Who is God? What is he like, and how do we come to know him? What is salvation?

We may be tempted to consign these questions to the first weeks of evangelistic courses or the earliest years of discipleship, yet they were central to the ministry of Cyril of Alexandria (c. AD 376–444). As a bishop and theologian with far-reaching influence, he saw the gravity of these questions, as well as the pastoral fallout if Christians thoughtlessly rattled off pat answers.

Cyril’s heart was that believers would consciously and joyfully place Jesus Christ front and center in their understanding of God and their salvation. His tenacious Christ-centeredness shaped some of the most significant all-church councils and creeds that we have inherited today.

Seeds of Scandal

In the fifth century, perhaps the most famous church in the world was the Great Church of Constantinople. Enthroned there in the heart of the “New Rome,” its archbishop carried a leading political and theological voice. In 428, the job was given to a well-loved Syrian preacher named Nestorius.

Nestorius wanted to stop all references to Mary as theotokos, Greek for “Mother of God.” The title had long been popular and had tried to express something of the wonder of the incarnation: that a human mother should give birth to God the Son in human flesh. In Nestorius’s mind, however, the title was imprecise and dangerous. His concern was not that it encouraged undue veneration of Mary (that would develop later in church history), but that it implied something about God that he could not accept.

That God should be born, naked and crying, depending on a mother to feed and wash him, was unthinkable. God, eternally unchanging and untouchable, simply could not be straightforwardly identified with the wriggling baby in the manger. No, Mary must be called “Mother of Christ,” not “Mother of God.” There had to be a clear distinction between the two. Nestorius devoted a sermon series to the subject, and his troubled colleagues began to ask, If Mary is not the “Mother of God,” then just who is her son?

Nearly seven hundred miles to the south in Egypt, Cyril, the archbishop of Alexandria, was alerted to the emerging scandal. Having spent years writing biblical commentaries and theological works on the Trinity, he knew he had to step in and challenge Nestorius. Like the apostle Paul centuries before, Cyril saw that when the identity of Jesus Christ is distorted, so is our understanding of God and what it means to know him — with devastating consequences. “Another Jesus” goes hand in hand with “another gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Another Jesus

Nestorius believed in Jesus as the eternal Son and Word of God. He believed, along with the Council of Nicaea of AD 325, in the humanity and divinity of Christ. Yet the distortion of Jesus he presented threatened to undo the orthodox faith he claimed to hold.

“‘Another Jesus’ goes hand in hand with ‘another gospel.’”

Nestorius’s deepest problem was that he had his definition of God prepared long before he came to look at the person of Jesus Christ. The carpenter from Nazareth, in the manger and on the cross, could not fit with his understanding of God. Following his mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428), Nestorius taught that Mary’s son was a separate man from God the Son: a man assumed (taken up) and brought into fellowship with God. Jesus and the Word enjoyed a relationship of unique cooperation, with the Word graciously sharing the honor of his sonship with Jesus. Because of his obedience, Jesus came to earn his resurrection into a new life free from death and decay (Nestorius, Bazaar of Heracleides, 1.3).

For Nestorius, although the people of first-century Israel saw an individual human being with divine power, they were actually looking at a kind of partnership of two sons, presented in one man. A glass wall ran down the middle of Jesus Christ, shielding the eternal Word from the human experiences and troubles of the man until he was perfected. While Nestorius was happy to worship and adore the man Jesus, he did so only beside “the one who bears him” (Sermon 9.262).

Cyril could see that Nestorius’s Jesus was only a man like the rest of us, elevated to a special relationship with God. The one who suffered and died on the cross was not technically God the Son himself coming to us in the flesh. Instead, God wore gloves, as it were, to deal with sinful humanity. He promoted a man to divine dignity, setting before us a supercharged example of holiness to imitate. Nestorius’s Jesus is the perfect Savior for those who would win salvation for themselves.

The Real Jesus

In AD 431, at the Council of Ephesus, Cyril (along with most of the other bishops) opposed Nestorius’s teaching. They saw that it contradicted not only the biblical Jesus but also the biblical gospel. Leaning heavily on Cyril’s writings, the fathers of the church affirmed that while there are two natures in Christ, there is only one person.

