http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15776612/to-groan-is-human-and-christian
What a wonder that Jesus groaned.
It’s one of the more arresting glimpses into his humanity that we find in the Gospels. Like his flare of righteous anger at Pharisees in Mark 3:5. Or, after Lazarus’s death, his being “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (John 11:33). And then, remarkably, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). How many readers have been stopped in their tracks by his admission of the limits of his human knowledge? “Concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).
We might overlook this remarkable moment in the human life of Christ — his groaning aloud in Mark 7:34 — if it didn’t happen again, and with more intensity, just a few verses later in Mark 8:12. That is, twice, just paragraphs apart — first before the feeding of the four thousand, then again immediately after — “Jesus sighed.” And the second instance was more dramatic than the first (“he sighed deeply in his spirit”). The Greek for sigh (stenazō) we translate groan elsewhere in the New Testament.
The emotional life of the sinless God-man might be more complex than we’re prone to assume.
What’s in a Groan?
Jesus’s sighing, his groaning, stands out all the more in Mark 7–8, because that’s not the tenor of his ministry elsewhere.
Yes, we know him as Isaiah’s “man of sorrows” not because he groaned his way through ministry, but because he came, in the end, to bear the cross for our sin. Typically, the Christ of the Gospels is conspicuously calm, composed, unnerved in the face of his foes, telling provocative parables, responding to hostile quips with grace and penetrating questions, exhibiting the equanimity that seems to be in shorter supply today.
But manifestly self-possessed as he may be in the Gospels, Jesus is fully human, with all that our nature entails — body, mind, will, and emotions. In particular moments, Jesus could be righteously angry and greatly troubled and even weep. And with each unexpected revelation of his full humanity, we mere humans have much to learn.
We might intuit some grace for us in glimpsing Christ’s groaning. Many keen observers, like J.C. Ryle, have anticipated “a deep meaning in that sigh!” (Expository Thoughts on the Gospel of Mark, 115) — but what, then, is the deep meaning? What might there be for us, his people, in the groaning of our Lord?
Truly Man, Not Only God
For one, we see the realness of Christ’s humanity, and with it, his identification with our plight. Not only does he, in Mark 7–8 as elsewhere, show distinctively human emotions — which he has by virtue of his humanity, not deity — but we find him drawing near to us. His groaning is not only like ours in this fallen age, but also for ours — as it is particularly for the deaf and mute man of Mark 7:
And taking him aside from the crowd privately, [Jesus] put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. (Mark 7:33–35)
As William Lane observes, Jesus took the man aside from the distraction of the crowd, entered his world, and “openly expressed the strong emotion he seems to have always felt in the presence of the ravages of demonic [oppre]ession and disease” (Mark, 267).
We might mistake the wrong kind of calmness for spiritual maturity. Godliness does indeed bring calm and stability to a human soul, but not at the expense of deep, spontaneous groans over sin’s curse (holy groans that are, at heart, markedly different from the grumbling which Scripture uniformly condemns). This picture of Jesus is different than the one we might be prone to imagine or portray. The healthy, sinless emotional life is not as one-dimensional as we might think. Holy emotions in a fallen world may fall across a wider spectrum.
“We all have moments, if not extended seasons, where this age of not-yets wears on us. Jesus too.”
Biblically, sighing is not an expression of joy, but of grief. Paired with groaning (Job 3:24; Ezekiel 9:4), sorrow (Psalm 31:10; Isaiah 35:10; 51:11), and the longing for divine deliverance (Psalm 38:9), sighing expresses (audibly) a kind of inner languishing, the opposite of a merry heart (Isaiah 24:7). Sighing is a soft, more quiet form of mourning (Ezekiel 24:17). And it is a universal aspect of the human experience: we all have moments, if not extended seasons, where this age of not-yets wears on us. Jesus too. Jesus sighed.
In the first instance in Mark’s account, the prompt is sin’s curse, as Jesus sees its effects in the deaf-mute before his eyes. Then his groaning intensifies in Mark 8:12 as the focus sharpens to sin itself, in the unbelief of the Pharisees.
Truly God, Not Only Man
If his first groan endears him to us, his second unsettles us as sinners prone to unbelief:
The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” (Mark 8:11–12)
“Jesus did not explode with anger and lose control. Nor was he stoic in the face of unbelief.”
