Audio Transcript

God is all-sovereign, all-powerful. And he is all-happy in himself. He lacks nothing. And he wants things from us. So, does he need us or need what we can give him? Matthew is trying to put these pieces together in his email to us today. “Pastor John, hello and thank you for your ministry,” Matthew writes. “Early in your wonderful book Providence, on page 43, you talk about how God has full glory. We don’t give him any glory he doesn’t inherently possess already. What God creates is never essential to God. That seems to be the point of Acts 17:25. So, we ascribe glory to God, ‘the only God,’ and we ascribe that glory to him ‘before all time’ — before creation even existed (Jude 25).

Considering this, does this mean if we glorify God by enjoying him, we can say that he created us not because he needed anything from us, but that he created us solely to share in his delight of delighting in himself? In other words, God’s self-delight in himself seems to have nothing to do with his neediness, but it is the greatest gift conceivable to the creation! That God is self-sufficiently happy, in himself, is the best news in the world for us to hear. Am I following your line of thought here? If so . . . wow!”

Wow, indeed. And Matthew is following me.

God is self-sufficiently happy in himself.
God created us not because he needed anything from us. He has no needs, no deficiencies.
He created us so that we would share in the delight that he has in himself.

On those three points, he’s tracking perfectly with what I think and what I believe the Bible teaches. As Jonathan Edwards put it, “It is no deficiency in a fountain that it is prone to overflow.” But what Matthew is really following here is not so much me as the Bible. So, let me try to sum that up.

Self-Sufficient God

We read in the Bible that God the Father says he loves the Son with pleasure. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). God the Father takes pleasure in God the Son. And in John 14:31, the Son says, “I love the Father.” So, in the fellowship of the Trinity, there is an eternal mutual love — not the kind of love (this is so important to get) that loves in spite of defects, the way God loves us, but the kind of love that is only delight. The Father and the Son find in each other the totally satisfying reality of a perfect, all-glorious God.

“The eternal happiness of God in God is the foundation of our eternal happiness in him.”

In 1 Timothy 1:11, Paul refers to the glory of our happy God: makariou theou, “blessed God.” It’s not the kind of blessedness that is translated “praise” or “honor,” but rather “happy,” the same as in the Beatitudes — the “happy God.” It belongs to God’s nature from eternity to be perfectly happy in the fellowship of the Trinity. That’s the foundation of saying he has no needs. He did not create us to meet any needs or to make up for any deficiencies.

Act 17:25 says, “[God] is [not] served by human hands, as though he needed anything [How clear can that be? He doesn’t need anything], since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” Mark 10:45 says that the Son of Man did not come into the world to recruit servants to meet his needs. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

And Psalm 50:12–15 says,

If I were hungry [God says], I would not tell you,     for the world and its fullness are mine.Do I eat the flesh of bulls     or drink the blood of goats?Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,     and perform your vows to the Most High,and call upon me in the day of trouble;     I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

That’s the glorious dynamic of God’s self-sufficiency. Did we notice, as we heard Psalm 50, that in that text (and in Acts 17:25 and in Mark 10:45) the effect is such good news? The effect of God having no needs — that is, being self-sufficient — is the basis of his meeting our needs. That’s the glory of talking about this.

In other words, God’s self-sufficiency is the basis of grace, the overflow of grace, which is why Paul says in Ephesians 1 that everything is done to the praise of the glory of his grace (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14). Because grace is the apex. It’s the highest point of God’s God-ness. He spills over. His self-sufficiency is the basis of his grace, his love.

Glorifying by Enjoying

Now, I think we need to just pause and let that sink in, Tony, because I think a lot of people hear us — you, me, Desiring God — talk about God’s self-sufficiency, and they feel like we’re dealing in some high-level, obscure, irrelevant, theological speculation about the nature of God that has no bearing on our daily lives. Good night! How absolutely wrong is that?