In other words, God the Son was the person in action during the incarnation, whether he was walking on water by the Spirit or tired after a journey in his flesh. He maintained his unchanged, eternal divine nature, but had added to himself a truly human nature — along with all of its capacity to fall asleep in a boat, battle temptation, or suffer crucifixion.

“The Son of Mary was none other than God the Son himself, made known and living in human nature as well as divine.”

God the Son personally took all that we are to himself, choosing this way of being “for us and for our salvation,” as the old Nicene Creed had it. In answer to the question of the pastors of Constantinople, the leaders gathered at Ephesus were clear: the son of Mary was none other than God the Son himself, made known and living as man as well as divine.

Cyril’s Influence

In time, this picture of Christ came to be known as the “hypostatic union”: a true union of divine and human in the one person (Greek hypostasis) of God the Word. It was not an agreement between two parties with separate agendas, nor a cooperation of equals.

In fact, there was a critical asymmetry to this union, for the humanity of Jesus comprised no separate person, as Nestorius had taught, but was “personated” by the Son. Humanity had been added to a preexisting divine person. There was no Jesus to know other than the second Person of the Trinity, now made flesh. This meant that all of Jesus’s actions and words were truly the actions and words of God the Son.

Just as it was right to call Mary theotokos, so it was right to say that God the Son played in the streets of Nazareth as a child, that God the Son had compassion on lost and helpless sinners (Mark 6:34), that God the Son shed his blood on the cross for our redemption (Acts 20:28). For it was no other person, no other human, but only the eternal Word in his humanity. After all, he was Immanuel, God with us.

These biblical convictions were honed and clarified by another all-church council held in Chalcedon in AD 451. Responding to another stream of false teaching, the church again turned to Cyril’s Christology (though he had now been dead some seven years). The gathered bishops affirmed that the one person of Jesus Christ was to be acknowledged in two “unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, inseparable” natures. They confessed that the divine and the human in no way undermined or undid one another, yet that he was nevertheless just one person: “one and the same Son” who was with the Father before all things and who was born of Mary for us and our salvation. Chalcedon rang deeply with the echo of Cyril’s theology.

God Was Pleased

Nestorius’s precooked doctrine of God meant that he struggled to get divinity and humanity in the same person. There was an unbridgeable gulf between the divine and human, and his theology left believers the task of crossing it on their own, following at a distance in the footsteps of a superman from Nazareth.

Cyril, however, began with Jesus and allowed the Son of God to reveal the nature of God (John 1:18). And the God revealed in Jesus, he saw, was pleased to draw near to sinful humanity in person (Colossians 1:19¬–20). He came in uncompromised deity, but with mind-bending condescension, to cross the divide himself. The Son stepped in, clothed in our humanity, laying down his life, and taking hold of us when we could not save ourselves. In Jesus, God truly demonstrates his love for undeserving sinners, up close and personal.

When Paul says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us,” he uses the same word twice: blessed (Ephesians 1:3). A moment’s thought, however, shows that God blesses us altogether differently than how we bless God.

When God blesses us, he takes the initiative, doing the kind of mighty acts that Paul recites in the next dozen verses: electing, redeeming, forgiving, adopting, sealing, and lavishing grace on us. When we bless God, we praise him in response. It’s a beautifully appropriate response, but just because it’s the same verb doesn’t make it the same act. The deep reason that we can never bless God the way he blesses us is that God is already blessed. God is blessed with perfect, plenary, personal blessedness.

The blessedness of God is a classic Christian doctrine, and one that we could stand to hear more about in our time. It gives us big thoughts to think about God in three domains: God’s relation to the world, God’s essential perfections, and God’s experience of his own life. Consider these three domains as concentric circles. We can think our way in toward the inner circle from a starting point in the outer circle, at the outskirts of God’s ways.

Outer Circle: God and Creation

To recognize that God is already blessed before we bless him is to realize something utterly fundamental about God’s relation to the entire world of creatures: God is self-sufficient. If God had never created anything whatsoever, he would still be fully himself, with no unmet needs waiting to be fulfilled by anything outside of his own divine life.

