A Calvinist friend once asked me what writing projects in history currently occupied my attention. I hesitated to answer as I was certain he would find my present historical focus quite outré. But answer I did (and I was not wrong about the initial response).

I told him that I was writing a variety of essays on the theology of color — not the question of race, I was quick to add, but actual colors. By that point, I had written essays on the colors white, red, and pink, and was hard at work on the color green in the literary corpus of Jonathan Edwards, who believed that green was God’s favorite color. My friend looked at me with some amazement, and I could sense from his face that he thought my interests quite odd.

This small exchange made me realize that for far too many, being a Calvinist was mainly about soteriological matters and not the glory of God in the entirety of life.

Studying in the Spirit

My conversion took place in the mid-1970s in a North American evangelical world convulsed by what has come to be called the Charismatic Movement. I encountered the movement early in my Christian life, and it gave me an abiding interest in the person and work of the Holy Spirit. It should not be surprising, then, that when it came to my doctoral dissertation (written at Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto), I could think to study only something in the realm of the Spirit (pneumatology).

Ultimately, my thesis dealt with what some might regard as an arcane topic: the Pneumatomachian controversy in the fourth century, which was centered on debates about the deity of the Holy Spirit. Specifically, I examined how Scripture shaped the way that two fourth-century Greek theologians, Athanasius of Alexandria (c.299–373) and Basil of Caesarea (c.330–379), thought and wrote about the Spirit’s godhead.

When I graduated from the University of Toronto with my doctorate in 1982, I was extremely blessed to be hired to teach church history at Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto.

What Five Points?

Ted Barton, the academic dean responsible for hiring me, was a tremendous mentor in the first few years of my teaching. When he interviewed me, he asked me, among other topics, what I thought of the “five points of Calvinism.” Amazingly, despite the fact I had earned a doctorate in church history, I had no particular knowledge of these doctrines.

I told Ted that if he let me know what they were, I would be able to answer his question. He said that was fine and quickly passed on to another question without giving me any particulars about these doctrines. The school had been having some problems with Calvinism, and in Ted’s mind, it must have been a good thing that I had no idea what these doctrines were! Within a few years, though, the doctrines had become a very familiar part of my Christian world.

During the 1980s, as I read Puritan authors like John Owen (1616–1683) and Banner of Truth books like The Grace of God in the Gospel, I came to a careful consideration of Reformed truth. Most significantly, at some point in the academic year 1985–1986, I encountered the Calvinistic writings of the Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller (1754–1815).

Fuller not only deepened my understanding of Calvinistic truths about salvation, but he also deepened my commitments as a Baptist (some who become Calvinists gravitate to paedobaptism). He did this by showing me, first of all, that Baptists had a rich heritage: his literary corpus is a robust collection of spirituality, rich in Christ-centeredness and crucicentric, ardent about holiness and the importance of the affections, and aflood with love for the lost, family, and friends.

I had questioned why on earth God had saved me among Canadian evangelical Baptists whose heritage seemed to be limited to an embattled and fissiparous Fundamentalism. Fuller, whose thought drew from the minds of men like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, showed me that Baptists had a far deeper lineage than the twentieth century.

Ideas in Stone and Color

Most importantly, though, Fuller’s overriding passion to live his life full-out for the glory of God has been central to my own spiritual formation as a Christian and as a historian. For me, that passion for the glory of God in all of life has involved a keen interest in art and architecture.

Now, while Fuller helped me understand that all of life must be lived for the glory of God, he himself could be quite dismissive of various fields of human endeavor. For instance, on one occasion, a friend — probably James Hinton (1761–1823), the Baptist minister of Oxford — was taking Fuller around Oxford University and showing him some of its architectural features. After a while, Fuller apparently turned to his friend and suggested that they return to Hinton’s dwelling to discuss justification by faith, which was far more interesting to the Baptist pastor-theologian.