Note this: “he sighed deeply in his spirit,” but did not rage. He did not explode with anger and lose control. Nor was he stoic in face of unbelief. Previously, we might assume his sigh was audible. Now, it’s both more intense and apparently less audible: “deeply” and “in his spirit.” His next words are not an outraged attack on the Pharisees, but a composed, though condemning, refusal to give the sign for which their unbelief pines. “The emotion displayed in his deep sigh was an expression of indignation and grief,” comments Lane. “There is a note of exasperation in the question, Why does this generation seek a sign?” (277).
For us, Mark’s peek into Jesus’s groan, deep in his spirit, exposes our own human proneness to trifle with unbelief. Our age conditions us to take unbelief lightly. We cast a desperate father’s cry — “help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) — as a sanctifying of doubt, rather than as a plea for deliverance without delay. But doubt is never a badge of honor in the Bible. Jesus can indeed handle our doubts (and heal them), but he does not celebrate them. In fact, as his deep groaning in Mark 8:12 reveals, few things, if any, discourage him like unbelief.
To this, we might ask ourselves how much we groan as Jesus does. Do we sense, with him, the seriousness, the atrocity, of unbelief? Or do we soft-pedal it, in ourselves and in others? Our Savior may find not that we groan too much, but too little. We need Jesus not to banish such groanings but to right the ship of our hearts, to get them back on course. Like a vessel off course, we groan at what we shouldn’t and do not groan at what we should.
Over His Dead Body
Finally, in the sweep of the Gospel of Mark, we also find an anticipation of the coming cross in the groans of Christ. We do here peek at the griefs of the man of sorrows.
As his first groan of holy compassion escalates to a second groan of holy indignation, the weight on his shoulders grows with each step toward the cross. The curse he will own, the sin he will become, and the unbelief he will remedy are a growing weight as he owns the purpose of his coming. “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” he testifies in Luke 12:50, “and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!” This heaviness was already there in his first sigh. As Tim Keller observes, when Jesus is about to heal the deaf-mute, he doesn’t grin and say, “Wait till you see what I’m going to do for you.” Because no healing, or faith, is free. Jesus will pay for it at the cross.
And the cross-ward solemnity is even more manifest in the second sigh, with the solemn tone of “Truly I say to you,” and his striking, implied self-imprecation. Jesus says, literally, “Truly I say to you, if a sign will be given to this generation . . .” (Mark 8:12) and then does not complete the statement. It’s an if without an explicit then. What’s implied is, “. . . may I be accursed.” Or, as we might say today, “Over my dead body.” Perhaps he trails off because the cross in the distance is becoming all so real. It’s one thing to say “Over my dead body” as a figure of speech; it’s another to own that death is indeed coming, and that he had not come to bring divine curse, but to bear it.
As much as we might hope to imitate our Lord in his holy groanings, we come to this great contrast as the hill in the distance draws near: the God-man went to the cross for the curse of sin and the unbelief he grieved. There were righteous groans in the mouth of Christ, on his way to Golgotha, that are not ours after Calvary.
Still, to groan is human — and Christian, for now. In this age of glorious alreadies and distressing not-yets, we groan, inevitably and even virtuously. And not only do we groan like our Lord, but we marvel that he groaned for us.
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The Joy of Jesus’s Return
Audio Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast on this Friday. Pastor John is back with us in the studio. No theme runs through your writing and speaking more consistently than the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. It’s the watchword of Christian Hedonism. And now you have written this new book, Come, Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Second Coming of Christ (Crossway, 2023). I have it in hand. And today I want to hear what you learned.
You’ve said many times that you make discoveries as you write. Way back in APJ 3, the third episode we ever did, you said, “Writing, for me, has become a way of seeing.” And then later, in APJ 613, another episode on writing, you said, “Writing is a way the mind can start seeing clearly what was before a fuzzy tangle of thoughts.” And then in APJ 1196, on book-writing, you said that, for yourself, writing a book is to watch a book slowly come to life, as “the writing itself becomes a way of seeing.”