When God freely and graciously created, he did not change from being unsatisfied and unglorified to suddenly being fulfilled and having a purpose. The benefit that accrues from creation, the blessing it brings, is entirely a blessing toward creatures. Furthermore, God continues to be self-sufficient and fully realized within his own life even once creation has come into being. Since God minus the world would still be God, then God plus the world is also still God.

Seventeenth-century lay theologian Edward Leigh (1602–1671) said it well: “God is blessed essentially, primarily, originally, of himself such, and not by the help of any other thing” (Body of Divinity, 200). The word blessedness opens up a vision of God as infinitely transcending all incompleteness. The word alone marks a vast doctrine.

Our point of departure in this essay was the way Ephesians 1:3 runs in two directions with the word blessed, but the Greek word used there is eulogetos, whose roots mean “speaking well of.” The actual key vocabulary word for blessedness in the ancient world and in the Greek New Testament is makarios: it is the same word Jesus uses about people in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5), but Paul applies it directly to God in 1 Timothy 1:11 and 6:15. Praising God (eulogetos) lifts up our minds to recognize his own state of blessedness (makarios).

“God is so perfectly complete and fulfilled that he is exalted above all neediness and greediness.”

God is so perfectly complete and fulfilled that he is exalted above all neediness and greediness. He works toward us in grace and love because, in the ultimate sense, there is nothing in it for him. He does not need to make use of us to increase or improve his blessedness, since it is already fully actual within the divine life, without reference to us. God alone has unborrowed blessedness. Creatures borrow blessedness and live off the largesse of God.

You may notice a tension in this doctrine, as it seems to start out by sternly warning us about God’s absolute self-sufficiency, as if carefully distancing God from entanglements. But as the doctrine unfolds in our understanding, it shows itself to be the source of God’s deepest involvement with creatures. We hear whispers of this beautiful doctrine of the blessed God in old hymns: “God from whom all blessings flow,” “fount of every blessing,” and so on. The theological tension is fruitful; unless God is blessed without us, we could never be blessed in him. What may seem like an imposing doctrine of an austere and faraway God is in fact the foundation of “the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11).

Inner Circle: God’s Perfections

In addition to helping us think rightly about God’s relation to the world, divine blessedness helps us rightly estimate all those perfections of God that we call divine attributes. Blessedness is a divine perfection, but it has a special status among the perfections. At least one theologian (A.H. Strong) reckoned it to be not so much a divine attribute itself as a description of what it means for God to have all of the divine attributes.

“Unless God is blessed without us, we could never be blessed in him.”

Whatever we decide about how to categorize divine blessedness, the point is that it is a doctrine that sums up all the other divine attributes. If you take all that it means to be God, his goodness and mercy and truth and faithfulness and beauty and steadfastness and patience and wisdom, and consider them simultaneously as God’s own inmost possession, you get the doctrine of divine blessedness.

Of course, it’s not as if we assemble God by adding together perfections, but our thoughts do need to run through the course of his perfections and accumulate them mentally before our mind’s eye in their primal unity. When we do that (no small task!), we can consider them as they shine outwardly and as they resonate inwardly. When we consider them as shining forth from God, we call it glory: another very special divine perfection. But when we consider them as being perfectly enjoyed by God in absolute divine self-possession, we call it blessedness.

To put it briefly, we can think of the word blessed as the answer to the question, “What is it like to be God?” To the extent that creatures can give any meaningful answer to that question, even on the basis of God’s self-revelation, we can answer that to be God is to be happy. Here, certainly in English but probably in all creaturely language, we crash into the problem of a word like happy not carrying the weight we need it to. God possesses whatever we should call the absolutely solid and real thing that happiness and joy are just a shadow of.

It is good news that God has blessedness, and that God is blessed. He is sufficient, self-sufficient, all-sufficient; never waiting on something outside of the divine life to make the divine life complete; always enjoying all the perfections of being himself, and knowing he has them, and loving to have them: God is blessed.