Well, I think Fuller was wrong to be so dismissive of architecture, which has rightly been described as ideas in stone. As a Reformed church historian, my interests, research, and writing need to take in all of life and not just theology proper, for the simple fact that the entire universe and its various elements are of deep concern to their Creator. He made them and moment by moment sustains them. A growing philosophical interest in the subject of aesthetics helped to make me aware that, in addition to questions of truth and goodness (on which Reformed thinkers and theologians have spent so much time and effort), we who confess divine sovereignty in every sphere of life need to spend energy and time reflecting on the impress of divine beauty on our world.

And here, Jonathan Edwards, the theological mentor to Andrew Fuller, has been enormously helpful. His linkage of the Holy Spirit to divine beauty brought together my interest in things pneumatological with this fascination with created beauty and color — even if I dissent from his estimation of God’s favorite color!

And as to God’s favorite color, that glorious refraction of white light called the rainbow might well offer a clue.

Audio Transcript

Happy Monday! We launch a new week and close in on 1,700 episodes in the podcast. Thank you for all the support and prayers and encouragements over the years. And as we march forward, I’m also investing some time curating the archives to notice where some of our content gaps remain. And while doing so, Pastor John, I found one of those gaps. We have several episodes on fasting. What is fasting? What does it mean? What does it accomplish? How do we do it? And so on. But by contrast, we have relatively little on feasting. And yet feasting is a major category in Scripture — far more prevalent in the Bible than fasting is, actually. So on this Monday, Pastor John, can you give us a little theology of feasting in ten minutes, as you understand it?

A little theology of feasting in ten minutes? Maybe the way to think about this episode on feasting is that the biblical points that I will make are the raw materials of a theology of feasting. That would make me feel a little bit better.

Commemorate God’s Mercy

First, we need a definition. I’m going to start with a popular definition — namely, feasting is the enjoyment of abundance. That’s my short-term definition. I’m not even going to say that it is limited to the enjoyment of food, because you could feast your eyes on scenery, you could feast your ears on music, you could feast your nose on sweet aromas, you could feast your taste buds on honey, feast your skin and body on sexual pleasures.

So when you turn to the Bible, you find that the word feast does not always have this connotation even of abundance in view. If you do a word search on the word feast in the Old Testament, it’s just full of “prescribed feasts,” as they’re called in English. And they include Passover, Feast of Firstfruits, Feast of Weeks, Feast of Pentecost, Feast of Trumpets, Feast of Booths.

And you can see these spelled out. They take their beginning in Leviticus 23, and then they’re unpacked all over the place. They don’t all imply abundance, but rather — and here would be a modification of the definition biblically — a communal sharing of a celebrated meal with a focus on some remembrance and thankfulness of some event of God’s mercy (something like that). And it might be very simple. I mean, unleavened bread is not what you think about when you think about a big Thanksgiving dinner.

So, we need to be careful and be sure that when we see the word feast in the Bible, we determine from the context whether it implies the enjoyment of abundance, or something more simple — some celebration of some remembered event in a focused and communal and simple way.

Four Biblical Truths About Feasting

But I’m going to focus on what we ordinarily mean by feasting. That’s what I think you’re really asking, over against fasting — namely, a joyful shared experience of some abundance, usually food and drink. And so I have four observations as I look at the Bible about such feasting — the raw material, maybe, of a little theology of feasting.

1. Feasting can be good — and bad.

First, the Bible is clear that feasting in and of itself may be a very good thing or a bad thing, depending on other factors.

“Mere abundance of food and drink does not make for a happy family or happy community. There must be more to it.”

For example, Proverbs 17:1 says, “Better is a dry morsel with quiet than a house full of feasting with strife.” In other words, mere abundance of food and drink does not make for a happy family or happy community. There must be more to it.

Another example would be Ecclesiastes 10:16–17: “Woe to you, O land, when your . . . princes feast in the morning! Happy are you, O land, when your . . . princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” In other words, there’s a time for work and a time for feasting, and there are good purposes for feasting, and there are fleshly, worldly, sinful reasons for feasting. Feasting in and of itself may or may not be good.

Another example: Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” In other words, the good and rightful pleasures of feasting cannot teach you the deepest things about life and death. I have never heard anybody say they went deepest with God, learned most of God, on easy days or at feasting.

