do we only see the mother of our children? Will we never pause to really see her who is beside us on this grand adventure?

The wise father knows that our hearts, unwatched, grow blind to beauty. We think life unextraordinary — as we live on a planet spinning constantly, flung into a corner of the cosmos, revolving violently around a massive flaming ball — yet we yawn and call it Tuesday. But what is more wondrous still, we live with an immortal soul — in Christ, a coheir of the universe, a redeemed one, indwelt by the God who made everything. A Christian wife. The Alphabet of good husbanding begins with seeing her through faith’s eyes. That is why I suggest, we need to cultivate the habit of seeing her as the Scriptures teach us to see her.

Look at Her

The husband of the Song of Songs, drunk on anticipation and admiration, observes her as an artist bent over a portrait or as Adam waking to behold Eve,

How beautiful are your feet in sandals,     O noble daughter!Your rounded thighs are like jewels,     the work of a master hand.Your navel is a rounded bowl     that never lacks mixed wine.Your belly is a heap of wheat,     encircled with lilies.Your two breasts are like two fawns,     twins of a gazelle.Your neck is like an ivory tower.Your eyes are pools in Heshbon,     by the gate of Bath-rabbim.Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon,     which looks toward Damascus.Your head crowns you like Carmel,     and your flowing locks are like purple;     a king is held captive in the tresses. (Song of Solomon 7:1–5)

Now here, distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive. Charge not forth, good men, to describe your wife in this exact manner. But do learn from the husband’s focus, his alertness, his ever-attentive eye that surveys his bride in quiet wonder. Husband, what does your wife’s neck look like? Her smile in the morning? Her gentle spirit? Her strong convictions? Speak of them, perhaps sparingly, but notice them constantly. And when you do, thank God, the Artist, for what he is painting.

Keep Looking at Her

Does this sustained, admiring stare depend on the beloved’s appearance? Kept curves, bright teeth, ungrayed hair? Notice that the father teaches that the eye of the beloved does not recoil when it observes new wrinkles on skin, new wear and tear from everyday life. Look again at his charge,

Let your fountain be blessed,     and rejoice in the wife of your youth,a lovely deer, a graceful doe.Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;     be intoxicated always in her love. (Proverbs 5:18–19)

“Rejoice in the wife of your youth.” How old is she now? Youth is somewhere in the rearview; the wedding day a distant memory. Decades have passed, perhaps. “Always” is your delight and duty. There she is. You gaze over your morning coffee at her — what do you see? The wife of your youth, the wife of your reminiscences, the wife of your now and former days.

The world, so crude and boastful, would tell you that she, with chronic knee pain and doctors’ visits, is past her prime, perhaps even disposable. With its diseased and rasping voice, it points to the youthful employee, the pornographic magazine at the checkout counter, the woman running past in painted-on attire — behold, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. She will thrill you with the chase, satisfy you with fresher springs.

No, no, no, foolhardy flesh. I have my lovely deer, my graceful doe. She, no longer a youth, is better: the wife of my youth. We keep a most blessed fountain. Her breasts have not stopped filling me at all times with delight. No, no, no, O dark and devilish temptation, you have no mastery here. My God, by his grace, has given me himself and more; he has gifted me her. And though our stay in this body be brief, though our figures droop and drag and waste away, she is even more beautiful now (more Christlike than ever before), a companion no harem of illicit pleasure could rival. Be gone, all others, be gone! I am swept away — intoxicated — always in her love.

King Caught in the Tresses

Consider how closely Christ looks at his bride. How particular is he to pore over that beauty which he himself bestows upon her (and at what cost)?

Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:25–27)

His life, his crucifixion, his being “marred, beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14), all so that he would watch her walk down the aisle toward him — “in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” before him. His eyes, keener than eagles’, survey her.

Behold, you are beautiful, my love;behold, you are beautiful;     your eyes are doves. . . .You are altogether beautiful, my love;     there is no flaw in you. (Song of Solomon 1:15, 4:7)

And then he, the perfect Groom, will call her from this cursed world,

Arise, my love, my beautiful one,     and come away. (Song of Solomon 2:10)

What Marriage Whispers

Marital intimacy, though not the Aphrodite culture would make her, is a precious gift. The father, while not merely pointing us to the marriage bed alone, is here bidding old lovers to drink deeply of the uncorked vintage of God’s design.

Marital sex, a lordly and bright sunlight, should itself bow. I believe we learn something of intimacy’s proper place from (of numerous other passages) a text that has always struck me as something of an oddity. Concerning the marriage bed, Paul writes,

Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)

Contra many skeptical notions, intimacy, in normal circumstances, should be enjoyed and regular. Our lack of self-control and Satan’s sure temptations ground this dictate. The soak under the silver waterfall serves more than delight and unity; it serves holiness. Regular “coming together” builds a gleeful rampart against the schemes of the enemy.

But this was not the oddity. The oddity to me concerned what the couple might decide (together) to lay it aside for. “[Don’t] deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer.” It struck me as odd that the apostle considered prayer the alternative and the superior.

What does prayer as a planned interruption to the marriage bed suggest? It tells me that sex is a good and necessary gift for married couples from a good and gracious God, but not an ultimate gift. Sex was made for man, but not man for sex. Greater pleasures perch on higher branches. One might halt the lesser intimacy, might intentionally fast from the feast, for the higher and the greater — prayer. The prayer closet — the place of intimacy with God — holds higher rank.

Swept Away

Marital intimacy — with all its high glories and some crawling challenges (here left undiscussed) — samples wine from a coming orchard. Wine within this covenant challis is ultimately about blood-bought union with a covenant-keeping God. The mountain peaks, the ocean deeps, the untamed thrill, the transfigured moments of pleasure and beauty in a healthy married life exist for him (Colossians 1:16). Our union with him is not of one flesh as with a wife, but greater, of one spirit (1 Corinthians 6:17). Considering Ephesians 5:31–32, John Piper clarifies,

Leaving parents and holding fast to a wife, forming a new one-flesh union, is meant from the beginning to display this new covenant — Christ leaving his Father and taking the church as his bride, at the cost of his life, and holding fast to her in a one-spirit union forever. (This Momentary Marriage, 30)

Marital union sketches union with Christ.

So, husbands, look at her, keep looking at her, awaken slumbering summer, foment tidy sheets, cast down enthroned shams — and forgo this intimacy, at times, to pray. Be intoxicated always in her love, be led astray, and in that affection be swept away to a higher love, the love of Christ. Let her voice and her love remind you of what you’ve been trying to remember all your life.

I first got to know the man who became my father-in-law when I began to date his beautiful, godly daughter. That was half his life ago, and two-thirds of mine. It didn’t take me long to size him up; Glenn was a man of immense, transparent integrity.

His reputation had preceded him. He was known in our church to be a man who loved Jesus, who loved his wife, and who loved his two daughters. He was also looked on and respected as a leader.

