http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16090912/end-of-the-global-south
ABSTRACT: In the early 1980s, missionary and researcher David Barrett published the World Christian Encyclopedia, a massive survey of global Christianity and missions. Since then, the work of Barrett and others has shaped the church’s approach to missions in profound ways, not least by focusing attention on the world’s remaining unreached peoples. Now, new generations of researchers are tracing the gospel’s spread through the Global South and beyond, showing that today’s church is more diverse than many have imagined — and helping today’s Christians participate more strategically in the gospel’s advance.
Evangelicals are serious about missions. To crib a quote from the American historian Douglas Sweeney, “Evangelicals care about nothing more than evangelizing the world.”1 Sweeney may be speaking in hyperbole, but not by much. We are passionate about doing and well-known for our activism. This is an evangelical strength. What evangelicals, as a group, have not always taken seriously is the life of the mind. As Mark Noll wrote in his epistle of a wounded lover, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”2 We have not been as passionate about thinking and are not as well-known for our erudition. This has been an evangelical weakness.3
American evangelical missions during the twentieth century often failed to combine zeal with knowledge.4 In a recent lecture on the history of missiology, Brian Stanley observed that “there is always a tendency, particularly in Christian missions, for the field to divide between the doers and the thinkers.” He rightly referred to the problem as a “fatal separation,” and one that may be more pronounced in missions than in any other area of Christian ministry. Stanley, a highly respected intellectual, is also an evangelical who is very much for missionary activity. As he put it in the same address, “The challenge is to enable practitioners to be less afraid of deep research and reflection, but to conversely challenge the thinkers with the continuing imperative of what the church is actually called to do.”5
There have been times in our recent past when the thinkers and the doers actually did get together. This essay introduces readers to the work of David Barrett and a remarkable story of success that has brought about significant changes in the way evangelicals carry out the Great Commission. A discussion about Christianity in the Global South will follow, interacting with Philip Jenkins’s recent comments about what he calls “the end of the Global South.” What does he mean — and what are the possible implications for the church and its mission?
‘Miracle from Nairobi’
In 1982, Oxford University Press published the 1,010-page World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE).6 It was edited by David Barrett (1927–2011), who served as a missionary with the Church Missionary Society from 1957 to 1985. Barrett was a British evangelical who had prepared for the Anglican priesthood at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was mentored by Stephen C. Neill (1900–1984), a missionary to India who later became an academic at the University of Cambridge.7 After finishing his studies at Cambridge (BA, MA), Barrett served as a missionary in Kenya (then British Kenya) before continuing his studies at Union Theological Seminary (STM) and Columbia University (PhD). Barrett the missionary, like his mentor, became Barrett the academic.
After finishing his doctorate at Columbia, where he did his work on African Independent Churches, Barrett returned to East Africa for an ambitious research project. Using Nairobi as his base, between 1968 and 1981 Barrett traveled to nearly “every country in the world” (he listed 212 countries) to harvest statistics on Christianity and missionary activity throughout the world. He worked with a team of 21 editors and more than five hundred consultants, one of whom was Patrick Johnstone, the missionary-researcher and author of Operation World.8 The project was slated to take three years but was extended to twelve, because Barrett and the entire editorial team “had seriously underestimated the size and complexity of the Christian world.”9 Barrett’s massive survey showed that the vast majority of Christians lived in the “so-called Third World,” and that there were “Christian churches in every inhabited country on earth.”10 Time magazine hailed his work the “Miracle from Nairobi!”11
As a well-trained academic, Barrett used a widely accepted conceptual framework from the study of economic geography. His data was organized around what is still known as the Brandt Line, which divided the globe between the economically developed regions of the world in the Global North and those classified as economically underdeveloped in the Global South. The term Third World was then a shorthand reference to those nations with the least-developed economies, though in the 1980s this term was gradually replaced with the more congenial-sounding Global South. The latter was a reference to most (not all) of the countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America (including the Caribbean), and Oceania. The term Global North was used for the bloc of nations with developed economies that are concentrated in North America and Europe. This nomenclature is still widely used in the discipline of global studies and informs important decisions made by governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies (such as the United Nations and the World Bank). The taxonomy still holds, though in recent years, with the rapid growth of some developing economies, the lines have begun to blur.12
Seeing the Unreached
One of the more fascinating applications of Barrett’s work was related to how evangelicals made decisions about where to assign missionaries. His data on missionary allocation showed that the Western church was continuing to send nearly all of its missionaries to parts of the world where Christianity had already taken root. A classic case is Kenya, where Barrett had lived since the 1950s, and had returned again and again for research. In 1900, Christians made up less than 1 percent of the population of what was then British East Africa, though by the year 2000 the percentage had increased to an estimated 77 percent.13 Even though Kenya had been largely Christianized, it remained (and remains) a popular destination for the allocation of evangelical missionary personnel. Many parts of Africa and most of Central and South America also fell into this category. Western mission agencies, Barrett’s research showed, were continuing to send people to places where foundations had already been laid, even to countries in the Global South that were overwhelmingly Christian. Many churches seemed to hold the assumption that effective missionary strategy simply meant acquiring a passport and sending people anywhere they “felt led” to go outside of the United States. This assumption needed to be completely reassessed.
Barrett’s work encouraged evangelicals to think about what they were doing. Soon after Oxford published Barrett’s miracle from Nairobi, the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) hired Barrett to work as a consultant. The FMB (now the International Mission Board) was one of the largest and most influential mission agencies in the world. Using Barrett’s research, the FMB determined that there needed to be a greater focus on what is commonly called “unreached people groups.” Donald McGavran (1897–1990), a WCE consultant, and Ralph Winter (1924–2009), an early advisor, had already begun popularizing the language of “unreached” or “unengaged” people groups in the 1970s, though Barrett’s research was instrumental in its usage.14 The FMB set up a think tank called the Global Strategy Group to reappraise its allocation of missionary personnel. The SBC was so persuaded by the need to act on this research that, in an unprecedented display of interagency cooperation, it invited 36 other missions organizations to give serious consideration to Barrett’s proposals.15 The changes brought about by Barrett’s research over the next few decades have been called “seismic and enduring.”16 When Barrett died in 2011, the global strategist for the SBC wrote, “When David Barrett came to the Foreign Mission Board as a consultant in 1985, less than 3 percent of our mission force was deployed to [unreached, unengaged souls]. Today, as a result of Barrett’s prophetic push, more than 80 percent of the people groups our missionaries serve among are unreached.”17
“The willingness of evangelicals to think about what they were doing has led to greater evangelical faithfulness.”