One more example: God says to Israel in Amos 5:21, 24, “I hate, I despise your feasts. . . . Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” In other words, if our feasting is a cloak of pleasure covering lives of lovelessness and injustice, the feast has become a stench in God’s nose.

So, those are examples of what I mean when I say feasting in and of itself may be a very good thing or a bad thing, depending on other factors.

2. Feasting rejoices in God’s kindness.

God intends that the abundance he provides for our physical enjoyment, the enjoyment of our senses, should echo in our hearts with thanksgiving to God and be made holy by the word and prayer. I’m simply echoing 1 Timothy 6:17, where Paul says we should set our hope on God, “who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.” In other words, the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touch of good things that God has made are not mainly tests to see if we will make them our god and become idolaters, but rather, they are mainly pleasures to send our hearts joyful and thankful back to God. That’s their main purpose for existence.

“The difference between unholy and holy feasting is not what’s on the table, but what’s in the mind and in the heart.”

Paul puts it like this in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” So, the difference between unholy feasting and holy feasting is not what’s on the table, but what’s in the mind and in the heart. Is the mind grasping the God-centered meaning of these things from the word of God, and is the heart sending up joyful prayers of thanksgiving as we taste more of the goodness of God in the very things we’re eating?

3. Feasting is our destiny.

One of the beautiful ways God describes the destiny of those who will accept salvation, his invitation, is a final feast with him in the age to come. Isaiah 25:6: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine. . . . He will swallow up death forever.” That’s a magnificent picture of our hope beyond this age, beyond the grave.

Jesus says in Matthew 22:2–10, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.” The king sent out the invitation to the world: “Come to the wedding feast!” That’s what world missions is. I mean, my book is called Let The Nations Be Glad. It could be called Let The Nations Come to a Feast.

And to his disciples at the Last Supper, just before he gave his life for our sins, Jesus said in Luke 22:29–30, “I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.”

And the book of Revelation tops it off with the angel crying, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). To which I respond, “Blessed indeed to be a part of the bride of Christ on that day.”

4. Feasting shows off Christ’s supreme value.

In some measure now, and then perfectly at the last day, God himself will be our feast. Psalm 36:7–8: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind . . . feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”

I think if we meditate on those four observations about feasting from Scripture, in the context of the whole Bible, we will be able to move wisely between fasting and feasting, between the joy of self-denial and the joy of abundance, in a way that shows the supreme value of Christ in our lives.

It might be hard to imagine that a phrase like soli Deo gloria could be misunderstood or misapplied. To God alone be the glory. What could be unclear or mistaken in those six simple words?

Fortunately, the main burden of the phrase is wonderfully and profoundly clear. Our generation (and, to be fair, every generation before us and after us) desperately needs to be confronted with such God-centered, God-entranced clarity. The clarion anthem of the Reformation has been the antidote to what ails sinners from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. We fall short of the glory of God by preferring anything besides the glory of God above the glory of God. That’s what sin is.

We want the credit, the appreciation, the praise for any good we’ve done (and pity and understanding for whatever we’ve done wrong). We were made to make much of him, but we demand instead that he make much of us. That is, if we think much of God at all. John Piper has been waving the red flag for decades.

It is a cosmic outrage billions of times over that God is ignored, treated as negligible, questioned, criticized, treated as virtually nothing, and given less thought than the carpet in people’s houses. (“I Am Who I Am”)

God’s glory gets less attention than the fibers under our feet — and we wonder why life feels so confusing and hard. Five hundred years ago, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and other reformers recovered the priceless medicine: soli Deo gloria. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory” (Psalm 115:1).

To Us Be the Glory

The Reformers were living in a spiritual pandemic of compromise and confusion. As they walked through the darkness and corruption, they stumbled into the holy pharmacies of Scripture. And what did they find in those vials? They found, above all else, the glory of God. And that startling light became the North Star of all their resistance. They would not settle for any religion that robbed God of what was his and his alone.

Justification — what makes us right before God — had been distorted and vandalized in ways that uplifted our work, our self-determination, our glory. God’s justifying act was no longer found by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, but in significant measure, muddied by our efforts. And that emphasis on what we do in salvation siphoned off glory from the gospel. To us, O Lord, and to our name, be some of the glory.