But when his beautiful, godly daughter put me in privileged proximity to him, I discovered what he was really like: he surpassed his reputation. And now, after forty years of firsthand experience, I can honestly say that my respect for this man has only increased.

If I had to sum up my father-in-law’s character in a single word (which in reality doesn’t do him justice), I would choose the word faithful. Glenn is a faithful man, by which I mean he is true to his word. Which also means he is a rare man in this fallen world.

Rare Like Gold

The wise, Spirit-inspired writer was sadly spot-on when he penned these words:

Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love,     but a faithful man who can find? (Proverbs 20:6)

The author is referring to the kind of man who displays an overall consistency between his words and his works, between what he professes to believe and how he behaves, between what he promises and what he performs.

This is the way just about every man wants to think of himself — or at least wants others to think of him. But the truth is, not many men are essentially and consistently faithful.

But my father-in-law is one of those exceptional men. Like gold, he is a rare find. In fact, his is a rarified kind of faithfulness, a kind that exceeds the common-grace variety. His faithfulness is a supernatural outgrowth of his being united by faith with Jesus, his Lord. His faithfulness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22).

And one of the great benefits I’ve received from being in privileged proximity to such a man is witnessing what this fruit looks like after a lifetime of faithfulness.

Gift of Being Taken for Granted

One such fruit is that my father-in-law is a man you can take for granted. Lest that sound insulting rather than honoring, here’s what I mean: Glenn is a man whose word you can trust. As I explain in True to His Word,

In Scripture, when a person is described as “faithful,” it’s almost never referring to how much faith that person possesses, but to how much faith others can place in that person — how much others can trust him to perform what he promises. A faithful person honors, cherishes, maintains, and guards the faith of those who put their trust in him. (12)

“There are few gifts a man can give to us more precious than the gift of our being able to assume his trustworthiness.”

There are few gifts a man can give to us more precious than the gift of our being able to assume his trustworthiness. We might be tempted to say that love is more precious, but at bottom, faithfulness is an inherent expression of love (see 1 Corinthians 13:7–8). It is a person’s love that honors, cherishes, maintains, and guards the faith of those who put their trust in him. This is Godlike love, since Scripture repeatedly describes God as showing “steadfast love and faithfulness” to his people (Psalm 25:10).

That’s the gift my father-in-law has given his wife, his daughters, those of us in his extended family, his friends, his fellow church members, his neighbors, the innumerable people he worked for and with during his vocational life: the gift of assuming his trustworthiness.

Who can possibly put a price on that?

What a Faithful Man Builds

It’s almost poetic that my father-in-law spent his vocational life in construction, because what he’s built relationally with his trustworthy character is strong, durable, and beautiful, like what he built with his skillful hands.

I see it in his marriage. His steadfast love and faithfulness to the beautiful, godly wife of his youth has meant that for 57 years (and counting) Lois has been able to stand on the vows Glenn made to her before God without fear that the floor of his fidelity would collapse underneath her.

I see it in his family. Like every father and grandfather, he gets his share of teasing and suffers the indignities of needing to be tutored on pop culture and new technologies. But he has the loving respect of his daughters, his sons-in-law, and his grandchildren because they all have been the beneficiaries of his steadfast love and faithfulness. They all trust him. This is perhaps most clearly seen when one of them brings some fault or sin to his attention; they do it because they know he can be trusted to receive it.

I see it in the church where he’s been a faithful, involved member for over forty years. He’s still known as a man who deeply loves Jesus, his wife, his family, and his church. And he’s still respected as a leader, though not just for what he does but who he is. Leaders and laypersons look to him because he truly cares for them, listens to them, serves them, encourages them, prays for them — in other words, he extends to them his steadfast love and faithfulness. Therefore, they trust him.

I see it in his neighbors — former neighbors, I should say. Last year, after my wife and I purchased and moved into the home where Glenn and Lois had lived for 44 years, we got to attend a farewell picnic the neighborhood threw for them. And if you could have heard the stories. As I listened, I realized these folks had come to see Glenn as something of a neighborhood chaplain. He not only knew everybody; he knew them personally. He had taken particular interest in each of them; he had come to their aid in need; he had offered his ear, his counsel, and his prayers when they were in pain. Even now, when he comes to the house, his former neighbors start making their way over to greet him. It speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

My father-in-law built many impressive things with his hands during his life. But in my estimation — and more importantly, in God’s estimation — the most impressive things he built were the relationships of love and trust through his steadfast love and faithfulness.

Putting God on Display

As a skilled master builder, my father-in-law knows better than most just how important a foundation is to the structure it supports. So, it’s no small thing when I say that the firm foundation of Glenn’s life, the granite upon which everything else in his life is built, is God and all God promises to be for him in Jesus.

But as a man who loves the glory of God, Glenn would not want this metaphor to be misunderstood. As John Piper says,

Foundations are invisible and are seldom thought about in the daily life of the house. They are taken for granted. They are silently assumed. But God wills not only to be the massive, silent, unseen foundation beneath the walls of our . . . lives; he also wills to be the visible capstone adorning the top and the brightness of the glory that fills the house for all to see.

That’s why, when we met for breakfast recently, Glenn told me, as he has repeatedly over the years, this time with tears, “I just want to put God on display.” That is the heart cry of an exceptional man, a man who has known through experience the steadfast love and faithfulness of God and can’t help but long to extend that kind of love to others in the hope that, through him, they too will come to know the Fount from which it springs.

And Glenn has put God on display, in both word and deed. God has not merely been the firm foundation of Glenn’s life; God has been visible at every level in the entire edifice of his life.

Honor of a Lifetime

The apostle Paul tells us that we must “pay to all what is owed to them,” including “respect to whom respect is owed [and] honor to whom honor is owed” (Romans 13:7). So, it’s only right that I pay what I can of the respect and honor I owe this faithful man. It is an immense and joyful debt of profound gratitude.

But Glenn has a far better payment of respect and honor coming to him. And it’s coming directly from the mouth of the God Glenn so deeply loves and so beautifully displays. It is the exceeding riches of respect and honor God will bestow on all of his faithful children, and it will more than pay off all the outstanding debts any of us owe to each other:

Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master. (Matthew 25:21)

What about the theological insights of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) make them so exhilarating for many who discover them today?

As a Reformed Christian who has long benefited from Edwards’s insights, I have been fascinated by that question. Sixty years ago, when I was a student, Edwards was respected in Reformed circles, but not often celebrated. Within thirty years, however, he had been rediscovered and had become widely revered as the one American theologian who might be mentioned in the same breath with Augustine and Calvin. So, in my studies of Edwards, I have kept asking which of his insights are most valuable for shaping Christian sensibilities today.

How does Edwards speak to us now in the twenty-first century?