John Piper made an even wider audience aware of Barrett’s work in his book Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions, first published thirty years ago. Piper cited David Barrett, Patrick Johnstone, and Ralph Winter throughout, taking evangelicals to task for what Winter had called “people blindness.” His plea combined rigorous exegetical work with impressive missiological reflection. He corrected misunderstandings of the English word nation and urged evangelicals to place greater emphasis on declaring the marvelous works of God among all ethnic groups.18 Piper’s lively and learned contribution to missiology, which has sold more than 300,000 copies since its first printing, has probably influenced evangelical thinking on missions more than any single work that has been published over the last thirty years.19 The willingness of evangelicals to think about what they were doing has led to greater evangelical faithfulness to the missio Dei.
End of the ‘Global South’?
I recently had a conversation with Philip Jenkins about his suggestion that we might now be entering a new era, one that he calls “the end of the Global South and, consequently, of global/world Christianity.”20 Jenkins’s 2002 book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity helped focus the attention of literate laypersons and learned academics on the rapid growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As he put it then, “The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.”21 Jenkins helped popularize what Barrett and others had been working on since the late 1960s. In light of Jenkins’s usage of the expression Global-South Christianity and his insightful work on the “coming of global Christianity,” it is reasonable to ask what he means by these comments. Is Global-South Christianity no longer a helpful category? Has global/world Christianity already come and gone?
Looking back now over the last two decades, Jenkins has observed that there has been “real progress in the popular awareness of global affairs among Christians.” He notes that “in recent years, the situation has changed utterly. Publishers have turned out countless volumes in world or global Christianity, a topic that is now very well covered in seminaries and religious departments.”22 The remarkable literary achievements of academics like Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Brian Stanley, Kirsteen Kim, Kwame Bediako, Jehu Hanciles, Mercy Oduyoye, Todd Johnson, Dyron Daughrity, Scott Sunquist, Paul Hiebert, Gina Zurlo, and Wilbert Shenk (to mention only a few names!) are now enlarging the story of Christianity.23 A younger generation of academics is also standing on the shoulders of giants and writing fresh histories of Christianity with sweeping coverage of nearly every country in the world. The field of global/world Christianity now comprises historians, theologians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and missiologists, many of them clustered around the Yale-Edinburgh Conference, co-founded in 1992 by Andrew Walls (1928–2021) and Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019).24 These scholars are interested in the broader theme of global/world Christianity, but individuals also specialize in particular regions (e.g., continents, subcontinents) and countries, and also focus on subjects like transnational movements (e.g., evangelicalism, Anglicanism, Pentecostalism) as well as specific topics (e.g., men and women, politics, migration, mission).
Generous samples of their scholarship are found in print and online academic journals published by major research universities in places like Boston, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Princeton. Lengthy bibliographic entries can be accessed in works like the Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity, the World Christian Encyclopedia (bibliographies are listed under every country) and the new nine-volume Cambridge History of Christianity. There is now voluminous coverage of Christianity in every historical period, covering nearly every single country of the world. Gina Zurlo’s recent work Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe is an effort to make some of this scholarly work more accessible for a general readership.25 Hundreds of highly motivated academics, a surprising number of whom are evangelicals, are shedding new light on the church’s story.
Global from the Beginning
This enormous output of research on the history of Christianity from the first century to the present is now showing that the church is more diverse than we have ever imagined. When the Spirit of God came blowing in at Pentecost, the gospel was translated into the languages of Africa, Arabia, Asia, and Europe, spilling out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Sometime around AD 60, the apostle Paul could already say that the gospel is “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout “the whole world” (Colossians 1:6). Christianity has been a worldwide, polycentric movement from its inception, and contrary to popular misconceptions, Rome has never been the sole seat of ecclesiastical authority. In point of fact, Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Armenia and Georgia in Asia and Aksum (Ethiopia) in Africa before it became the state religion of Rome in the West. In the ancient church (ca. 100–450), networks of churches were clustered around places like Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople in Asia; Alexandria in Africa; and Rome in the West, with multiple centers of influence all confessing a near-identical creed. For a brief period in the early Middle Ages, these five regions formed a pentarchy (five coequal spheres), but even prior to the usage of this term in the sixth century, new centers had already formed further afield in Asia as far as India and China, across Africa as far south as Sudan, and to the farthest reaches of Western and Northern Europe. The work of historians is helping us see more than ever before that Christianity has been a diverse, global religion for two thousand years.
“Christianity has been a worldwide, polycentric movement from its inception.”
In our own day, the growing ethnic and geographic diversity of Christianity is pushing thinkers like Jenkins to challenge how we use expressions like the Global South and global/world Christianity. Jenkins believes that the classifications Global South and Global North are helpful ways of having conversations about macrolevel trends, but that they fail to do justice as descriptors of Christianity’s boundless diversity. With so much scholarly light having now been cast on Christianity in every country of the world, he wants to be careful about using the term Global South as though it were a religious monolith. He wants to avoid language that simply divides the church into halves. To be fair to my colleagues working in religious demography, they are not using the terms in this way, and Jenkins himself still uses Global-South Christianity in his writing. More controversially, the boundless diversity of Christianity has even led a few academics to adopt the expression “world Christianities” (plural) rather than global/world Christianity (singular), though this language is now being convincingly contested.26
A few examples will suffice to illustrate what Jenkins is talking about. Christianity has grown rapidly in Kenya, as well as in neighboring South Sudan, yet the church in both countries has been shaped by different narratives and disparate political and social realties. Nigeria is roughly divided between Christianity and Islam, creating unique conditions and challenges for the church within different regions of the same country. Christianity is growing in Northeast India as well as in the neighboring hermit-kingdom of Bhutan, but in decidedly different ways, due in part to starkly different political and social contexts. Historians still write about Korean Christianity, though the churches of North Korea and South Korea are undeniably living out their faith in different political contexts. Christianity across Central America has common features, but you can see and feel the differences between the churches of Guatemala and neighboring Honduras — and both countries are distinct from Costa Rica, with its large expat community. Brazil provides one of the most interesting examples of Christian diversity, with evangelicals and Pentecostals now diffused in nearly every tradition, including Roman Catholicism, in a way that has now influenced national elections. These are but a few examples of contrast, and we haven’t even begun talking about the vast continental differences. As Jenkins has put it, “In demographic and cultural terms, the world is anything but flat.”27 Said another way, the Global South is not a country.
Drama of Unfolding Redemption
Scholars will continue their work (and their debates), but what is important to note here is that the academic study of Christianity’s past and present has been a source of tremendous wisdom for evangelical engagement in global missions. This should encourage Christians who have been suspicious of the life of the mind not to be afraid of careful reflection. The increased awareness in our own day of Christianity’s boundless diversity also has implications for missions — a topic that needs further exploration. One implication is clear: the opportunity has never been greater for the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world. What is needed is a shift in missional thinking, one that abandons an America-first mentality, and one that adopts a gospel-first mindset. To repackage a Pauline trope, the gospel did not originate with us, and we are not the only ones it has reached. The way of the future is in working together across cultures in cross-cultural missions for the glory of God.