Inmost Circle: Blessed Trinity

With this insight, we come to the inmost circle of the three domains of blessedness. The perfect God who creates without need or greed, the one God in the plenitude of his attributes, is the triune God whose eternal life is characterized by ineffable joy and mutual glorification among three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Divine blessedness and triunity have a special relation to each other. In previous generations, theologians who took the time to write very large treatments of Christian doctrine would usually say everything they could about God’s nature first, and then turn to the doctrine of the Trinity to consider each of the three persons who possess this one divine nature they had just discussed. Often, they would reserve the doctrine of blessedness to be the very last thing they said about the one God, before turning on the very next page to the Trinity. We see this strikingly in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, and great Protestant theologians like Amandus Polanus and Petrus van Mastricht do the same in their systems. Something deeper is at stake here than just how to organize the table of contents in a big theology book!

Why does the doctrine of blessedness gravitate toward the doctrine of the Trinity like this? Partly because of the summative character of blessedness, the way it bundles all the divine attributes and considers them with reference to God having them. But partly because, once we cross the line into trying to speak about the fullness and perfection of God’s joy, we find ourselves reverently following the lines of revelation into the innermost chamber of God’s identity. That identity is the eternal reality of the living God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Vast Happiness

One possible reason we don’t often hear about divine blessedness these days may be that it is such a vast and comprehensive doctrine that it is hard to talk about. God’s blessedness has one foot in the highly exalted “big God” theology that some people have recently been calling classical theism. The doctrine keeps company with great themes like aseity, simplicity, and the attributes that start with the prefix omni-. It is a high and exalted doctrine.

But the doctrine’s other foot is very near to us, and makes close contact with human happiness. We must maintain constant awareness that we are speaking analogically about the ineffable, and we always need to remain reverent in what we say. But the fact is that God is happy, and the sovereign joy of the indestructibly blessed God is good news.

Audio Transcript

How do I know if my good deeds are vain — or if they are eternally relevant? Just because we act in ways that look sacrificial to the world does not mean those works are virtuous. It’s an essential point made by Jesus when he contrasts the Pharisee and the tax collector. There he introduces us to a very moral teacher, a man who is not an extortioner, not unjust, not a scandalous sinner, not an adulterer. No. In fact, he fasted twice a week and tithed off everything he got (as we are told in Luke 18:11–12). And it was all vain. All of it. And yet, said Jesus, our own righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 5:20). So there’s a sacrifice worth noting here, even if it’s proven vain in the end.

How do we escape the Pharisee’s vain sacrifice? It’s the question Pastor John took up in one of his early sermons, way back in 1980, specifically answering the question: How do we do good works so that God gets the glory? Here’s the answer from rookie pastor, John Piper, 42 years ago, just a couple weeks into his new pastorate.

It’s possible to be a kind of do-gooder, a kind of philanthropist, a benefactor, who (for one reason or another) uses his or her money to alleviate suffering, and not even believe in God, let alone do it all for his glory. And that creates a kind of problem. Can’t just be merely good deeds then, can it, that gives God glory?

When Jesus said, “You are the light of the world,” he didn’t just mean the bodily motions through which you go in doing good deeds. He meant you — your attitude, your motive, the spirit that you exude in those good deeds. That’s what it means to let your light shine. There is a way to do good deeds that will bring glory to God, and doing it that way, in that spirit, will be the shining of the light that Jesus is talking about, which is why I entitled this sermon, “How to Do Good So God Gets the Glory,” not just “Doing Good So God Gets the Glory.”

Don’t content yourself that you have done many good deeds in your life. It might be a pile of rubbish in God’s sight. There is such a thing as works and Phariseeism. So we must ask the next question, which comes from 1 Peter 4:10–11, how shall we do good deeds? How shall we serve so that not we, but God, gets the glory?

In the Strength He Provides

Probably no other book in the New Testament, besides the book of James, reflects a greater acquaintance with the teachings of Jesus than 1 Peter.

For example, in 1 Peter 2:12, you have a very loose quotation of the very text we’ve been looking at, Matthew 5:16. It says there, “Maintain good conduct among the Gentiles so that when they speak against you as evil-doers, they might see your good deeds and give glory to God on the day of visitation.” It’s the same idea exactly as Jesus’s teaching because Peter, of course, was a very close apostle.