Two Worlds Collide

As a historian of American religion and culture, I have been especially interested in how Edwards’s own cultural context helps us understand his continuing relevance. Especially important for that understanding is that Edwards lived at a dramatic turning point in Western culture.

As a precocious teenager, Jonathan struggled passionately with how to reconcile two very attractive worlds. The son of a strict and impressive New England Reformed pastor, he was heir to what had become one of the most formidable intellectual-spiritual traditions of the time. Yet he also was fascinated by the exciting new outlooks arising from the scientific revolution shaped by Isaac Newton, the philosophical insights of John Locke, and what we know as the Enlightenment. We might think of his close New England contemporary Benjamin Franklin, who also was confronted with these two worlds and embraced the Enlightenment.

Edwards recounted that, as a teenager wrestling with these two outlooks, he was full of objections to the “sovereignty of God,” which he thought was a “horrible” doctrine. But then, in a way he could not quite explain, he came to embrace that teaching as “a delightful conviction.” He then goes on to speak of his experiences of an “inward, sweet delight in God and divine things” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 16:792).

In brief, I think the best explanation for this paradigm shift is that Edwards’s early view of God’s sovereignty was too small. He came to see that if God’s sovereignty is understood properly, it extends to the very essence of all reality. And not only that, but it means that the universe is essentially personal. God’s sovereignty, in biblical terms, is an expression of the language of God. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

God’s language is not identical with God, but it is nonetheless an intimately personal expression. And that language is the language of love. God created the universe and sustains it every microsecond ultimately in order to communicate love to creatures capable of love. And the supreme expression of that love is the sacrificial love of Christ for the undeserving.

Our Impersonal Age

Edwards’s view of the universe as essentially personal offers a view of reality opposite from the direction his enlightened contemporaries — and eventually the whole modern world — were moving.

For Isaac Newton, the physical universe could be understood as interacting impersonal mechanisms. One could add the God of Christianity to this outlook (as Newton himself did), or a vague Providence (as Franklin did), but practically speaking, most things could be understood as the operations of impersonal forces.

During the next generations, the enlightened Deists distanced God further from everyday life. Deists still thought it necessary to posit a Creator of the marvelous mechanisms, but for them, God, like a master watchmaker, had essentially retired, allowing the wonderful machinery to operate on its own.

By the later nineteenth century, with the advent of Darwinism, it became plausible for progressive thinkers to remove God altogether and to view all reality as the product of mindless, chance forces out of which intelligent beings happened to appear.

Today, all of us, even though we might reject a chance universe, are shaped in part by the assumptions on which our civilization has been built: that the universe is most essentially impersonal, run by laws best known by natural science and controlled by instrumental reason. Technology vastly increases the domain of that impersonal universe as its influence shapes our lives, determining how we earn livings, how we organize our everyday lives, how we spend money, how we communicate, how we form our beliefs, how we are entertained, and often how we worship. God is almost inevitably distanced from that impersonal world run by its self-contained sets of laws.

Religious believers typically supplement that world with beliefs in a higher spiritual reality and with some moral principles that may somewhat modify the way they relate to the technological society and the natural world. They typically believe God created the world sometime in the past and may still intervene at any time, particularly with respect to occasional spiritual experiences or regarding personal concerns, especially matters of health. The outlook of religious believers is thus often dualistic. We tend to move back and forth between two types of realities — the “real world,” as we might say in an unguarded moment, and the higher spiritual dimension. These two are seldom well integrated with each other.

God’s Language of Love

Edwards’s starting point in the triune God’s ongoing creative love provides a wonderful basis for cultivating some alternative sensibilities. For Edwards, the most essential dimension of reality is the spiritual and personal that pervades everything. This outlook is not just added on to what we believe about the material world. Rather, it is a reorienting recognition of underlying dimensions of reality that define everything that is.

All creation is part of a language that has its highest expression in the redemptive love of God in Christ. Edwards often speaks of that love as the highest beauty. We all can get glimpses of the wonderful beauty of the natural world around us, as in a sunset or in the flowering trees of springtime. These point to the higher beauties in personal relationships. The highest beauty, after all, is the beauty of true love. And again, the highest love is Christ’s love for us as undeserving sinners.

Edwards accordingly cultivated sensibilities toward what we regard as “the natural world” to see it as a personal expression of a loving God whose love to us should shape our affections. Edwards saw created reality typologically as “Images of Divine Things.” He kept an extensive notebook with that title where he recorded reflections on how the beauties of Christ’s love are revealed in everything around us. Since nature has been corrupted by sin, its revelations are also of Christ’s redemptive love. The beauties of the universe are the harmonies of right relationships that we sometimes get intimations of in the beauty of trees and flowers.

In Edwards’s greatest sermon, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” he depicts the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ as a light flowing from the center of reality. Since that light reveals the beauty of a loving person, it can be truly known only affectively. Someone might have just a rational knowledge about that love but not truly sense it. Edwards uses the analogy of our human loves. “There is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance” (Works, 17:414).

So, if we are given eyes to see the overwhelming beauty of that love, we will freely and enthusiastically embrace it. And if we do truly encounter the love of Christ, it will bring a joy and delight; that is, a new sensibility will begin to reshape our lives and loves.

Transformed by Beauty

Edwards, then, points us toward an overwhelming, wonderful, and life-changing personal beauty. That encounter with the beauty of God’s love at the center of reality offers something much deeper than simply adding new religious convictions and practices to our other activities and loves shaped by the devices and desires of our technological civilization.

Rather, our joy and delight in experiencing Christ’s love will give us new sensibilities about everything around us. It will also reorder our loves. In his great treatise on Religious Affections, Edwards offers us a guide as to what these life-changing loves look like, culminating in Christlike characters and practices of love to neighbors.

None of us may fully live up to these ideals, but in Edwards we find a guide who offers wonderful alternatives to the soul-deadening outlooks of our contemporary world.

Audio Transcript

Starting today, we have a bundle of apologetics questions lined up on the person and work of Christ. Next time, we will look at several answers to the question, “Why did Jesus leave earth after Easter?” Imagine if Christ were still here with us. Well, he’s not. Why not? That will be APJ 1978. Then, a week from now, we’ll address the question, “Why didn’t Jesus have to pay eternally for our sins?” Isn’t that the price — eternal judgment? So, why is his suffering done? That will be APJ 1979, on the 25th of this month. Then comes the question, “Why don’t we have more archaeological or historically written evidence for the death and resurrection of Christ?” That will be APJ 1981, our first episode in October. A lot of ground to cover until then.

We start with today’s question. Because even if the Christian faith is untrue — if the cross and resurrection didn’t happen — aren’t Christians still happier than non-Christians in this life? Don’t our present life priorities make for a more fulfilling experience of this life than non-Christians seeking their joy in the world, even if we are wrong?