“The opportunity has never been greater for the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.”
What we are witnessing today through the work of globe-trotting researchers and travel-worn academics is the glorious drama of God’s unfolding worldwide redemption. The Spirit is blowing where he pleases, the kingdoms of the world are continuing to enter the kingdom of the Lord from the east and the west, the north and the south, and the nations are singing the praises of God. These stories are now being churned out by major academic presses as scholars have turned their attention to understanding the “surprising work of God” around the world. Christian academics have eyes to see the overarching work of redemptive history in their scholarship, even as they delight in the increasing diversity of the church “that no one [can] number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). New research is helping us reimagine the Christian world and widening our gaze to apprehend more fully the glory of God, world without end. Amen.28
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How to Entertain the Holy Spirit
Here’s a thought to make the soul stagger: if you are in Christ, then the God of highest heaven has made your heart his home. The Holy Spirit has moved in, so to speak, filling your soul’s halls and rooms with himself. And he will never, ever move out.
“If anyone loves me,” Jesus told his disciples, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). In Christ, not only do we have a home in heaven (John 14:2), but heaven has made a home in us now. Already, we feel some of the warmth of our Father’s fireplace, and hear some of his music dancing down the halls, and smell some of the food from his table, because the very Spirit of that home is here.
And what a Spirit he is. Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), one of the great Puritan theologians of the Spirit, writes that when the Spirit takes us “for a house for himself,” he
doth also become unto us a counselor in all our doubts, a comforter in all our distresses, a solicitor to all duty, a guide in the whole course of life, until we dwell with him forever in heaven, unto which his dwelling here in us doth tend. (The Works of Richard Sibbes, 5:414)
Before the Spirit brings us to heaven, he brings something of heaven to us. How foolish, then, to ignore or refuse this glorious guest — and how happy to host him well.
Entertaining the Spirit
Sibbes, in his seventeenth-century way, liked to talk of “entertaining” the Spirit, by which he simply referred to our showing him hospitality (as in the language of Hebrews 13:2, “Some have entertained angels unawares”). If the Holy Spirit dwells in us (Romans 8:9–11), then our great duty and joy is to entertain him, to welcome him, to lovingly host him until he brings us to heaven.
And how? Consider four pieces of counsel from Sibbes, a master in Spiritual hospitality.
1. Hear his voice.
The Spirit, like the best of guests, comes to speak with us. And though he may at times impart a prophetic word (1 Corinthians 12:8, 10), he speaks most clearly, and with final authority, in the pages of Scripture. These are the words he once breathed out (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21), and for those with ears to hear, they are “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), the Spirit’s breath still warm upon them.
“Read the Bible” is, I suppose, old counsel for most of us. But Sibbes alerts us to two common ways we read Scripture with ears muffled to the Spirit: by hearing selectively, and by hearing superficially.
“If the Spirit‘s words never wound us (and then heal us), we are not hearing his voice.”
First, he writes, “It is a dangerous grieving of the Spirit, when, instead of drawing ourselves to the Spirit, we will labour to draw the Spirit to us” (Works, 5:420). He has in mind the person who reads Scripture to hear not what the Spirit actually says — however uncomfortable it may be — but what he wants the Spirit to say. How easily I forget that the “living and active” word is also “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) — and the Spirit wields the weapon. If his words never wound us (and then heal us), we are not hearing his voice.
Second, Sibbes speaks directly into our hurried age:
Another way whereby we commonly grieve the Spirit of God is, when the mind is troubled with a multitude of business . . . for multitude of business begets multitudes of passions and distractions; that when God’s Spirit dictates the best things that tend to our comfort and peace, we have no time to hear. (422)
The Spirit’s voice can be drowned by the noise of a distracted life (Mark 4:19). We may hear his word in a quick, cursory way, as a husband hears his wife while rushing out the door. But “we have no time” to listen, unhurried and undistracted, so that the Spirit’s voice sinks down deep.
Hearing the Spirit — really hearing him — takes humility, time, and quiet, just as hearing a spouse or a friend does. We would do well, then, first thing in the morning, and perhaps at key moments throughout the day, to dismiss all other company from the soul and invite the Spirit to speak.
2. Heed his motions.
Intimately related to the Spirit’s voice are what Sibbes calls the Spirit’s “motions.” By “motions,” he refers not to what some today call “impressions” (often a sense that we should take some unusual course of action), but what many of us might call “conviction.” Motions are spiritual promptings to apply a specific part of Scripture — read, heard, or remembered — to a specific part of life.
Say, for example, that you hear a sermon or teaching on fasting, and (as happened to me recently) you sense your negligence in this spiritual discipline and feel the need to change. You may in that moment be feeling one of the Spirit’s motions, “sent to make way for God in our hearts” (Works, 5:426).
Now, the question is, What will you do? We likely can resonate with Sibbes when he says, “How many holy motions are kindled in hearing the word, and receiving the sacraments, etc., which die as soon as they are kindled for want of resolution!” (428). Sermon over, we leave the gathering, get caught in the current of the day, and forget what we felt (James 1:22–24). The Spirit has invited us to enjoy more of his presence and power, and by our actions we have silently said no.
How then do we heed the Spirit’s motions? Through what Paul calls a “resolve for good” (2 Thessalonians 1:11). Sibbes writes, “When the Spirit suggests good motions, turn them presently into holy resolutions. Is this my duty, and that which tends to my comfort? Certainly I will do it. Let not those motions die in us” (428). Sermon over, we leave the gathering and perhaps tell a trusted friend what we’ve felt, discerning if the motion was truly spiritual. If so, we might then make a plan for how we will “work out” the Spirit’s motions “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), laboring to open every door to him.
3. Hate his enemies.
Opening every door to him requires closing every door to sin. As Sibbes writes, “Who will think himself well entertained into an house, when there shall be entertainment given to his greatest enemy with him, and shall see more regard had, and better countenance shewed, to his enemy than to him?” (Works, 5:419). Holiness is far more than keeping some abstract law or code of conduct. Holiness begins with good hospitality.
“How many of our excuses for sin would wither and die if we remembered the holy guest in our souls?”
How many of our excuses for sin would wither and die if we remembered the holy guest in our souls? Where can we go from this Spirit? Or where can we flee from his presence? If we ascend to angry heights, he is there. If we make our bed in hidden fantasies, he is there. If we take the wings of the morning and sin where no human eye sees, even there he with us; even there his heart grieves (Ephesians 4:30).