The stubborn word of God would not surrender glory so easily, though. “I am the Lord,” the Reformers read; “that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols” (Isaiah 42:8). “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25). Then four more times in just three short verses:

For my name’s sake I defer my anger;     for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,     that I may not cut you off. . . .For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,     for how should my name be profaned?     My glory I will not give to another. (Isaiah 48:9–11)

The only God who saves is a God rightly, beautifully jealous for glory. He plans and works all things, especially salvation, “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14). Our only hope in life and death is that God will do whatever most reveals the worth and character and beauty of God. All our efforts to find glory beside him or apart from him only lead us further away from him and into sin. Any news that says otherwise, whether from a pope in Rome or an angel from heaven, is a curse, not a gospel.

Does God Get All Glory?

How, then, might soli Deo gloria possibly go awry? If we wrongly assume that God’s ultimately receiving all the glory means his people receive none. No, if God alone is glorified in our salvation, Scripture promises, then we too are and will be glorified. “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). God himself glorifies someone other than God — to the glory of God.

“God himself glorifies someone other than God — to the glory of God.”

As the apostle Paul unfolds God’s plan in that greatest of all chapters, he says more: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for . . .” For what? For the appearing of Christ? For the renewed creation? No (not here anyway). “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:18–19). The creation pants to see us — what we will be. Why? Paul goes on, “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). When the creation sees us as we will be, it too will be set free.

For us to live in a paradise where fullness of joy lives — where God himself lives — we have to be something more than we are. Piper writes, “You can’t put the jet engine of a 747 in a tiny Smart Car. You can’t fit the volcano of God’s joy in the teacup of my unglorified soul. You can’t put all-glorious joy in inglorious people” (“Soli Deo Gloria”). We will be made glorious enough to swim in the wells of the greatest happiness ever conceived. The oceans, mountains, and stars are lined up outside to get a glimpse of that transformation — of our glory.

God Will Make You Like God

This thread in Scripture is as stubborn and stunning as the one beneath soli Deo gloria. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Even now, here on earth, we’re growing in degrees of glory. And then one day we’ll close our eyes for the last time on earth, and the next time we open them, we’ll barely recognize ourselves: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). When glory finally comes, it will not merely be a wonder to see, but a wonder to be.

“When glory finally comes, it will not merely be a wonder to see, but a wonder to be.”

What will happen when Christ returns? “The dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:52–53). Or as he says a few verses earlier: “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:42–43). We’re destined to live on a real earth like ours, with real bodies like ours, surrounded by blessings and experiences like ours, but without the weakness, mortality, and sin that plague all we know and enjoy now. That world will be like ours, but glorious. We will be ourselves, but glorious.

One of the most staggering and scandalous claims of Christianity is that God not only loves shameful, undeserving sinners, but shares his glory with them. He not only allows them to live in his presence, but he makes them like his Son.

To God Alone Be Glory

In a man-centered age like ours, it seems right that the overwhelming focus of our theology be away from self and on God. Thirty years ago, John Piper lamented, “I find the atmosphere of my own century far too dense with man and distant from the sovereignty of God” (The Pleasures of God, 2). I assume the pounds per square inch are even higher today (and many more miles farther from heaven). Soli Deo gloria is a precious, God-breathed chorus for our self-sick generation. We’re not in need of many articles exalting our glory.

We might need more than we have, though. Ironically, discovering all that we are and will be in Christ may be one key to escaping the cold cells of man-centeredness. Because anything glorious we discover about ourselves — and we will be glorious — is a mere reflection of him. We don’t receive any glory that does not whisper his glory and therefore glorify him all the more. We are “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9–11). If he makes us wise, he is always wiser. If he makes us strong, he is always stronger. If he makes us happy, he is always happier. As brilliant as the stars are — each of them blazing fires so bright they’re seen across galaxies — their Maker eclipses them all.

At our very, most glorious, nearly unimaginable best — sinless, painless, fearless — we’ll always still be candles lit by a far greater light, the Glory of glories, God himself.