It’s a question from Chip, a listener from Georgia. “Pastor John, hello to you! Christian Hedonism seems to say that our deepest longings in this life can only be satisfied by God, and it’s only in him that we can be truly happy. If God makes us happier than people who simply pursue the world, why does Paul say we are to be pitied most of all men if there is no resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:19)? Even if Christ was not resurrected, isn’t our life, now, more satisfying than the life of the non-Christian?”

I’m smiling. I love sharp, biblically rooted questions. I’ve asked this; in fact, I’ve spoken on it. Years ago, I spoke to the Wycliffe folks in Cameroon on this very question, so I was trying to remember what I said. It is a really important and good question rooted in 1 Corinthians 15. So, let me just bring Chip up, and the rest of us, to where I’m thinking today. I don’t know that I have the completely satisfying answer, but I have some answers that have helped me.

Foretaste Awaiting Fullness

Just a clarification to start with about Christian joy in this painful life. A huge part of our joy as Christians is what Paul calls rejoicing “in hope” (Romans 5:2). In other words, joy is not complete in what we can know and have of God here now; our joy is “in hope” of what we will know and have of God in the future also. Our joy here is a foretaste of the fullness of joy there, and so it’s not complete now. We see through a glass darkly, and we know in part, so our joy is in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). It’s strong now, it’s deep now, it’s enough to carry the day now, but it’s nothing near what it will be.

“The joy we anticipate in the age to come flows back into this age in measure — not in fullness, but in measure.”

“Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). That means that the joy we anticipate in the age to come flows back into this age in measure — not in fullness, but in measure. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3–4). We are a people who have this strange emotional experience of rejoicing in what we don’t yet have to make us happy.

So, I don’t want to overstate the joy of the Christian Hedonist in this age. It is not nearly what it will be in the age to come; much of it is anticipatory now.

Four Fearful Hypotheticals

So, here are the keywords that create the problem in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul’s talking about whether Christ has been raised from the dead or not.

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God [that is, we’re false witnesses of God, liars about God], because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. (1 Corinthians 15:14–15, 17–18)

We’re going to come back to that. That’s really crucial. “Christians have gone to hell. Those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished; they’ve gone to hell.” Then he continues, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19)

And the question is, How can Christians — who have more joy than anybody else — be most to be pitied? That’s the question. I’m asking, “Why did you say that, Paul?” I think I see four reasons.

1. We live under a delusion.

Evidently, Paul believes that delusion — a life of delusion — is to be pitied, even if it’s a happy delusion. It’s not just that what we’re experiencing in this life proves to be more or less happy in the other; it proves to be nonexistent in the other. If Christ is not raised from the dead, then my joy in the living Christ is not joy in the living Christ. There is no living Christ, and therefore, I am not experiencing joy in the living Christ. I am an absolute idiot — I’m a fool.

Paul’s first conviction, it seems to me, is that this is not true; Christ is raised. And his second conviction is that it’s a delusion if he’s not raised, and it’s an enormous delusion, more pitiable than anything he could think of, evidently. So, that’s the first reason: a delusionary life — a life lived in absolute delusion — is to be pitied.

2. We suffer in vain.

Paul’s life would be pitiable because he willingly embraced so much suffering that he could have avoided. Those sufferings were sustained by Paul’s joy in Christ, not the other way around. The sufferings didn’t create the joy in this life. If there’s no resurrection, those sufferings were absolutely pointless.

3. We renounce sin in vain.

We deny ourselves many pleasures here precisely for the sake of the reward of the age to come. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad [now], for your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12).

“If Christ and we are not raised from the dead, then Paul doesn’t infer atheism; he infers hell.”

So, we renounce retaliation and the joy of getting back at people. We renounce the comforts of fitting into the world so that we don’t ever have to be criticized or reviled. Why? Precisely because we believe it will be made up to us in heaven, which means we didn’t just fail to maximize the pleasures we could have had here, but we bargained that the self-denial would be rewarded in the resurrection — and there is no resurrection, and the bargain failed.

4. We slander God and hell awaits us.

If Christ and we are not raised from the dead, then Paul doesn’t infer atheism; he infers hell. We enter a worse punishment in hell than others, because we didn’t just make a mistake; we actively misrepresented God. Oftentimes, I’ve read this chapter in this argument as though, “Well, if there’s no resurrection for the dead, the whole biblical religion is false. There is no God. Que será, será. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry.”

That is not what Paul does. He didn’t argue like that. He says, “If Christ has not been raised, God’s going to send me to hell, because I’ve been telling everybody that this is his Son and he’s been raised from the dead, and I am a false prophet. And therefore, I am of all people most to be pitied, for I’m going to get the worst punishment.”

Most to Be Pitied

So, in sum, if there is no risen Christ — no resurrection of believers unto eternal reward and joy — then (1) Christian life is a delusion, (2) voluntary suffering is painfully pointless, (3) hope in heaven is futile, and all our self-denials based on that hope were ridiculous, and (4) any attempt to speak for the living Christ would be a damnable scam and a false prophecy, which would deserve hell even more than others, and we would perish under that severe sentence. So, we are, of all people, most to be pitied.

As I get older, decisions in life don’t seem to get smaller and easier, but bigger, harder, and more frequent.

In the moment, we often think the hardest decision we’ll ever face is whichever one we have to make right now. If we look back in ten years, though, this whale of a decision may begin to look a little more like a dolphin or a penguin.

When I was in my early twenties, the most difficult decision I had made was whether to stay near home for college (with my friends) or wander outside the safety of southern Ohio. Tears were shed. By my mid-thirties, however, I had made a dozen decisions bigger than that one. Where will I live? Where will I go to church? What will I do for a living, and who will pay me to do that? Whom will I marry? When will we try to have kids? Will I stay in this job? What school will we send our kids to? How will we pay for that? And those are just the big decisions most people have to make at some point. You have question marks of your own.

This year brought some new whales into our family’s harbor, and so we’ve been in need of fresh wisdom and clarity. As we wrestled through these weighty decisions, I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia with my six-year-old. On one of our hikes through its forests, my son and I came to a crossroads (as one often does in Narnia). And it was one of those crossroads that unveils the magic of Lewis’s world.

While standing there beside a dwarf (Trumpkin) and looking out over a gorge separating the four Pevensie children from Prince Caspian’s army, I suddenly wasn’t looking at a dwarf anymore, or a gorge, or even a book. I was looking at my life, at the hard decisions I needed to make. I was looking at myself. It was as if Lewis himself had decided to stop over from mid-twentieth-century Oxford to help me choose between the paths before me.