Hear Sibbes’s spiritually sane counsel: “Take heed of little sins, which we count lesser sins perhaps than God doth” (429). Yes, take heed of little sins, for every sin, if given entertainment, will seek to destroy the Spirit’s work. Take heed of gossip and borderline shows. Take heed of greed and second glances. Take heed of bitterness and snap judgments. Take heed as you would of a thief at your door.
The counsel will not sound too strict to those who have enjoyed the Spirit’s fellowship. When he is Master of the house, and all enemies are outside, then the music plays, the feast arrives, the fires blaze; then the soul rests happy at home. And so, we will not hesitate to say, “Come and help me kill your foes” (Romans 8:13).
4. Have his grace.
Of course, anyone who has entertained the Spirit knows what it feels like to grieve the Spirit — to stifle his voice, kill his motions, welcome his enemies (Ephesians 4:30). And yet, even in the aftermath of those miserable moments, we need not wait to entertain him again — or worse, try to work our way back to a welcome. No, we can entertain him right here, right now, by agreeing to have his grace.
To entertain the Spirit is, in essence, to welcome the Spirit in his various offices. And his most precious office is to glorify Jesus (John 16:14). We are never more hospitable, therefore, than when we let him lift our eyes to Christ.
“Let not our despairing hearts cross the Spirit in his comforts,” Sibbes writes (Works, 5:428). To refuse the Spirit’s comfort, even after we have confessed our sin, may feel humble. But those who persistently refuse the Spirit’s comfort persistently refuse the Spirit himself, as much as a host who leaves his guest outside.
Let your broken heart take courage. The Spirit comes to us with grace. He comes with comfort. He comes to give us Jesus Christ.
Heaven’s Happiness on Earth
“It is the happiest condition in the world,” Sibbes writes, “when the soul is the temple of the Holy Spirit; when the heart is as the ‘holy of holies,’ where there be prayers and praises offered to God. . . . While the Spirit and his motions are entertained by us we shall be happy in life, happy in death, happy to eternity” (Works, 5:432).
The deepest, most durable happiness, a hint of heaven’s own joy, can be felt here below. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit to those who entertain him. So, hear his voice, heed his motions, hate his enemies, have his grace — and welcome the indwelling Spirit of joy.
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Dressed in His Righteousness Alone: What Is Justification by Faith?
I’ll never forget meeting up with a mentor of mine at Starbucks shortly after becoming a Christian. We regularly met there to read and study the Bible. One day, a person walked by and was elated to find Christians. But during our conversation, my mentor began asking some pretty forthright questions, and I couldn’t quite understand why.
“Do you believe that a person is justified by faith alone?” he said. The stranger hesitantly responded, “No, I believe that a person is justified by faith and works.” My mentor graciously but strongly insisted, “Then you don’t have a biblical view of justification.” A lot of back-and-forths followed, but because I was a recent convert, I found it immensely difficult to understand what was going on. I barely understood what the term justification meant!
Eventually, I discovered the importance of this vital doctrine. Martin Luther and other Reformers considered the doctrine of justification by faith alone the article on which the church stands or falls. It is at the core of the gospel, and the church needs to embrace it as such.
What Is Justification?
So then, what is justification? This is a crucial starting point. How one defines justification will determine not only how one thinks and believes but also how one lives.
Roman Catholic dogma, for example, defines justification as synonymous with sanctification,1 and the result is detrimental. One’s standing on the final day is determined by the growth of Christ’s righteousness, which is imparted to a person through baptism and increases through participation in the sacraments.2 In a word, justification is essentially a clean slate that one needs to maintain to enjoy a favorable verdict at the final judgment.
Diametrically opposed stands the Reformed understanding of justification, which is carefully, succinctly, and biblically defined in the answer to question 33 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:
Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.3
Notice that justification is an act, not a work or process.4 It is not a hopeful destination. It is God’s gracious, once-for-all verdict — his declaration of a person to be righteous in Christ, and therefore fully accepted by God.
The Greek words for justification and righteousness, along with their cognates,5 belong to the legal sphere.6 Consider, for example, Romans 8:31–34:
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies [Greek ho dikaiōn]. Who is to condemn?
Justification language belongs to the courtroom; it is forensic. Accusations are met with God’s justifying verdict spoken over his elect (see also Romans 5:16–19) — a spoken word that melts the hardened hearts of sinners.
Whose Righteousness?
God, the holy, just, and perfect Judge, finds sinners not guilty and declares them righteous. How? On the basis of the person and work of Jesus Christ — by forgiving our sins on account of the substitutionary death of Christ in our place (Romans 3:21–26) and imputing or reckoning Christ’s righteousness to us (Romans 4:1–9; Philippians 3:9; 2 Corinthians 5:21).
What is this righteousness? His perfect obedience to God, rendered in his life and death, often referred to as the active and passive obedience of Christ. He perfectly fulfilled the law (Galatians 4:4–5; Romans 8:1–4) and also died under the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13), in love for his people (Galatians 2:20).
Nevertheless, death could not keep its prey, and so Christ tore the bars away and arose a victor from the dark domain.7 Jesus’s resurrection was not only proof that his sacrifice satisfied God’s wrath; it was also his own justification or public vindication (1 Timothy 3:16; cf. Romans 4:25). On Resurrection Sunday, God declared the verdict of righteous over his Son, and through union with him, we too receive that unchangeable righteous standing (2 Corinthians 5:21).
How Do We Receive It?
What is necessary to receive this righteous standing? Faith, works, or a combination of both? The answer is faith alone. Paul makes this clear in Galatians 2:16: “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Justification is not a both-and matter. It’s either by faith or by works.
Paul fleshes this out in Romans 10:3–4. He speaks of his Jewish kinsmen as those who are “ignorant of the righteousness of God,” are “seeking to establish their own [righteousness],” and thereby do “not submit to God’s righteousness.” Then he provides this explanation: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” We submit to Christ’s righteousness by faith.
Just breaths later, in Romans 10:9–10, Paul writes, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” No wonder Paul, in the very next chapter, helpfully explains that “if it is by grace [that we are chosen, saved, and presumably justified (see Romans 10:10)], it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Romans 11:6).
“Justification is not a both-and matter. It’s either by faith or by works.”
A biblically Reformed understanding of justification by faith alone is indeed comforting to the sinner. “How can I be righteous before a holy God?” is an appropriate question to ask for those outside of Christ. The only acceptable answer is found in Christ. He is the basis of our justification, and he can be received only by the empty hands of faith. And this doctrine is at the core of the gospel.
More to the Gospel than Justification?