As you write more, you see more. So as you wrote this new book on the second coming of Christ, what did you see more clearly? What discoveries stand out? And particularly, did you make any new key discoveries about how Christian Hedonism echoes in the second coming?
Well, the discovery, the key discovery of the connection between Christian Hedonism and the second coming, happened a long time ago, not while I was writing the book. It happened way back when I was first trying to understand the relationship between God’s God-centeredness and God’s love for us. As soon as I read in seminary Jonathan Edwards’s book The End for Which God Created the World, I began to see everywhere in Scripture statements to the effect that God does everything for his name’s sake or for his glory.
That’s what I mean by “God’s God-centeredness”: doing things for his own name’s sake. He predestined salvation for his glory (Ephesians 1:5–6). He created the world for his glory (Isaiah 43:7). He guided the history of Israel for his glory (Jeremiah 13:11). He sent Christ into the world for his glory (Romans 15:8–9). He forgives sin now for his glory (1 John 2:12). He sanctifies his people for his glory (2 Thessalonians 1:11–12).
Glory at Christ’s Return
Then I asked, “Is that true for the second coming?” I asked that a long time ago. And the answer Paul gives in 2 Thessalonians 1:7–10 is simply amazing, because it not only shows that Jesus is coming back for his own glory, but it does so in a way that is an answer to the question, “Well, how is Christ’s self-exaltation at the second coming really an act of love for his people?” We usually think self-exaltation and love are opposites. How does that work at the second coming? Let me read Paul’s answer:
[He will] grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might [and here comes the key phrase] when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints . . .
So pause here before I finish the sentence. Jesus is coming back “to be glorified in his saints.” That’s what I mean when I say that he is self-exalting. There is the self-exaltation of Christ. He’s coming back to be exalted. He’s coming back to be glorified. His aim in coming is that he be exalted, glorified. That is his purpose in coming, according to that verse. And it would be easy to show that this is of course the same as God’s aim to be glorified in all that he does, because God is sending Christ back so that as the Son is glorified, the Father would be glorified in him.
Christ Glorified by Our Marveling
Then comes the essentially Christian Hedonist twist in verse 10: “. . . when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed.” So he’s coming to be glorified in the saints and to be marveled at among the saints. And I ask, Are those distinct, like ham and eggs — like the ham of being glorified and the eggs of being marveled at — or are they not distinct but like jewel and diamond or like celebrating and clapping? A diamond is a jewel. Clapping is a way we celebrate something. And when he comes on that day to be glorified and to be marveled at, my understanding is that these two acts (to be glorified, to be marveled at) of the believers at the coming of Christ are not distinct, like ham and eggs. Being marveled at is the way Christ will be glorified when he comes. He’s glorified by being marveled at.
“Christ is not Christ-exalting at our expense; he’s Christ-exalting through our joy.”
Now, let’s think about that, because this is right at the heart of Christian Hedonism. What is marveling? Another word for marveling is being amazed. Amazement and marveling are not thoughts; they’re emotions. If you see something marvelous and you feel nothing, you’re not marveling — I don’t care what you think. If you see something amazing and you don’t feel any amazement, you’re not amazed. Marveling is a feeling. Being amazed is a feeling, not a mere thought. Well, what kind of feeling is it? It’s a good feeling. People pursue amazement; they pursue marveling. That’s why we go to the mountains and the canyons. That’s why we get out of the city lights so that we can see the stars. People pay money to be amazed, to marvel. It’s a good feeling; it’s a desirable feeling. It’s a species of pleasure, joy, gladness, satisfaction.
And you see where that leaves us. “He comes on that day to be glorified and to be marveled at” — that is, he’s coming to be glorified in us by our marveling at him. He will be glorified in us when we experience the satisfaction of marveling at him in his coming. It’s pure Christian Hedonism. It’s the way God designed the universe. He will get glory. That’s why he made everything. He will get glory, and we will get the joy. And by our getting the joy in his glory, he will get the glory from our joy, which is the answer to the question, “Now, how is it loving for God to be so God-centered? How is it loving for Christ to be so Christ-exalting?” And the answer is, Christ is not Christ-exalting at our expense. He’s Christ-exalting through our joy.