A Godless Calculus

Where we were reading, King Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are hiking with Trumpkin, trying to find the Great River. After arduous days, they’re questioning whether they’ve gone the wrong way when they suddenly come to a gorge. The chasm is too wide to cross, so they must either follow the gorge downstream, hoping it meets the river, or climb upstream, looking for a place to cross. Trumpkin’s convinced that the gorge must fall into the river somewhere below, and Peter quickly approves. “Come on, then. Down this side of the gorge” (Prince Caspian, 131). At that moment, though, young Lucy sees an old, majestic friend.

“Look! Look! Look!” cried Lucy.

“Where? What?” asked everyone.

“The Lion,” said Lucy. “Aslan himself. Didn’t you see?” Her face had changed completely and her eyes shone.

The other children, not able to see Aslan themselves, immediately suspect she’s seeing things. Lucy won’t back down, though. As they search and search and see nothing, they ask where exactly she saw the lion.

Right up there between those mountain ashes. No, this side of the gorge. And up, not down. Just the opposite of the way you want to go. And he wanted us to go where he was — up there. (132)

“Anyone who regularly reads the Bible, by the Spirit, sees the lion every day.”

As Lucy insists, the dwarf resists. “I know nothing about Aslan. But I do know that if we turn left and follow the gorge up, it might lead us all day before we found a place where we could cross it. Whereas if we turn right and go down, we’re bound to reach the Great River in about a couple of hours. And if there are any real lions about, we want to go away from them, not towards them” (133). He’s the voice of conventional wisdom. He can calculate only what he can see.

In this case, his small, narrow eyes win the day, so the company turns right and goes down.

Unconventional Wisdom

First, the way turns out to be not as “conventional” as it had seemed: “To keep along the edge of the gorge was not so easy as it had looked” (135). They fight through dense woods until they can’t anymore and have to back out and go around the trees. When they find the gorge again, the hike down is slower and more treacherous than they expected.

As they finally near the bottom, they take another turn like so many before, and suddenly the Great River stretches out before them. Their spirits surge, lifting their sore feet and tired legs. The children are busy talking again — and then the arrows come. The evil King Miraz had posted soldiers near the river, who chase the children, sending them back to where they started.

“I suppose we’ll have to go right up the gorge again now,” says Lucy (142).

When they get all the way back to the top, they stop and make camp for the night. The dwarf prepares a great meal for the crew, and they all fall into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night, Aslan wakes Lucy and tells her to wake the others. The older kids still don’t believe her, but with the hissing sound of arrows still ringing in their ears, they decide to follow anyway. As they walk together through the dark, the lion shows them a path down into the gorge they never would have noticed. And before morning comes, they have found King Caspian and the others.

Meeting God in the Forest

Now, what might Lucy’s childlike wisdom mean for our crossroads? When it comes to complicated and heavy decisions, do we just follow whatever inner impulse we have? No, that’s not how God — or Aslan — leads. Lucy wasn’t following some inner impulse. She really saw a lion, with fur and paws and teeth. She wasn’t following a hunch or intuition; this was reverence and obedience. He showed her the way to go, and expected her to go, even if the others couldn’t see what she saw yet.

What do we do, though, when we wrestle and pray and labor over a decision, and a lion hasn’t come yet? How might God come and stand on a path for us?

The most important thing to say is that anyone who regularly reads the Bible, by the Spirit, sees the lion every day. The word of God is the one inspired, infallible path he has given us for life. “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:3–4). Google can’t provide answers like these. Artificial intelligence is a shadow of such wisdom. A hundred PhDs would only scratch the surface. We have no idea what we hold in the pages of this Book.

The Bible is not peripheral to your marriage and family decisions, your work decisions, your schedule decisions, your church and ministry decisions, your giving and saving decisions, your medical decisions. In his word, his Spirit, and his church, God really has given you everything you could conceivably need to make the daunting decision standing before you.

The Lion in Their Eyes

When it comes to your crossroads, don’t forget the church. Along with the word and his Spirit, God gives us other word-saturated, Spirit-filled, flesh-and-blood fountains of wisdom.

Lucy found the right path by listening to Aslan. Peter, Susan, and Edmund found the right path by listening to Lucy. She saw what they could not see yet, because Aslan had decided to reveal it to her first. How often does this happen with us? Our perspective and judgment are clouded by the weight of a decision, until the right friend comes. They’re not blinded by our fog, and so they’re able to see through it and guide us out. “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22).

“God really has given you everything you could conceivably need to make the daunting decision standing before you.”

When we join a local church, as ordinary or simple as it may seem on the surface, we are being surgically woven into a whole new nervous system of wisdom. God has specifically gifted the people in our church — through his word, through their resources and experiences, through gifts of his Spirit — to meet real needs in our lives, including helping us make wise plans and life decisions. If you’re wrestling between two paths right now, who in your church might already know something about those paths? What might God show them to help guide you?

And what might he show you to help guide someone else? At times, you’ll need a Lucy. At other times, you’ll be a Lucy. God will give you unique, supernatural perspectives on decisions that your friends and family won’t be able to see at first. They’ll need the lion in your eyes.

Following After Trees

Lucy has one more lesson for us. When Aslan appears to her that second time (while the others are still sleeping), he leads her on a walk through the forest glade. As she follows the voice of the lion, she sees something unsettling among the trees. The trees themselves — those dark, towering, leafy pillars — seem to be moving. And not just moving, but dancing.

Why were they dancing, and why now? Not because Lucy and the others had finally chosen the right path, but because of the one roaming that path.

She went fearlessly in among the trees, dancing herself as she leaped this way and that to avoid being run into by these huge partners. But she was only half-interested in them. She wanted to get beyond them to something else; it was from beyond them that the dear voice had called. (146)

Moments later, she is face-to-face with him again. “Lucy rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane” (148).

I found this scene — a frail girl’s heart wrapped tight around the ferocious lion — to be as illuminating and stirring as any. Yes, the lion knew which way to go, but the trees say much more than that. He didn’t just know the way; he was the way. And he was the destination. The wise path, whether up the gorge, down the gorge, around the gorge, or over the gorge, was always going to be wherever his big paws were.

And so, perhaps the best question to ask when faced with another big life decision would be this: Where’s the lion now? He could show up on any number of paths, and it won’t always be easy to see him (and you might not be the first to see him). But in any given decision, we want to be able to wrap our arms around his neck and bury our faces in his fur.

At any given crossroads, we want the path with more of him.

Every morning summons us to a feast. With each new day, the inviting voice of Isaiah 55 beckons, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. . . . Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:1–2).

So, with the Book in hand, we turn Godward with the parched and famished soul of Psalm 63, acknowledging our need and anticipating his banquet: “My soul thirsts for you. . . . My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food” (Psalm 63:1, 5). In Christ, we come to God, through his word, as those who thirst come to water, to receive wine and milk without cost (Isaiah 55:1), as those who hunger to be satisfied with true bread.

Each new morning dawns with divine mercies to quench our thirst and satiate our souls.