When the Bible speaks of God’s infinite, ultimate self-sufficiency, it ties it together with God’s being a generous, gracious, overflowing, need-meeting God. So, in Acts 17:25, the fact that God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything” leads to this: “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” And in Mark 10:45, the fact that “the Son of Man came not to be served” leads to this: “[Instead, he came] to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And in Psalm 50:15, the fact that God doesn’t need to be fed by anybody else leads to this: “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you.” And that next phrase in Psalm 50:15 ties it together with the glory of God. It says, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

In other words, the giver gets the glory. The one who meets the needs of others gets the glory because it shows his overflowing fullness. When Isaiah 43:7 says that God created us for his glory, it means God created as the overflow of his fullness, the overflow of his greatness, his beauty, his worth (we call it his glory), so that his glory would be our all-satisfying treasure. That’s how you glorify an infinitely valuable treasure: by treasuring it, by treasuring it above everything else, by being satisfied in his self-giving revelation above everything else.

God did not create to become glorious. He created to share his glory for the enjoyment of his creatures. And wonder of wonders, our enjoyment of the all-glorious God is the very means by which his glory shines most brightly in the creation. The eternal happiness of God in God is the foundation of our eternal happiness in him. And our supreme happiness in God is the seal that we put on the supreme worth of God’s glory, which is why we never tire of saying that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

I can remember exactly where I was sitting, wrestling with guilt and shame and regret over failed relationships and sexual sin, wondering if I would ever overcome my broken history, when a friend recited Micah 7:8–9 from memory:

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;     when I fall, I shall rise;when I sit in darkness,     the Lord will be a light to me.I will bear the indignation of the Lord     because I have sinned against him,until he pleads my cause     and executes judgment for me.He will bring me out to the light;     I shall look upon his vindication.

God pleads my cause. The one I betrayed kneeled down to appeal for me. His gavel landed, not on me, but on his Son. Having lived and hidden in darkness, I found a home in the light. The purity I thought I had lost was now suddenly and undeservedly possible.

As we raise up younger men in the church, and encourage them toward becoming men of God, how can we call them into the kind of freedom and purity God gave me in Christ?

Set an Example in Purity

Of course, raising up godly men is about far more than sexual purity. A man of God is more than his self-control in dating relationships. He’s more than his last Internet accountability report — far more. When grace grips a man, it more than curbs his lust for porn; it lights fires for good under every area of his life. And so, young men need strong, dynamic, ambitious pictures of what they might become in Christ.

Fortunately, God gives us plenty of great lessons on manhood in his word. First Timothy 4:12 has become one especially concise and compelling picture for me:

Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.

The apostle Paul gives Timothy, his son in the faith, five cues for spiritual growth and development. The areas are not exclusive to men, but they are each critical for godly men. Each of those five words is a battlefield to be won, and each can become its own stronghold for holiness. Do this man’s conversations consistently say he belongs to God? Does his lifestyle set him apart from the unbelieving? Is he a man of surprising and sacrificial love? Does he fight for faith in the trenches of temptation and doubt? Is he pure?

In previous articles, we looked more closely at the first four — speech, conduct, love, and faith. Here we turn to purity, the area that may receive the most attention in young men’s discipleship (often for good reason), and yet often in ways that miss the heart of Christian purity.

In All Purity

First, what kind of purity did the apostle have in mind? The only other use of this Greek word in the New Testament — agneia — comes just one chapter later in the same letter:

Encourage [an older man] as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity. (1 Timothy 5:1–2)

This suggests the purity Paul had in mind was sexual purity — a broad and consistent holiness that marks all of Timothy’s relationships with his sisters in Christ. Purity is bigger and wider than personal sexual morality, but sex and sexuality (then and certainly now) play a major role in setting followers of Christ apart from the world. Man of God, as you encourage younger women in the church, do so with purity. Don’t talk, behave, or daydream in ways that make them vulnerable to serve your lusts. Put to death sexual immorality within you (Colossians 3:5). Flee from sexual temptation (1 Corinthians 6:18). Treat young women with the respect and concern with which you would treat your own sisters — because they are (Matthew 12:50).