Love His Appearing
The way he maximizes his glory is by maximizing our joy in that glory. He magnifies the radiance of his glory by multiplying the marveling of people in that glory. The more we marvel, the more he shines; the more we marvel, the happier we are. It’s a form of happiness. This is love. Right at the heart of the design of the universe is love. So yes, I did see a relationship between the second coming and Christian Hedonism, and it goes to the very heart of God’s purposes and ways in creation and redemption and consummation in the world.
“The more we marvel, the more he shines; the more we marvel, the happier we are.”
Christ is coming “on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed,” which takes us back to the verse from which the whole book sprang — namely, 2 Timothy 4:8, which says, “Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” And that love is a desiring love. It’s a cherishing love, a treasuring love, a longing love. It’s the kind of love that wants the beloved.
And what the discovery of Christian Hedonism at the second coming does is simply add another reason, an amazing reason, for us to love the Lord’s appearing. And that’s my prayer for myself and why I wrote the book.
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A Father’s Good Pleasure
A recent experience stirred in me a desire to share a word for fathers. I have fathers of younger children particularly in mind, those on the front end of their fathering days, when a man is seeking to establish godly habits so that, by his example, his children might see the shadow of their heavenly Father. This word, however, is also relevant to fathers of teens and young adults, like me, as well as for elderly fathers whose children are well into adulthood. I hope even those in situations where a father is absent will be able to draw out applications for themselves.
But before I unpack this threefold word of biblical counsel, allow me to share my recent experience with you, since it both inspired and illustrates what I have to say.
Because I Love You
One Friday morning a few months back, I sent a text to my sixteen-year-old daughter, Moriah. Before sharing the text, let me share a bit of context.
I began giving each of my five children a weekly allowance when they were around the age of seven. Then, at different points as they grew older, I sought to help them put age-appropriate budget structures in place to equip them to handle money well. When each approached age sixteen, I let them know that their allowance would end when they were old enough to be employed.
A few days before I sent my text, Moriah began her first job, which meant it was her last allowance week. So, early that Friday morning, I transferred the funds into her account. I wasn’t at all prepared for the tears. Why was I crying? I tried to capture why in this (slightly edited) text I sent to her shortly after:
I just transferred your allowance into your account. In the little memo window, I typed “Mo’s final allowance payment,” and suddenly a wave of emotion hit me, catching me by surprise. I’m standing here at my desk, alone in the office, my eyes full of tears, swallowing down sobs. Another chapter closed, another little step in letting you go. A decade of slipping you these small provisions each week to, yes, try and teach you how to handle money (not sure how well I’ve done in that department), but also, and far more so (when it comes to this father’s heart), out of the joy of just making you happy in some small way. At bottom, that’s what it’s been for me: a weekly joy of having this small way of saying, “I love you.” I’ll miss it. Because I love you.
I still can’t read that without tearing up. I so enjoy every chance I get to give my children joy. As I stood there, trying to pull myself together, a Scripture text quickly came to mind:
Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9–11)
And as I pondered this passage, I thought of some friends who are fathers of young children and jotted down three lessons I wanted to share with them.
Pursue Your Pleasure for God’s Sake
God means for you to taste the great pleasure it gives him to make his children happy through how much pleasure it gives you to make your children happy.
“Fathers, become a student of what gives your children joy.”
So, pursue your pleasure in making your children happy! Give them good things — things they value as good and really want. And really, authentically enjoy doing it. It has God’s endorsement, since he too takes great pleasure in giving good gifts to his children.
What’s wonderful about this pleasurable experience is that, for a Christian father, it is multidimensional: we get the joy of blessing our children and the joy of tasting our heavenly Father’s joy in blessing us. This becomes an opportunity to exercise what C.S. Lewis called “transposition” (in his essay by that name in The Weight of Glory) — we see and savor the higher, richer pleasure of God in the natural pleasure of giving pleasure to our children.
Pursue Your Children’s Pleasure
God means for your children to taste how much pleasure it gives him to make his children happy through how much pleasure it gives you to make them happy.
So, pursue your children’s pleasure in making your children happy! Become, through your joyful, affectionate generosity, an opportunity for your children to experience transposition too — to see and savor the higher, richer pleasure of God in the natural pleasure of their father giving good gifts to them.