But in 1 Peter 4:10–11, we have probably the clearest word in the Bible about how it is we must do good deeds if God is to get glory,

As each has received a gift, employ it for one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace. Whoever speaks, let him speak as one who utters oracles of God. Whoever renders service, let him render it as one who renders it by the strength which God supplies in order that in everything God might be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

“For God to get glory in our lives, the good we do must be done in dependence upon the strength which he gives.”

There is no clearer answer in the Bible to the question, how we shall serve or do good deeds so that God gets glory. And the answer, very simply, is that, for God to get glory in our lives, the good we do must be done in dependence upon the strength which he gives and not our own. Not mere good deeds, but good deeds done in a spirit of humble reliance and joyful dependence on the provision of God.

The Proud Servant

I want you to picture two people this afternoon. These two people are trying to decide whether to come to F.A.C.T. tomorrow night (Fun All Cleaning Together). Going to clean up the church.

Now, one of these fellas is a younger man and he’s strong and virile, works a lot around the church. He’s pondering, “Shall I go or not to help? Oh, I suppose I’ll go. Might be worth a few brownie points with the leadership. They might serve snacks. Besides, I know how to do all that stuff really well. I can give a few pointers and that’s always fun.” And so he comes and he grumbles about the tools that are there, and he criticizes the way things have been planned, and he talks on and on about his experience. He gets a lot done, does a lot more than lots of other people, gets a lot of corners spick and span. A lot of employers would go after that man because many employers are only interested in productivity and efficiency.

“Every piece of resolve that we can muster to do good is a gift of God.”

God looks on that man’s heart and his assessment of his contribution is this, “I got no glory from that effort because it was not done in reliance upon me. It was not done in a spirit of humble trust and joyful acceptance of life and gift from me.”

The Humble Servant

Then there’s another person. Now, this person’s a little bit older. He’s worked a lot in the church too, but he’s been ill for a while now. The knees are real stiff and give a lot of pain. Arthritis, I suppose. And he wants to come. He would love to come. He’s always enjoyed working at the church, and he never made any big to-do about inconvenience or sacrifice or any of that stuff. He was just there putting in the hours.

He says, “O Lord, I would just love to be there. Maybe I could just encourage some of the down-hearted. Maybe I could just keep the coffee warm, but it would be sure great to be there with your people in your house.” He makes a special effort and praise. “Just this once, let me wake up in the morning with no pain in these knees, and I’ll go,” and low and behold, he wakes up with no pain.

He gets on the phone to Flossy, “I’m coming down there. I’m going to do whatever you need done.” And so he’s there, and he works, and he doesn’t get so much done because his knees start to ache a little bit, but he’s there with bells on. He exudes a kind of joy and gratitude for life, and everybody’s attention through him is appointed to God from whom he has acknowledged receiving this help. His whole bearing and his whole demeanor exude that God is getting the credit for his being there, and God is getting the credit for every little swipe of the rag or push of the broom. That’s what it means to let your light shine (and not just to be there), right?

What Have You Not Received?

But here’s the hook. Every single one of us is in that category, not just the guy with bad knees. Every single one of us, all the strength we have is from God. All the fibers of our brain and our intelligence are a gift from God. Every piece of resolve that we can muster to do good is a gift of God. “What do you have that you did not receive,” Paul said to the Corinthians, “If you received it as a gift, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Why do you get haughty and arrogant and braggy? We are all crippled apart from the grace of God — and worse than crippled, apart from his sustenance. We would degenerate into nothing or into devils without his grace.

Oh, how differently we would serve and do good if this truth would hit us with all its force: how utterly dependent we are on God for life and breath and everything. We would not boast in our achievements. We would not criticize the speck in our brother’s eye. We would not grumble about inconveniences, and we would not be presumptuous as if existence itself could be taken for granted. It cannot. A person who truly owns up to the fact that he exists by the word of God, and that all his strength and moral resolve comes from God, is going to be a humble and lowly and grateful and joyful person in all the good deeds that he does. And in serving that way, God, and not himself, will get glory.