“Be the safest man on earth for a young woman to meet.”

And not just purity, Timothy, but all purity. Don’t treat women just slightly better than men in the world do, but wholly differently. When other men flirt with ambiguous messages and signals, be surprisingly clear and honest. When other men secretly gratify their lusts, make moments alone a training ground for self-control. When other men dishonor themselves and others through sexual sin, be a man who loves to honor and protect women. Don’t look for the lowest bar to crawl over, but be ambitiously pure — love any women God has put in your life with all purity. Be the safest man on earth for a young woman to meet.

‘Husband of One Wife’

Earlier in his letter to the younger Timothy, the apostle gives at least one other glimpse into how godly men relate to sex and sexuality.

When he names qualifications for pastor-elders, the majority of the list simply pictures a normal godly man, whether he ever serves in church office or not. He must be “sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, . . . not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Timothy 3:2–3). These qualities mark every mature man who follows Jesus. And according to that same list, such a man is also “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2).

Now, Paul did not mean that an elder could not be single. Paul himself was unmarried, after all, and he was not only an elder, but an apostle. No, more fundamentally, this is a way of saying men of God are to be sexually pure. They are men, whether married or not, who refuse to indulge themselves sexually (in thought or action or suggestion) with any woman but their wife. “The husband of one wife” (literally, “one-woman man”) is a concise way of saying, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4).

So, do our thoughts and hands and clicks honor the spiritual wonder and purity of marriage? Or, when asked by God himself to stand guard along the walls around the marriage bed, have we instead gone missing? Worse, have we turned and fired the arrows he gave us against him and the women he has made? Have we indulged lustful thoughts, lengthy glances, wicked searches, sensual touching, sexual impatience, and self-gratification? Have we used God’s gift of sex to assault the hands that gave it?

Purity Tells the Story

Why would men of God be “the husband of one wife”? Because God has made marriage and sex an unusually compelling way of drawing attention to Christ and his love for his bride, the church.

It’s not the only way, by any means. Jesus himself never married. And single believers in Jesus often experience more of Jesus than married believers do (1 Corinthians 7:35). But from the beginning, God has joined one man with one woman, for one lifetime, to tell the world physically and relationally (though certainly imperfectly) about the depth and duration of his love for us (Ephesians 5:31–32). The fire in a new husband’s eyes is a flicker of the roaring flames in heaven. The brilliance of a bride, wrapped and radiant in white, is a glimmer of what it means for the church to be chosen, wooed, won, and made pure.

And so how men (and women!) treat sex and sexuality, whether married or not, sheds light on Christ for all to see, or obscures and slanders him. The world has found countless ways to distort, abuse, and vandalize God’s masterpiece, but the added darkness has served to make true purity a brighter and clearer picture of reality. Few phenomena are more spiritually revealing and provocative today than a man who consistently denies his sinful flesh and makes war against sexual temptation. It will make him an alien in the eyes of the world — and a king in the eyes that matter most.

Purity for Sexual Failures

What if we’ve already failed sexually? What if we’ve already spurned purity and fired our arrows back at God? Have we been dishonorably discharged and forever branded with our worst thoughts and actions? Is sexual purity possible for sexual failures?

It is — and I should know. Pornography and sexual immorality plagued me for years, even after coming to know Jesus. I know what it looks like to fire arrows at God because I was often pointing the bow. Sexual repentance, to my shame, was a decade-long war. I indulged desires outside of marriage that were meant to lead me to a bride. I flirted and dodged and disappeared in dating. I dishonored sisters in Christ, women whom Jesus had bought with his blood and who had entrusted themselves to me, a brother. With my thoughts and hands and clicks, I slandered the Lion of Judah and concealed his wondrous cross. I squandered opportunity after opportunity to be the man I knew God wanted me to be.