In loving and declaring the doctrine of justification by faith alone, some can begin to think that justification is the gospel. But that is not true. Simply saying, “Jesus died for my sins so that I can receive Christ’s righteousness” does not capture the entire gospel.8 Paul doesn’t stop there when he lays out the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1–4. Jesus also was buried and rose from the dead. In fact, the resurrection of Christ plays a crucial role in our justification (as we’ve seen in Romans 4:25; see also Romans 1:3–4; 1 Corinthians 15:20–23, 42–49; 1 Timothy 3:16).9 The gospel also includes Jesus’s ascension, enthronement as Lord, and outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Romans 1:3–4; Acts 1:11; 2:1–21; 2:32–33). We therefore should not say that justification is the gospel.
And yet, neither should we welcome the persistent emphasis of those who downplay justification, whether by minimizing it to a “subsidiary crater” in Paul’s theology10 or, even more drastically, by insisting that “our justification by faith is not part of the gospel.”11 In the end, justification is not the gospel, but it is undeniably at its center.12 If you exclude justification from the gospel, then the gospel ceases to be “good news.”
Solely by Faith?
The Reformed tradition has consistently promoted a threefold definition of faith: (1) knowledge of the content of the gospel that we believe (Latin notitia), (2) intellectual assent to the gospel of Christ (assensus), and (3) trust in the person and work of Christ on our behalf (fiducia).
Recently some have taken aim at the third part of that definition (trust).13 They argue that faith is not primarily “interior” or “emotional” but “exterior” and “embodied.” In other words, faith is active rather than passive, and it should be seen rather than felt. So they prefer slogans such as “justification by allegiance alone,” since allegiance underscores the active nature of faith.
Those who argue for this definition of faith make a major mistake. Since they redefine faith as a more active response, they argue that Paul’s either-or of justification is actually a both-and — both faith and works. To be clear here, they do not think a person can be justified by works that stem from self-righteous efforts. They believe Romans 3:20, that “by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.” However, they underline the phrase “works of the law” and say, “Paul was not against Spirit-wrought good works contributing to a person’s justification.”
“Christ is the basis of our justification, and he can be received only by the empty hands of faith.”
At this point, you may be feeling the way I did in the conversation at Starbucks, not really understanding the fine distinctions. But this is significant. To say that Paul wasn’t against good works with respect to justification, you have to make a drastic move theologically. You have to reject the distinction between justification and sanctification.
What do I mean by that? Put simply, justification and sanctification are inseparable yet distinct, like the heat and light of a fire.14 You cannot have one without the other; at the same time, you can distinguish one from the other.15 Good works, as Paul commends them, are done in our sanctification, but they cannot contribute to our justification. If they do, justification is no longer by faith alone.
Is Christ’s Righteousness Imputed?
After the conversation with the stranger at Starbucks, I asked my mentor, “What does imputation mean?” The word was thrown around during our discussion but never really defined.
Imputation means that the righteousness of Christ — his active and passive obedience — is counted or reckoned to believers. Christ’s righteousness is imputed, counted, reckoned to you when you are united to Christ by faith (1 Corinthians 1:30; 6:11; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Philippians 3:9). As Calvin said, “We do not . . . contemplate [Christ] outside ourselves from afar in order that this righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body — in short, because he deigns to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him.”16 When we talk about receiving righteousness, union with Christ is essential.
Imputed righteousness is distinct from infused righteousness. In the Roman Catholic view, Christ merited righteousness for us, and that righteousness is then infused into believers at baptism. It’s as if Christ’s seed of righteousness should be planted into your heart. It becomes your own. And it is up to you, in dependence on the Spirit and the sacraments, to water it and grow in personal righteousness.
By contrast, the imputation view intentionally uses the words count or reckon, as Scripture does (Romans 4:1–8; 5:12–19; Galatians 3:6).17 In justification, Christ’s righteousness does not become ours as some sort of personal possession. It is counted or reckoned as ours. Why? Because we do not perform the acts of justifying righteousness. Christ, as our substitute, lived the perfect life we couldn’t and died the death we deserved. The righteousness of Christ must therefore primarily and exclusively belong to him.18 It is therefore an alien righteousness — it comes from outside of us. And it is graciously imputed, counted, or reckoned to those who have no inherent righteousness whatsoever (Romans 3:9, 23; Ephesians 2:1–3). We are indeed “dressed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne.”19 For nothing else avails before God.
Jesus Receives Sinners
Listening to the conversation my mentor had with that fellow at Starbucks was intimidating and a bit over my head. I heard many terms and distinctions that didn’t seem, at the time, to make much of a difference in the Christian life. But the more questions I asked, the more I learned that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is not only theologically essential but thoroughly practical.
Just think of Christians who question their salvation as they struggle with sin. In those times, they easily can turn inward. “Have I done enough to please God?” “Perhaps if I serve more at church, he will accept me.” “I need to stop sinning in order to be accepted by him.” They may never say these words out loud. After all, they wouldn’t want anyone to think they were weak in faith — or even worse, an unbeliever. But their knee-jerk reaction to turn inward reveals a deeper underlying issue. They need to turn outward toward the objective realities of the gospel. They need to trust in Christ Jesus, their righteousness (1 Corinthians 1:30). They need to rest — not only in mind and mouth, but in heart and life — in the “word of surest consolation; word all sorrow to relieve, word of pardon, peace, salvation! . . . ‘Jesus sinners doth receive.’”20
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He Delighted to Crush His Son: The Pleasure of God in the Gospel
I was in the spring semester of my freshman year at Furman University when I first encountered, and began to engage, the claim that God is happy. I don’t think I had ever thought about God being happy — truly, deeply, richly, infinitely happy as God — and not sullen, disappointed, nervous, or constantly frustrated by all the mess of this world and sinful humans.
At the time I was not a reader, but a college junior, living at the end of our freshman hall, started a Bible study with a handful of us midyear, and when spring semester came, he said we would read the book Desiring God and discuss.
At first, I was not happy about the plan, but I acquiesced to be part of the group. And in due course, my vision of God and the Christian life was radically changed. In particular, it was the chapter titled “The Happiness of God” that turned my world upside down. There I read on the opening page of the chapter:
Redemption, salvation, and restoration are not God’s ultimate goal. These he performs for the sake of something greater: namely, the enjoyment he has in glorifying himself. (33)
A few pages later, I read about the “two lenses” and the “mosaic”:
The infinite complexity of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses . . . When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. . . . But when God looks . . . through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. . . . This mosaic in all its parts — good and evil — brings him delight. . . . [God] has designed from all eternity, and is infallibly forming with every event, a magnificent mosaic of redemptive history. The contemplation of this mosaic (with both its dark and bright tiles) fills his heart with joy. (40–41)
The whole book was life-changing, but far and away, it was chapter 1, on the happiness of God — that is, on the pleasures of God — that was the great catalyst.