Ideally, this is the main feel of morning meditation in God’s word: feeding, eating, drinking, being satisfied. Not the feel of battle and combat, but of feasting. But mark this: as sinners, in a cursed world, with a real enemy — to keep feeding, we also must fight.

Ordinary devotions are nothing less than war.

Devil Rise Early

“Did God actually say . . . ?”

From that very first temptation, the enemy has set his sights on the words of God. If we’ve already heard them, he’ll question them. But even better, he knows, would be to keep us from hearing God in the first place.

The devil and his team know how powerful are the words of God, and how vital they are for our life and health. They know the devastating power of ordinary Bible intake. They know the power of fire to warm coals, and the power of God’s word to feed saving faith and keep believing hearts soft. They know, and tremble at, the explosive, world-altering force of faithful Christians sitting down morning by morning — without fireworks or theatrics or applause — to the quiet glory of ordinary devotions.

So, the devils will do whatever they can to disrupt the morning feast. They launch their campaign under the cloak of darkness, and attack at dawn. But we are not left to be outwitted by their schemes, ignorant of satanic designs (2 Corinthians 2:11). The devil may prowl like a roaring lion, seeking to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Yet with sober-mindedness and watchfulness, we can observe, and reinforce, his likely points of attack.

Three Assaults on Bible Intake

Consider, then, how our enemy often leverages the patterns of our world, with the sins and weaknesses of our own flesh, to plot against the ordinary, quiet, unhurried, early-morning feeding of our souls in the word of God.

1. Keep Them Up Late

The campaign begins the night before, at dusk: keep them up too late. It could be a sleepless child. It could be some tangible, late-breaking need, requiring an act of love. It could be analog human conversation or a late-night event. All the old stuff. But these days, machines are now doing a good bit of the work. Our many screens — from big ones on the walls to the little ones in our pockets — are very efficient at burning the midnight oil.

The spiritual war for ordinary devotions begins long before the sun comes up. The sober-minded and watchful observe it, and act with wisdom — ready to sacrifice the good of sleep in the call of Christian love, and eager not to squander God’s gift for the follies of late-night bingeing and scrolling. One bad habit can knock other good ones out of sync. The enemy would have us be blinded to the cascading effects of empty late nights.

2. Distract Them

If we do retire at an actual human hour, not all is lost for the enemy: distract them in the morning. Which can be quick work.

In one sense, it’s always been easy. Even in the mid-seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) lamented our universal proneness to distraction: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We don’t need endless news and the Internet to sidetrack our attention — yet now we have them and, oh, how susceptible we can be. The smartphone, its notifications, and infinite scrolls are particularly ensnaring.

3. Make Them Rush

A third enemy scheme is hurry. The devil would have the motor of our souls run at the same RPMs first thing in the morning as it does the rest of the day. He would have us move at the world’s pace, rather than the Word’s. He would even happily have us try to do too much in morning devotions, so that we do it all too quickly.

As columnist Thomas Friedman has written, we find ourselves living in an “age of accelerations.” Our world pressures us and conditions us to adopt its pace, and we are prone to internalize its speed as our own — and bring the rat race with us when we come to God’s word.

But the morning feast of Bible meditation is not fast food, and not to be treated as such.

Three Attacks on Temptation

How, then, might we combat the devil’s schemes? It’s one thing to anticipate how the demons will attack; it’s another to act on that knowledge. What will you do to thwart the evil forces set against daily Bible reading and meditation?

1. Handle Screens with Care

Among other practical strategies, we might learn to handle our screens with special care. Think how much less prone to morning distraction you might be if you kept the phone silenced, upside down, and further away than arm’s length. Or even better, in another room.

For our souls to start the day feasting on God, we need not only to make time, and be realistic about what we have, but also to guard it by getting to bed, getting up, and avoiding morning diversions. Both the night before and morning of, screens and their content, with their glittering pixels, are great distractors of souls.

For many of us in modern life, we can hardly avoid them. We work at them and use them for our jobs. We spend a shocking amount of our days and weeks on them, much of it for good. But exercising particular caution with our screens after dark, and before meeting with God in his word, is becoming the greater part of modern Christian wisdom.

You might also consider going old school with a paper Bible. Those do not ring, vibrate, or notify. And paper actually helps a reader slow down and experience “the precious milliseconds of deep reading processes.”

2. Gather a Day’s Portion

A glorious simplicity accompanies “ordinary devotions,” the kind that feed and sustain souls for a lifetime. Admirable as it may be to try to read this book and that commentary, and study these topics, and memorize those verses, and even pray long lists — and all that in addition to reading and meditating on God’s word — trying to do too much in the morning will undermine the rest and feast of being in God’s presence and enjoying him, and his Son, through his word.

One way to put it: seek simply to gather a day’s portion each morning. Like God’s people, collecting manna each day in the wilderness, aim to feed your heart’s hunger and quench your soul’s thirst for just that day. No need to catch up from yesterday’s missed readings, or try to get ahead to store up for tomorrow or next week. God will take care of tomorrow. Rather, come to eat and drink and be satisfied today. In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Don’t try to do too much, but cultivate a faithful realism for the long haul.

3. Chew Your Food Slowly

Finally, save your hustle for the rest of the day. Slow down, if you’re still able. It may take some time to learn how. Seek to chew your food slowly and enjoy it. Such savoring in the moment also helps us to carry it with us into the ups and downs, and pressures and accelerations, of the day.

The biblical image of meditation dovetails with the feasting pictures of Isaiah 55 and Psalm 63. Hebrew meditation is like an animal chewing the cud. I’m no farmer, but the few cows I’ve observed doing this did not seem to be in any sort of hurry. If you’re going to be like a cow, be it first thing in the morning as you chew slowly, unhurriedly, even leisurely, on the words of God in Scripture.

Ancient books in general, and the Bible in particular, were not meant to be read with speed, like we today have been conditioned to read (that is, skim). Learn a whole new gear for Bible reading. Read slowly, and reread. Seek to enjoy God and his world and his glory and his Son. Don’t swallow too quickly and move on, but chew slowly and savor his grace.

War is not the main mindset for early mornings. Come to God’s word to feast and be satisfied. But know this is nothing less than battle. Consider the devil’s common schemes, and fight to guard the feast.

Did Jonathan Edwards neglect his family?

What would prompt such a question as this? Is there well-known or newly discovered evidence that pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) — a leader of the First Great Awakening and widely considered America’s greatest theologian — neglected his family? Are there reasons to believe he had a troubled marriage with Sarah? Did his children turn out badly?

No. Rather, it’s likely that the only reason anyone would even pose the question arises from a short but famous remark by Samuel Hopkins (1721–1823), Edwards’s first biographer.

Behind the Study Door

Hopkins, who would later become an influential theologian in his own right, once lived in the Edwards home for six months to observe and learn from the renowned minister.