But God pled my cause. He brought me out into the light. After I had fired my arrows against him, he intervened and took my thorns, my nails, my wrath. “I received mercy for this reason, that in me, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience” (1 Timothy 1:16). By his grace, he forgave what I had done, and by that same grace, he trained my hands, my thoughts, my words for good. He made a once impure man pure — not perfectly, but genuinely.

“Stories of sexual brokenness have their own way of honoring the worth of Christ and his cross.”

Stories of sexual brokenness have their own way of honoring the worth of Christ and his cross. God wired sexual purity and marital fidelity to sing the truth about Jesus — a soaring and mesmerizing melody — but he sings something just as captivating over harlots, like me, who leave our sexual sin for him.

Pure Men Move Toward Women

One more lesson from Paul’s counsel to Timothy: setting an example in sexual purity does not mean avoiding women in the church. Notice the posture in his charge to the younger man: “Encourage . . . younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:1–2).

He could have said, “Play it safe and just keep your distance,” but instead he says, “Encourage younger women as sisters” — care for them like you would if they grew up next to you. Move toward them, Timothy. Look for ways to give courage — to strengthen their hearts in the Lord and their resolves to love. The picture here is the opposite of the kind of divide that can emerge between men and women in churches and ministries. To be sure, there may be certain women to avoid (Proverbs 5:3–8). Generally speaking, however, men of God do not sidestep their sisters in Christ, but engage and care for them in all purity. In other words, they treat women like Jesus did.

Safest Man for Women

When you stop to look, Jesus spends a surprising amount of time caring specifically and personally for women — in a day when these kinds of interactions were more socially scandalous. Even the disciples marveled at how he would stop and talk to women (John 4:27).

Listen to the warmth and tenderness in Jesus’s voice when a seriously ill woman grabs the edge of his garment: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (Luke 8:48). When he finds the woman at the well, with her deeply broken and painful history, he doesn’t look the other way or scramble to another well, but offers to refresh and restore her soul: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

When he saw the woman horribly disabled by a demon, he “called her over and said to her, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability.’ And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God” (Luke 13:12–13). He reached out and touched her, in all purity, because that’s what a good brother would have done. When he saw a mother grieving over the death of her son, he drew near to her broken heart. “He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (Luke 7:13).

And when he rose from the grave, what was the first name on his death-conquering lips? “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary’” (John 20:16). This is the truest, most manly picture of purity the world has ever seen — a man abstaining not from his sisters, but from mistreating them or neglecting their needs. A man who consistently and profoundly encouraged women in all purity.

Audio Transcript

We know that one day Christ will return to earth physically to rule over the nations. We long for that day when he rides his white horse, his eyes “like a flame of fire,” “clothed in a robe dipped in blood” — and all in order to finally rule over the nations “with a rod of iron.” That’s what we are told to expect in Revelation 19:11–15. But does Christ rule over the nations right now? And if so, how? It’s a very good question to us from the west coast of India. “Greetings to you, Pastor John. My name is Fernandes, and I live in Goa. My question is this: Is Jesus Christ ruling over all the nations of earth now, as Paul seems to indicate in Romans 15:8–12? It seems like he has ‘all authority in heaven and on earth,’ according to Matthew 28:18. Or is this rule to come in the future, as 1 Corinthians 15:27–28 seems to suggest? Will he rule over all the nations after his second coming? Will he rule in a different way, now spiritually and later physically? Pastor John, how do you think through the reign of Christ over the nations?”

What I see in Scripture, Fernandes, are at least three ways God rules over the nations — or we could say three stages in history in which God brings the nations into complete submission.

God’s Everlasting Dominion

First, there’s the absolute, all-embracing, all-pervasive rule of God’s providence over all nations at all times and in all places.