Become a student of what gives them joy. Watch for those few opportunities during their childhood to bless them with a lifetime memory (think Ralphie’s Red Ryder BB rifle in A Christmas Story). But know that often it’s the simple, smaller good gifts in regular doses that make the biggest, longest impact. Because the most lasting impression of any of the good things you give your children will be how much you enjoyed giving it to them.
This is important, because when, out of love for them, you must discipline them or make a decision that displeases them, or some significant disagreement arises between you, and they’re tempted to doubt that you care about their happiness, your history of consistent, simple, memorable good gifts, given because you love to do them good, can remind them that even now you are pursuing their joy. It can become an echo of Jesus’s words: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). And it will model for them that God too really does take joy in their joy, even when his discipline is “painful rather than pleasant,” since later it will yield “the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).
“Often it’s the simple, smaller good gifts in regular doses that make the biggest, longest impact.”
If your children experience their father’s good pleasure in giving them joy, what is likely to stay with them, long after the good gifts are gone, is this: the gift you were to them. The real treasure wasn’t their father’s good things; it was their father. And in this is an invaluable parable, if our children have eyes to see.
Let Your Pleasure Speak for Itself
God means for your pleasure in giving your children pleasure to first speak for itself.
One last brief word of practical counsel. For the most part, avoid immediately turning the moments you give gifts to your kids into a teaching moment. Don’t explain right then that what you’re doing is an illustration of Matthew 7:9–11. Let your pleasure in giving them pleasure speak for itself, and allow them the magic moment when the Holy Spirit helps them make the connection.
In fact, don’t talk too much to them about your experience as such. Wait for meaningful moments, and then take them when they come. Like an early Friday morning text message to your sentimental sixteen-year-old while she’s sitting in a crowded high school classroom, forcing her to text back, “Stop! ur gonna make me cry!”
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Is God More Honored or Dishonored in the World?
Audio Transcript
We live in fractured and chaotic times. And we also know that God’s glory is important. So, when we survey our world, and we mentally run the numbers, so to speak, to find the evidence, which side of the scale tips? Does this world bring God mostly honor? Or does it bring God mostly dishonor? In creation, and in this drama of human history, which side is winning out?
I love unique, big-picture questions like this one today from a listener named Sam in Brighton, England. “Dear Tony and Pastor John, I have been listening to your podcast for two years now, and have found it invaluable in my own personal journey toward a Christ-centered life. The key foundation of the APJ ministry is that God wishes to be glorified in the everyday actions of his creatures, and that this is both satisfying and pleasing to him. I greatly enjoy the study of history and what it tells us about the human condition. My interests are in human conflict and approaches to peace. So often it appears, however, that human history is full of violence, war, and suffering. My question is this: How does this enormous weight of non-God-glorifying acts stack up against God’s desire to be glorified? I realize that God ultimately requires nothing from us, but how can he be satisfied if, quite possibly, there have been far more God-dishonoring acts across the span of human history than God-glorifying ones? How does the philosophy of Christian Hedonism answer this imbalance?”
Maybe there’s an imbalance — but maybe not. Sam’s observation is that on the one hand, the Bible teaches that God aims to be glorified in this world. That’s absolutely right. God says, for example, in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” And Isaiah 43:7 says that God’s people are created for the glory of God.
And the prophets teach that eventually the earth will be covered with the glory of God like the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). In Ezekiel 20, several times, it says that just when it seemed that the world or evil got the upper hand, God says, “But I . . . acted for the sake of my name” — my glory (Ezekiel 20:22). So, it’s really clear from the Bible that God intends for nature and history and redemption to serve the glorification of his excellence. Yes.
Then on the other hand, Sam points out, because he’s a student of history, that the world seems to be full of non-God-glorifying acts more, he would think, than God-glorifying acts. And he wonders how I would address that, especially from the standpoint of Christian Hedonism. So let me try in six steps.
Creation Declares His Glory
First, I would observe that nature, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest gathering of galaxies, is constantly, without pause, and in millions upon millions of ways, declaring the power and the wisdom of God in this world. Every animal, every human mind and body, every flower, every tree, every cloud, every river, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the interworkings of these realities — they all give an exquisite testimony to the brightness and truth of the glory of God.
“God is always and everywhere shouting the wisdom of all that he has made.”