In the months that followed, I took up The Pleasures of God, and it deepened and expanded and solidified such glorious, subterranean, bedrock truths like the infinite bliss and blessedness of God — and the good news that there is a chance that I could be truly happy forever. Because the pleasures of God, as he has revealed them in his word, are the great foundation and possibility for our happiness.
So thank you, John, for preaching on the pleasures of God in 1987 and for writing the book, first published in 1991. And thank you, God, for putting it in John’s head, while reading a line from Henry Scougal, to ask: What about God? “Is it not also the case that the worth and excellency of God’s soul is to be measured by the object of his love?” (18).
God’s Pleasure Conundrum
We turn in this final session to “the pleasure of God in the gospel.” Now, we could approach this topic in a more general sense or a more particular sense. Gospel can be an expansive word. We could stretch its meaning broadly and catalogue some of God’s many pleasures in the fullness and expanse of his reality we call “the gospel,” the good news that Jesus saves sinners. There is much we could say in general about God’s pleasure in the gospel. Like Luke 12:32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
However, more specifically, at the very heart of the gospel is a pleasure conundrum. If “Jesus saves sinners” is a simple, general summary of the gospel, then the simple, straightforward answer to how he saves sinners is, in the words of 1 Corinthians 15:3, “Christ died for our sins.”
So Jesus died. Did that give God pleasure? Did the Father delight in the death of his Son? How can the God who does not delight in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11) delight in the death of his own righteous Son? Where shall we go for guidance on the pleasure of God in the death of his Son?
Gospel According to Isaiah
Turn with me to “the fifth Gospel,” as some call it: the prophecy of Isaiah. In the high point of all his prophecy, Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, the great passage about the Suffering Servant (who is Jesus), Isaiah deals head-on with our pleasure conundrum, and he does so seven centuries before the climactic events transpired in history.
Twice in this prophecy we have explicit mention of the pleasures of God. We also have mention of the pleasures of two other parties, as we’ll see. But before we focus on the desires and delights in this solemn passage, let me note a couple items not to miss in what is essentially the preamble to 53:2–12. Look at Isaiah 52:13–53:1:
Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.As many were astonished at you — his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind —so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him,for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
First, note the opening declaration of the servant’s success and exaltation in verse 13: “Behold, my servant shall act wisely [literally, he shall succeed]; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.” So before we hear of his jarring humiliation and marring and piercing and crushing, we first hear that he will succeed, and be exalted.
Second, note that, given this declaration in verse 13, a banner of astonishment is unfurled in verse 14 and flies over the rest of the passage:
“As many as were astonished at you . . .” (Isaiah 52:14)
“Kings shall shut their mouths” in amazement. (Isaiah 52:15)
“Who has believed what he has heard from us?” he asks, because it is so surprising, so seemingly upside down. (Isaiah 53:1)
“ . . . who considered . . . ?” (Isaiah 53:8)The whole of the vision foretells of an astonishing, startling, almost unbelievable work that “the arm of the Lord” will perform. This servant (God’s own Arm) will have his appearance marred beyond human semblance. And perhaps what’s most striking of all is not just that it will happen, but that this is God’s doing. This is God himself at work. In other words, the astonishment comes from the story of the servant being an expression not of human wisdom, but divine.
This is the same God who confounds human wisdom by saying “the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23); this is the same God who will say, through Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . . For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9).” This is the same God who will one day inspire another commentary after these forecasted events that reads,
The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. (1 Corinthians 1:18–21).
God not only does it this way — confounding human wisdom and expectation — but he takes pleasure in it. He delights to astonish. As Jesus prays in Matthew 11:25–26, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will [literally, it was pleasing before you].”
So then, what is this enigma? What’s so astonishing, startling, unbelievable? Isaiah 52:2–12 unfolds the astonishing story, from the servant’s quiet birth and upbringing, to his unimpressive appearance, to the puzzle of his being rejected and despised, to his astounding conduct when treated unjustly (and that, shockingly, all the way to the grave). And finally, climactically, in Isaiah 53:10–12, most astonishing of all, through death comes delight — God’s greatest pleasures through, and because of, this unjust, horrific death of the righteous, undeserving servant.
Let’s unfold the astonishing action of God’s Arm, through the lens of the pleasures of three parties. Our focus here is the pleasures of God, and we’ll linger there longest, but this vision speaks to desires and delights beyond his, shedding light on the pleasures of God in the death of his Son.
1. The Pleasures of Natural Man
The preamble in Isaiah 52:13–53:1 might have us anticipate some big splash. We might expect such a servant will start his career by descending from heaven in glory. But then it all comes about so unexpectedly, so quietly. “For,” as we read in Isaiah 53:2, “he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground.”
So, no glorious descent (though there was a private angelic announcement to a small party of lowly shepherds), but the servant came from the womb as an infant and grew up as a boy. Verse 2 goes on to explain how, as man, he was not the kind to attract an Instagram following: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire [or take pleasure] in him.”
Rather, given his quiet upbringing and unimpressive appearance, the story takes another unexpected turn in Isaiah 53:3: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces [!] he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Sinful Man Would Tell Another Story
The first pleasures mentioned in the vision are the desires of natural man. And they are not the same as God’s. The pleasures of natural man would have led to a very different story for the servant.
He would have a celebrated birth and celebrity childhood. Perhaps he would be the visible, well-known and well-discussed son of a beloved monarch. Or maybe he would acquire his fame through athletic achievement, or great triumphs as a warrior. Or even better, all three. And he would be tall, strong, and handsome. He would be both nobly born and accomplished in his own right. So are the desires of natural man.
But this vision of the servant and his story as astonishing points to a critical truth about natural man, that will come front and center in Isaiah 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way.”
The essence of this “going astray,” this turning — what we call “sin” — is preferring other things to glory of God (The Pleasures of God, 158). Which means that natural man, and his human wisdom, does not see the world aright. His wisdom, even as it seems wise, leads to folly.
Human Versus Divine Wisdom
If you ask, What is the fundamental difference between divine wisdom and human wisdom? I might point you forward a few pages in The Pleasures of God to the chapter on God’s pleasure in hiding himself from the wise and revealing himself to infants:
God’s wisdom has the supremacy of God’s glory as the beginning, middle, and end of it, but man’s wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, self-determining, and not utterly dependent on God’s free grace. Divine wisdom begins consciously with God (“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” Psalm 111:10), is consciously sustained by God, and has the glory of God as its conscious goal. When divine wisdom is revealed to humans, its effect is to humble us and give us the same God-orientation that God himself has. (278)
Such human wisdom leads not only to overlooking the quiet, humble beginnings of divine wisdom (and to eventually being surprised by it), but also, in time, to despising and rejecting God’s wisdom. Sin is an assault on God, however much it may not seem like that at first. It may pretend to simply ignore him, but at bottom it is a despising and rejecting of him, and in time that will be manifest.