In The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (1764), Hopkins wrote that “he commonly spent thirteen hours every day in his study.” Hopkins passes immediately from the remark without so much as a word as to how Edwards spent that time. It is not hard to guess the general contours of those thirteen hours, given Edwards’s propensities and the extant sermon manuscripts and publications. Still, nowhere do we read of a routine schedule or specific details describing Edwards’s activities behind the door of his study.

That’s it. When people read Hopkins’s ten words through the lens of modern life, and then factor in time for sleeping, eating, and other matters, some conclude that Edwards must have neglected his family. Those familiar with Edwards also recall his daily four-mile round-trip visit on horseback to the Sawtooth hills west of Northampton, where he would dismount to meditate and pray while walking, as well as his habit of chopping wood for exercise. Adding it all up, even Edwards’s most loyal supporters can be prone to wonder if — as so many pastors have done — he sacrificed his family on the altar of ministry.

The title of Elisabeth Dodds’s insightful book on “the uncommon union” of Jonathan and Sarah — Marriage to a Difficult Man — doesn’t help dispel these suspicions, at least for those who know of the book but haven’t read it. But as we shall see, Dodds instead sheds a reassuring light on life in the Edwards home.

His Little Church

Readers of Edwards’s sermons on the subject of family life will find them biblically orthodox. It isn’t surprising that, from a contemporary perspective, Edwards’s instructions about the governance of a home may seem rather strict. But they were in harmony both with the Christian parental guidance of his day and the spirit of the biblical teaching on the family.

His favorite analogy of the family was that it was like “a little church.” He used the image in one of his earliest published sermons (1723) and again in his “Farewell Sermon” to the Northampton church 27 years later, saying, “A Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules.” As a church should be marked by love, Christ-centeredness, and biblical order, so, said Edwards, should be the home.

In his 1739 sermon “The Importance of Revival Among Heads of Families,” Edwards warned of the “great offense” to God “if heads of families are either God’s enemies or are cold and dull in religion.” He advocated for the practice of regular family worship and the responsibility of fathers to instruct their children in the ways of the Lord. And yet, all the instruction, regardless of how faithful to Scripture, “will have little effect unless example accompanies instructions.” Thus, Edwards was well aware of the importance of being a Christlike example in the home. But he also knew that no amount of modeling or teaching was sufficient apart from the work of the Spirit in the hearts of children. Therefore, he urged the parents to “earnest prayer” for their children: “You should travail for them.”

Perhaps you’ve heard of hypocritical pastors who failed to practice in private the orthodoxy they preached in public. Edwards, however, has never been counted among them, but rather is renowned for the general congruence between his life and preaching. So, let us look elsewhere.

Uncommon and Happy Union

Why did Elisabeth Dodds refer to Edwards as “a difficult man”? It wasn’t because he was a disagreeable man or a distant man. Rather, it was because “a genius is seldom an easy husband” (31).

“As a church should be marked by love, Christ-centeredness, and biblical order, so, said Edwards, should be the home.”

In fact, Dodds argues that Edwards’s devotion to and dependence upon Sarah was one of the reasons why he would have been no easy husband. According to Dodds, Edwards often invited Sarah to join him in his late afternoon rides into the woods. There he would pour out the contents of the day’s study and sermon preparation for her consideration or seek her input on some parish problem. Although the break from her heavy domestic duties and the opportunity to be outdoors provided some physical refreshment, Dodds concluded that sometimes Sarah “must also have been singularly drained” by such intense mental demands at the end of the day.

Before the third paragraph of her book, Dodds says of Jonathan, “He was in fact a tender lover and a father whose children seemed genuinely fond of him.” Still, living with a man of such “labyrinthine character” meant their marriage was not a “radiant idyll” (i). No marriage is, even for two people as godly and well-matched as the Edwardses.

Being a pastor’s wife — especially the wife of the only pastor in town — is often difficult. Sarah knew she was scrutinized every time she left the house, down to what she wore, how much money she spent, and how her children behaved. Jonathan was always underpaid, so money was always tight, and the financial pressures increased with the birth of each of their eleven children. Add the criticism Jonathan received (which also weighed heavily on Sarah) to the problems of the church, and you have a mix that would strain the bonds of any marriage.

Yet, to the end Jonathan and Sarah loved each other and enjoyed what can only be considered a happy marriage. In fact, on his deathbed — literally in the last moments of his life — Edwards’s final words included this message to his wife of thirty years, who had not yet made the move to Princeton where Edwards was the new president: “Give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever.”

Incidentally, Jonathan named his first child Sarah.

Three Meals a Day

When specifying the qualifications of an elder, the apostle Paul wrote, “He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive” (1 Timothy 3:4). Edwards met this qualification with flying colors, for each of his eleven children turned out well. Of course, pastors can (and have) kept their “children submissive” harshly and with dictatorial domination, but Edwards did it “with all dignity.” And to the point of this article, every good parent knows that neglected children seldom turn out well.

Abundant evidence proves that Edwards did not neglect his children at all. For starters, “Sarah could count on one hour a day when Edwards gave the family complete attention,” writes Dodds (49). “He made sure to save an hour at the close of each day to spend with the children.” How many of those who charge Edwards with neglect do this? Hopkins observed and wrote about this hour.

Moreover, the Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia reports that “when [the children] were old enough, he took them with him one at a time on his journeys. He often wrote his children when traveling alone” (87). Additionally, Edwards “had the idea, unusual in those times, that girls as well as boys should be educated. . . . The girls, tutored by their father at home, learned Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and penmanship” (Marriage to a Difficult Man, 50).

But Edwards placed the greatest emphasis on the commitment required for the spiritual instruction of his family. In his prize-winning biography, George Marsden writes that Edwards

began the day with private prayers followed by family prayers, by candlelight in winter. . . . Care for his children’s souls was, of course, his preeminent concern. In morning devotions he quizzed them on Scripture with questions appropriate to their ages. . . . Each meal was accompanied by household devotions. (133, 321)

Each meal! Note that this also implies that he ate three meals a day face-to-face with his family. If we knew nothing else of his interaction with his children, what we know of the gathering of his “little church” for family worship several times each day demolishes any suggestion that Edwards neglected his family.

‘Thirteen Hours Every Day’

Although the Edwardses lived in a two-story home, it was by no means large by today’s standards. Often as many as fifteen people lived there. That alone generated significant noise to interrupt a study in which there was no streaming music, white-noise device, or noise-canceling earphones to insulate Edwards from the distractions.

And though he was there thirteen hours a day (where else would he have gone to do his work?), he would have emerged as needed to quell a sibling dispute or address any other issue that required his attention. Moreover, the children were not forbidden to enter the study when necessary. After his evening hour with the children, Edwards retreated to his study for another hour or so. At bedtime Sarah would join him there, and they would close the day together in prayer.