Psalm 103:19: “The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.” That’s true now, and that’s true always.
Psalms 47:2: “The Lord . . . is . . . a great king over all the earth.”
Proverbs 8:15: “By me kings reign.” There’s no reign of any king anywhere at any time except by God’s decree.
Daniel 4:17: “The Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”
And when God puts the kings in place, he governs what they do. Proverbs 21:1: “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.”

The most dramatic instance of God’s ruling the wills and actions of sinful rulers is the way those rulers conspired to put the Son of God to death.

In this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27–28)

“Christ’s rule at this point is not to build a political or national or earthly civic order. That comes later.”

In other words, God governs the actions of sinful rulers, like Herod and Pilate, to accomplish his purposes, without himself ever sinning. So, the first way to think about God’s rule over the nations is that it is total, constant, and infinitely wise and just — now and always. “He does according to his will among . . . the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Daniel 4:35).

Christ at God’s Right Hand

Second, God puts his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, on the throne of the universe at his right hand and with all authority in heaven and on earth.

And what’s new about this stage in God’s reign over the nations is, first, that before the incarnation, there never was a God-man to sit at God’s right hand to rule the nations, whereas now, the eternal Son of God is clothed with humanity, and according to Acts 2:36, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

So, as Jesus sends out his disciples and says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18), he has rule as the God-man at the right hand of God now and forever. That wasn’t always the case; that’s new. All of that providential rule of stage one is vested now in the incarnate Son of God. Jesus says in Luke 10:22, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Or John 5:22, “The Father . . . has given all judgment to the Son.”

Now, the second thing that’s new about this rule under the crucified, risen, incarnate Son of God is that the purpose of the rule is to establish God’s saving reign in the hearts of millions of people from all the nations of the world. His rule at this point is not to build a political or national or earthly civic order. That comes later. His purpose now is to establish his saving dominion in the hearts and lives of all the elect from every tribe and tongue and people and nation in the world.

He is sovereign in every way, but he uses his sovereignty now to rescue captives by destroying the authority of Satan in the hearts of his people, and by gathering his elect from all the nations. The penetrating thrust of the kingdom in this age is salvation and sanctification — that is, the beautification of the bride of Christ for presentation to him at the last day. That’s the dominion of God over the nations through Christ now.

When God Is All in All

Third and finally, the stage of God’s rule over the nations that is yet to be from where we stand now is going to begin at the second coming of Christ.

So, during the second stage, Christ is mainly invisible as the one who wields the power of providence and salvation. But that will change at the second coming of Christ. He will no longer be invisible — he will no longer reign invisibly from heaven — but will himself stand forth and be visibly, bodily present on the earth as the King of all kings.

Listen to the difference between the present reign over all things and the future reign over all things. We hear the difference. We hear the description of the present reign in Ephesians 1:20, and we hear the contrast of what it would be like at the future reign in 1 Corinthians 15:22. Let me read those two, and you’ll hear the contrast.

[God] raised [Christ] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. . . . And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church. (Ephesians 1:20–22)

In the present, Christ is seated above all rule, authority, power, and dominion, who still are very active in this world, these evil powers. But he rules over them, seated at the right hand of God, invisibly performing his influence while they have some sway on the earth. Then comes the contrast in 1 Corinthians 15:22–24,

As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits [his resurrection], then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.

“One day, every rule and authority and power will be destroyed; opposition will be over.”

So, there’s a difference: In this age, before the second coming of Christ, Christ sits at the right hand of God far above all rule and authority and power, and does his saving work. But in that day, every rule and authority and power will be destroyed; opposition will be over. Christ reigns until that work is completely finished. And then Paul adds, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). And Revelation 20:14 describes that: “Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”

Then Christ will hand over the kingdom to God the Father, and God will be all in all, and through Christ, and through his body — his people — God will reign forever and ever in the new heavens and the new earth, and his people will be “from every tribe and [tongue] and people and nation,” whom Christ has made “a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” forever and ever (Revelation 5:9–10).