2. The Pleasures of God in Crushing His Son
First, we have the backdrop of the desires of thin, fleeting pleasures of natural man in verses 2–3. Now we come to our main focus, as we go to the culminating paragraph in Isaiah 53:10–12 and the greatest surprises of all.
Twice the ESV has the phrase “the will of the Lord” in verse 10. I don’t think that’s a wrong translation, but I suspect that the idea of “willing” in English is lost on many of us today. Many of us hear “willing” with a sense of acquiescence. “Well, I don’t want to do that, but I’m willing” (like when I agreed as a college freshman to read Desiring God).
But the Hebrew here implies more. It is a desirous willing — a wanting. This same root is translated delight elsewhere. Like in Isaiah 62:4: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.”
That’s the same word here in Isaiah 53:10: “It was the delight of the Lord to crush him.” The KJV reads: “It pleased the Lord.” Interestingly, the KJV has “bruised” and “pleased,” while the ESV has “crushed” and “will.” Verse 10 is so shocking — that it delighted Yahweh to crush him — it’s easy to imagine translators feeling the pressure to soften it. (Admittedly, the verse is so striking that it’s difficult to translate without being able to teach on it and provide context.)
Astonishing Delight
Let’s read Isaiah 53:10–12, in the ESV, and then ask how this text might help us approach our pleasure conundrum:
Yet it was the will [delight] of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief;when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;the will [delight] of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors;yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Remember our banner of astonishment. The shock of the servant’s story continues, through verses 4–9, as we’ll see, but now it hits a new register in verse 10. God himself did this, and he was pleased to do it. He didn’t do it by accident or acquiesce. He delighted to do it.
Which not only raises our question today, but also functions for Isaiah to confirm that this did indeed satisfy God’s demands. Our iniquities and transgressions and guilt were against God. It matters very little what this servant does if it does not please or satisfy God.
Happy to Save
So, God’s pleasure in the death of his Son might raise our pleasure conundrum, but let it not be lost on us what great assurance his settled delight provides for saved sinners. Brothers and sisters in Christ, God doesn’t just save sinners; he delights to save us. He doesn’t just go through the motions at Calvary. He doesn’t bite his lip. He doesn’t hold his nose with his people at arm’s length.
As Jesus says in John 16:27, “the Father himself loves you.” God doesn’t only accomplish the gospel and apply it through his Son, but it pleases him to do so. The happy God is happy about his own Son dying to save us. The gospel is not a divine concession. It is a divine delight.
Salvation in Christ is not based on a whim or accident. God designed it, and did it, and it pleased him to do it. And neither Satan nor sinful man can change that! Regardless of what questions it raises, God’s settled pleasure in this gospel gives us great confidence in the solidity of our salvation in Christ.
So, let’s linger here and consider three aspects of God’s pleasure in the crushing (to death) of his Son in this culminating paragraph. (As verse 12 makes clear, this crushing was a crushing to death: “He poured out his soul to death.”)
First, the pleasure of God in the gospel is the pleasure of God in substitution.
Isaiah 53:10 tell us, “His soul makes an offering for guilt.” And then we read in Isaiah 53:12: “He bore the sin of many.” Which leads us to consider the very heart of the passage in verses 4–6. And here’s how it flows under the banner of astonishment: Why was such a servant a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? Because his sorrows and griefs were not his own but ours!
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way;and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Our griefs. Our sorrows. Our transgressions. Our iniquities. Our chastisement, our punishment, laid on him. There is no getting around this being “substitution.” This is unmistakably Levitical language. These are the categories of the sacrificial system. The animal, albeit imperfectly and temporarily, stands in (by God’s gracious provision) as a substitute for the chastisement sinners deserve.
Yet here in Isaiah 53, the substitute is manifestly human. Isaiah dares to tread where Moses only pointed. The whole sacrificial system hinted at this and inevitably anticipated something like this, but the arm of the Lord is not yet revealed until Isaiah — and then not yet enacted for another seven centuries.
Second, the pleasure of God in the gospel is the pleasure of God in justification.
Isaiah 53:11 declares, “The righteous one, my servant, [shall] make many to be accounted righteous.” The servant not only bears the griefs of others and carries their sorrows, but he literally “will provide righteousness for the many” (Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, 442).
“Justification” refers to God’s declaration of “Righteous!” over the sinner on the basis of the righteousness of Christ to whom the repentant sinner is joined by faith alone. In other words, the servant (Christ) will “provide righteousness” for the many joined to him by faith. This is an additional pleasure to substitution. The servant (Jesus) not only “bears their iniquities,” but also “provides righteousness.”
But what about “the many” that’s repeated in this text? This is one of the most important questions in the vision because it appears over and over: “Many were astonished” (Isaiah 52:14); “He bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12); “Many to be accounted righteous” (Isaiah 53:11); and he will share his “portion with the many” (Isaiah 53:12). And this repetition of “the many” leads to a third pleasure of God.
Third, the pleasure of God in the gospel is the pleasure of definite atonement.
“The many” who are astonished in Isaiah 52:14 become the witnesses who speak in Isaiah 53:1 (“us”) and Isaiah 53:2 (“we”). “The many,” then, is “my people” in Isaiah 53:8. “The many” is “his offspring” in Isaiah 53:10. And it’s these “many” who now say, in Isaiah 53:4–5:
“He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”
“He was pierced for our transgressions . . . crushed [to death] for our iniquities.”
“[He] brought us peace.”
“With his wounds we are healed.”“The many,” then, is the “we” in Isaiah 53:6 who say, “All we like sheep have gone astray . . . and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” — that is, all “the many.” The “we” talking in verse 6 are “the many,” the “offspring,” the “my people” — all those whom God has moved from seeing the servant with the desires of natural man, to seeing him with the pleasures of God.
So, the “alls” of verse 6 are constrained by the “we” of verse 6, which goes back to the “we” and “us” of verses 1–2. As Alec Motyer argued at length in his contribution to From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: “The intended recipients and the actual beneficiaries of the Servant’s atoning death are one and the same group” (266).
That is, the servant’s work is definite. It is particular. Which means that the servant can say, as Jesus does in John 19:30, “It is finished.” He doesn’t say, “Well, I did my part.” He says, “It is finished.” The servant does not leave the work undone. Nothing here in Isaiah 53 is open-ended. And this finality, this completeness, this definiteness, this particularity is all part and parcel of the achievement of the incarnate Son that delights his Father.