So, when Hopkins writes that Edwards was in his study thirteen hours every day, it’s wrong to envision him there totally alone the entire time (that’s also where he counseled church members), completely disengaged from his family. In fact, from everything we know, he probably had more personal contact and interaction with his large family than almost any father does today.

Finally, although this article was specifically about Jonathan, I cannot close without emphasizing that much of the character and success of the Edwards children was, of course, attributable to the love, nurture, and training of the remarkable Sarah. And I’m sure Jonathan would agree. Together they truly had an “uncommon union,” and from it resulted an uncommon family.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back on this Thursday. Well, if you were to sit down with John Piper’s collected works, his thirteen-volume collected works, published back in 2017, and if you read the entire thing, beginning to end, you’d come across the word satisfy or satisfied nearly 1,500 times. Satisfy, satisfied — those loaded terms are all over those works, and they’re all over your ministry, Pastor John. But we rarely, if ever, read a definition of what you mean by the term, leading to Ralph’s question today.

“Pastor John, hello to you! I thank God for your ministry in my life. I have read many of your books and listened to many of your messages, especially those on Christian Hedonism. That idea revolutionized my relationship with the Lord. You have spoken about being satisfied in God thousands and thousands of times in your life. But I cannot find any reference in your works to where you have defined that term. To you, what does it mean to be satisfied?”

This is good for me to be pressed to ponder a term that I ordinarily use, because I consider it self-explanatory. Sometimes those are the very terms that would be most fruitful to at least try to put into words, or to relate to real-life experiences, so that we don’t just speak with empty phrases. So, thank you for the question.

Satisfaction in Scripture

I think the first thing to say is that it doesn’t really matter very much what John Piper means by satisfaction, but it matters a lot — I mean, it’s hard to exaggerate how much it matters — what God means by it when his inspired spokesmen in the Bible use the word. For example:

Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”
Psalm 63:5: “My soul will be satisfied [in the Lord] as with fat and rich food.”
Psalm 65:4: “We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple!”
Psalm 103:5: “[The Lord] satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
Psalm 107:9: “He satisfies the longing soul.”
Matthew 5:6: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Philippians 4:11–12: “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be [satisfied or] content.” I know how to abound, and I know how to be in need.
Hebrews 13:5: “Keep your life free from love of money, and be [satisfied] content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’”

So, it’s not so much what I think satisfaction is that matters, but rather, What do texts like these mean? What did God intend when he called us in all those passages — and others — to be satisfied? What kind of experience are we talking about?

Let me try to get at what satisfaction in God, or satisfaction in all that God is for us, refers to.

Evil and Its Opposite

First, notice that the experience of satisfaction corresponds to desire and longing and yearning in the human heart. There would be no such thing as satisfaction if there were no such thing as desire. God created human beings as desire factories. Everybody has desires, longings, yearnings, wantings. God made us that way. Our problem as sinners is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are directed toward the wrong things.

That’s the essence of sin. That’s the essence of evil. Jeremiah 2:13: “My people have committed two evils.” What is that? Number one: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.” Number two: “[They have] hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

That’s evil. Evil is to turn away from being satisfied with God as your fountain. All our desires are designed by God to be Godward desires, to move toward the fountain of living water. Even when we desire earthly things like food or friendship or praise or beauty, all these things are tastes of God’s goodness and pointers to God as the final satisfaction.

God-Shaped Joy

So, the first thing I would say about the meaning of satisfaction in God is that it refers to the experience of having our desire — longing, yearning, wanting — filled. And filled means not too little and not too much. Satisfaction in God is the experience where God is enjoyed as the perfect fullness that corresponds to the God-shaped desires of our hearts.

Eternal Joy

Second, sometimes I use the phrase all-satisfying, like “the all-satisfying God.” And by this I mean that there are no desires that, in the end, God will not purify and satisfy with himself. Even sinful desires have some vestige of legitimacy. God will rescue that fragment of legitimacy and cleanse it of all that is destructive and fill it up in the age to come. When this sinful age is over and the kingdom has fully and manifestly come, there will be no unmet longings, no unfulfilled desires, no dissatisfaction.

Embattled Joy

Third, there are many mysteries about what our experience will be like when we are totally perfected in the age to come. But for now, I want to stress that to say, “Jesus is all-satisfying,” does not mean that when he becomes our satisfaction, our desiring ceases. That would be a mistake to say that our desiring ceases.

Jesus says in John 6:35, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” Now, I don’t think he means that when we are born again and receive him by faith, we never desire him again. I don’t think he means that. I think he means that finding Jesus to be the bread and the water that our souls have always longed for means our quest is over. We no longer look for a better drink or a better food. We have found our all-satisfying treasure.

But in this sinful age — and I’m including myself now, as a sinner, as remaining corruption within me needs mortifying — in this sinful age, where the heart of faith is always embattled, our experience of the satisfaction of Christ will always be imperfect, fragmentary, ever-changing, renewable, greater and lesser.

“Our problem as sinners is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are directed toward the wrong things.”

Christ remains who he is, right? He doesn’t change. He remains who he is: all-satisfying. And our new birth with new spiritual taste buds that know he is the all-satisfying one remains attached to him. We don’t lose him and then find him, and lose him and then find him. He holds on to us. We do not run away after some new fountain or new bread. But for now, our experience is up and down. It won’t be like that in the age to come. But how will desire and satisfaction be related in the age to come? Frankly, I can’t answer that fully.

Dissatisfied Joy

Fourth and finally (and this is really important), the reality of love for other people, and especially compassion for those who suffer, demands that our satisfaction in this age of pain and sorrow be a dissatisfied satisfaction. Almost forty years ago, when I wrote the chapter on love in the book Desiring God, I said this: “The weeping of compassion is the weeping of joy” — or you could say, “the weeping of satisfaction” — “impeded [hindered] in the extension of itself to another” (125).

Now, that sounds paradoxical, “weeping satisfaction” — an odd phrase. But what it means is that when God grants me to know him as satisfying to my soul’s deepest needs, and then I look on a suffering person, my God-given satisfaction at that moment has in it the impulse to expand and include the other person in it. I want them in it. I want them to share it. Satisfaction in God is not indifferent to those who don’t share it. If we could, we would fold them into our satisfaction in God. But if we are hindered from that, it is our very joy, our very satisfaction, impeded in the extension of itself, that grieves. It is a peculiarly Christian form of dissatisfied satisfaction.

Four Facets of Satisfaction

Ralph, that’s my effort to clarify what I mean by “satisfaction in God.”

It is a filling up of God-given, God-shaped desires.
It will, in the end, leave no desire unfilled for God’s children forever.
For now, the satisfaction in God is embattled and variable, and desires must be rekindled.
For now, even the best experience of satisfaction in God is a dissatisfied satisfaction, when we are surrounded by the pain of those who don’t yet have it and the sorrows of this fallen world.