It would be difficult to quantify this and say that somehow this is less, say, than the calamities of the world that might detract from the glory of God. God is always and everywhere shouting the wisdom of all that he has made. “The heavens [are telling] the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). “In wisdom [he has] made them all” (Psalm 104:24).
And just this morning in my devotions, I read that section in Romans 1:18 to the end of the chapter, where it says everybody knows God, and the creation of the world, all the works that he has made, is revealing the invisible attributes of God. There’s just no room for saying that God is not revealing his glory continually through the things he’s made. So, that’s the first thing I would observe. It is an overwhelming testimony, and oh how blind the world is!
God Always Acts for His Name
Second, I would draw attention to the phrase in the Bible “that they may know that I am the Lord.” That phrase occurs 88 times in the Bible; 72 of them are in the book of Ezekiel. That’s amazing.
Even more amazing is that this phrase is used both when God’s people are being saved and when they are being judged. It’s used when secular nations are getting the upper hand and when they are being punished. So, I think the intention is that in all of history, whether we see it or not, God is acting for the sake of his name, so that someday we will have eyes to see the way he worked for his name and his glory in the events that did not seem that way to us at all at the time.
God’s Glory Often Shines Unseen
Third, and this is the most clear and specific and stunning illustration of what I just said — namely, the cross of our Lord Jesus. As Jesus comes to the end of his life, and he contemplates that in the next hours he will be crucified, he prays like this (this is John 12:27–28):
“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”
In other words, in the absolute worst, most sinful event in the history of the world, the grace of God was being put on display, and nobody saw it. God’s glory was shining. The fact that nobody saw it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Later, through the eyes of faith and with divine interpretation, we do see it. That’s what 2 Corinthians 4:6 says — we do see it. But when it happened, nobody saw it. And I think that’s the way it is with most of what God is doing in this world in this fallen age.
Human Sin Magnifies God’s Grace
Fourth, when we ask why there is such pervasive failure on the part of God’s people in this world to live in a way that glorifies God, and why the Bible itself is such a relentless history of failure by God’s people, not to mention the nations, Romans 3:19–20 gives a remarkable insight.
Paul has just finished indicting the whole human race, Jew and Gentile, under the power of sin, and then he says this:
Now we know that whatever the law says [all those Old Testament quotations he’s just given to show the pervasive sinfulness of the human race] it speaks to those who are under the law [that’s Jewish people] so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of law no human being will be justified in his sight.
In other words, one of the purposes of the history of failure among God’s people is to stop the mouth of every human being and make clear that no one can get right with God through law-keeping, but only through absolutely free, glorious sovereign grace. So, God intends to show that humans are in an absolutely hopeless condition, and thus to magnify the freedom and the beauty of his grace.
All Will Be Clear in the End
Fifth, this leads to the observation that in the end we will be able to see the God-glorifying purposes of God more clearly than we can now. Consider two images. You’ve probably all heard these. I find them both very helpful. First, the imagery of a tapestry. I think Corrie Ten Boom used to talk about this. Now we see the ugly loose strands at the bottom of the tapestry — nothing beautiful about it that we can see, except by the eye of revelation. But then we will see it from the top, and the tapestry will be complete. It will be beautiful, with the strands all in their proper place. And that will be what history is.
“In the end, we will be able to see the God-glorifying purposes of God more clearly than we can now.”
Or consider the image, similarly, of a painting. God is now painting a mural of universal history and creation and redemption. And as that mural comes into being, we see this corner; we see that corner; we see this darkness; we see that little bright spot. And we can’t make much sense out of it as a whole, just staring at history with all of its mixed colors and shapes. But in the end, when it’s complete, everything will fit together; everything will make sense. It will be a perfect display of the glory of God’s wisdom and power and grace.
We Will Delight in God Fully
The last thing I would say is this: Christian Hedonism says that God will succeed in finishing the tapestry and completing the mural in such a way that there will be a perfect communication of the perfections and beauties of God in all their proper proportion. And God will succeed also in creating a people for himself who finally have eyes to see that glory for what it really is — and hearts finally able, with appropriate intensity, to delight in God’s beauty the way they should. And that delight will be the consummation of the demonstration of the glory of the grace of God.