One more quote from Motyer:
The “we” of these crucial verses were locked into a failure to grasp what the Servant was all about, but our iniquities were laid by Yahweh on his Servant; and this is what led to our “seeing.” The theological implications are profound: the atonement itself, and not something outside of the atonement [like the human will], is the cause for any conversion. The resources for conversion are found in the Servant’s death; they flow from it. Thus, it is the atonement that activates conversion, not vice versa. (261–62)
“The pleasure of God in the gospel is the pleasure of God in substitution, justification, and definite atonement.”
The pleasure of God in the gospel is the pleasure of God in substitution, in justification, and in definite atonement — but still our problem remains, however layered and multi-dimensional these pleasures: Why does God delight in the death of his Son?
Four Reasons for the Father’s Pleasure
Here are four reasons (and the fourth leads us to the third and final party to whom Isaiah attributes pleasure) that answer the question, Why does God delight in the death of his Son?
First, God delights in the magnitude of his Son’s achievement — and his death is an achievement. In fact, it is the single greatest achievement in the history of the world: the eternal Son of God became man, lived sinlessly for more than three decades, and with silence and without violence, willfully submitted himself to unjust arrest, torture, and even death to rescue a chosen multitude from every tongue and tribe and nation. And then he rose again in triumph over sin and death and Satan.
This is the singular achievement for which the world was made and set up. This is an achievement of which we have only begun to grasp its magnitude. We will celebrate it forever. When God delights in the death of his Son for sinners, he delights in his Son achieving the single greatest feat in history.
Second, God delights in the pleasure of “the many” rescued by his Son. He takes pleasure in once natural men now born again to delight in him. And nothing produces holy delight in his redeemed people like the achievement of his Son at the cross.
To be accounted righteous, and to be apportioned to the Son — what does that produce? Obligation? Duty? Joy! Real pleasure, not thin and shallow, but the kind that endures forever! And note, the joy of “the many” here is not our getting the Son’s portion as much as our being the Son’s portion (“all are yours, and you are Christ’s,” 1 Corinthians 3:22–23).
If you wonder, Am I among “the many”? here’s the question for you: Do you see the servant and his work as folly or wisdom? Do you see him as nonsensical or glorious, embarrassing or delightful? Does your soul find pleasure in him, or despise him?
At bottom, what do you do with Jesus? There’s no finding out if you’re included in “the many” apart from him and how you orient on him. Those whom God has been pleased to move from despising and rejecting Jesus to worshipful astonishment of Jesus can count themselves among “the many.”
Third, God delights in the Son’s love for God and his glory. The Son “acts wisely”; he does the Father’s will; he lives, and dies, to glorify his Father. He does not take sin — as the preferring of other things to God — lightly. Rather, he takes it with utter seriousness by going to the cross to die for the sins of “the many.” Back to Piper in The Pleasures of God:
The depth of the Son’s suffering was the measure of his love for the Father’s glory. It was the Father’s righteous allegiance to his own name that made recompense for sin necessary. So when the Son willfully took the suffering of that recompense on himself, every footfall on the way to Calvary echoed through the universe with this message: The glory of God is of infinite value! The glory of God is of infinite value! (176)
“Nothing magnifies the glory of God like the Son of God embracing the cross.”
Or, we might say, God is most glorified in his Son when he is most satisfied in his Father. God is most glorified in his incarnate Son when, “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2), he endures the suffering and shame of the cross, for his Father’s sake. Nothing magnifies the glory of God like the Son of God embracing (willingly, gladly) the incomparable suffering and shame of the cross.
Which leads both to a fourth reason for the Father’s pleasure and, at the same time, the third and final personal mention of pleasure in Isaiah 53: the pleasure of the servant himself.
3. The Pleasures of the Son in Being Crushed (53:11–12)
This is critical: the pleasure of God in crushing his Son is not apart from the pleasure of the Son in being crushed. That the Son was pleased to be crushed — that in the agony, he endured for the joy set before him — does not mean it was easy. This is not pleasure light. This is pleasure deep, deep enough to sustain and animate the soul against the greatest of earthly deterrents. Consider two aspects of the Son’s pleasure.
One, consider how he went: willfully. Not kicking and screaming, but voluntarily — that is, he tasted enough pleasure in the moment to embrace the cross. We stand in awe of Isaiah 53:7–9:
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth;like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered [astonished!]that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death,although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
This, again, all under the banner of escalating astonishment. Verses 4–6 gave us the unexpected reason for his sorrow and grief. Verses 7–9 give us the unexpected conduct of the servant. He could have called ten thousand angels. But in the garden, the holy hesitations of his human will gave way to glad submission to the divine will, which — as the God-man — was also his will. He prays, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42), and in doing so, his human will embraces the divine.
So, he offered himself voluntarily. He consented. He did not just acquiesce. He willed it. He embraced it. He owned it. He “let himself be brutalized.” It was his pleasure — not a thin, shallow immediate human pleasure, but a deep, divine, supernatural pleasure — to be crushed for the glory of his Father, and his own joy, through saving many sinners.
Then, consider the source of the joy that sustained him. Isaiah 53:11 says, “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.” In the agony of the cross, he looked forward to the pleasure he would enjoy on the other side, and tasted enough of it in the moment, to keep going. And this requires resurrection.
No Resurrection, No Delight
This is essential for God’s pleasure in the death of his Son, and the Son’s pleasure, and our pleasure in him. If there is no resurrection, there is no divine pleasure in the death of the divine Son. And no pleasure in the Son in being crushed. But the resurrection turns death upside down. And God’s pleasure in the death of his Son is always pleasure that has the resurrection in view.
“If there is no resurrection, there is no divine pleasure in the death of the divine Son.”
Isaiah 53:10 tells us that the Lord “shall prolong his days.” And the pleasure of the Lord “shall prosper in his hand.” God’s pleasure in the death of his Son is a pleasure in prospering his Son after death. Through the achievement of the cross, and by the resurrection, Jesus enjoys the reward of his achievement, “the many” as his portion. The Groom receives his bride.
And the one who once had no majesty that we should look upon him, becomes the majestic one, upon whom the redeemed gaze as the one who died to bear their sins and lives to be their greatest delight. Which brings us back to the first line of the vision in Isaiah 52:13: “He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.”
God’s pleasure in the crushing of his Son is the pleasure of God in lifting up his Son — both at the cross and in the resurrection (as in John 12:32). Just as God the Son delights in the glory of his Father, so God the Father delights in the glory of his Son.
And just as nothing moves the born-again human heart like the exaltation and glory of Christ, so nothing moves the divine heart like the exaltation and glory of his incarnate, perfect, crucified, risen, reigning Son.
