What is the good that makes the gospel good news?

If the present, and especially the future, that the Christian gospel offers is undesirable, unimpressive, boring, bland, and unenjoyable, then how good is the good news? Is it only good in contrast with the active misery and punishments of hell? Or, does the good news positively reflect, and welcome us into, the very heart of the God who is Goodness himself?

At bottom, the good news that stands behind and beneath the Good News is what we might call “the God-centeredness of God.” Our Creator’s “supreme regard to himself” makes possible, solidifies, and guarantees his loving and gracious posture toward sinful creatures who are united to his Son by faith. And perhaps no other good news upholds the very foundation of good in the Good News itself like answering the question, What makes God happy?

Why Did God Create the World?

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), remembered as “America’s Theologian,” authored books, essays, and sermons that have been read for generations, and freshly discovered in recent decades. But given its topic and its quality, Edward’s posthumously published Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World has yet to receive its due. As Stephen Holmes observes, and laments, “there is so little attention paid to this Dissertation in the secondary literature” (God of Grace and God of Glory, 45, note 45), and yet it addresses many of the same challenges we still face today.

Biographer George Marsden recognizes the dissertation as a “counterattack against some of the most prevalent assumptions of modern thought” (Edwards: A Life, 459). Edwards is “attempting to undermine the foundations of what had gone wrong in modern thought” (459) including its “fashionable scheme of divinity,” which still remain in the air we breathe.

In the final paragraph, Edwards mentions his concerns with “our modern free-thinkers who do not like the talk about satisfying justice with an infinite punishment” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 251). We still know the type. And with it typically comes a focus on the love or grace of God that is implicitly, if not explicitly, man-centered. In Edwards’s day, moral philosophers and writers — like Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man was “the best-known popular expression” — were “increasingly speaking of the deity as a benevolent governor whose ultimate interest must be to maximize human happiness” (Marsden, 460). Edwards countered with the clear emphasis of the Christian Scriptures from beginning to end: the glory of God.

His response was not to reduce or minimize the love of God toward his people — including God’s grace and forgiveness and mercy and goodness — but to locate it properly in the full sweep of Scripture. And in doing so, we find that our God shows us a divine love and favor for his church that does not diminish but grows in the soil of God-centeredness — good news beneath the Good News, guarding the true gospel from the would-be poison of modern man-centeredness.

What Does Reason Teach?

The dissertation contains a brief introduction, to clarify terms, and only two chapters. Chapter 1 considers what human reason alone teaches; Chapter 2, God’s revelation in Scripture.

Reason alone, Edwards concedes, is not enough to make his case, but it can answer objections. Chapter 1 culminates with four objections and his responses — with the fourth being the one he will mention again at the end of the dissertation, and expound upon further in his companion work on The Nature of True Virtue.

What is this fourth objection? It is one that many still feel and voice today: that God’s supreme regard to himself takes away from (Edwards says “derogates”) his goodness and love toward his creatures. If God, goes the objection, “makes himself his end, and not the creatures, then what good he does, he does for himself, and not for them; for his sake, and not theirs.”

Here we are right at the heart of what Edwards means to make plain in this dissertation and in True Virtue: that God’s supreme regard to himself and his genuine love toward his creatures “are not properly set in opposition . . . these things, instead of appearing entirely distinct, are implied one in the other” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 176). Chapter 1 ends with Edwards acknowledging that revelation in Scripture, to which he now turns in Chapter 2, “is the surest guide” and yet “the voice of reason” can be valuable in showing “that what the word of God says of the matter is not unreasonable.”

What Does Scripture Teach?

In the second and longer chapter, Edwards turns to what Scripture teaches concerning God’s ultimate ends in creating the world. Note an important distinction here: that God has one supreme or chief end (singular) in creating the world does not mean that he does not have other ends (plural). Indeed, as Edwards will show from Scripture, God has multiple ultimate or last ends which he finds pleasing in themselves, including loving his people.

Edwards begins (Section 1) with the Alpha and Omega, first and last texts that show God making himself his own last end in creation. Section 2, then, takes a step back to lay out twelve positions for a right understanding of Scripture on this theme. Here he introduces key interpretive principles he will return to in dealing with particular texts in Section 3. For instance, God’s ultimate end in providence also would be an ultimate end in creation. So too would be God’s revealed end in the moral world (ethics), in his providential use of the world, in his main works of providence toward the moral world, in the goodness of moral agents, in what he commands of moral agents, in the goodness of the moral world, in what is sought by exemplary saints, in what is longed for in the hearts of saints in their best frames of mind, and what was sought by Christ. Section 3 then demonstrates that in these many ways God’s ultimate aim is his glory, or importantly, his name.

Section 4 turns to “places of Scripture that lead us to suppose that God created the world for his name, to make his perfections known; and that he made it for his praise.” Now Edwards expands the field of relevant texts to include not only God’s name but also his praise, as well as his perfections, greatness, and excellency which are spoken of like his glory.

Love as End and Means

Section 5 is the heart of the dissertation in addressing the modern question we still hear today: Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures? Edwards answers with texts of Scripture in which God’s goodness toward the creature (that is, his love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, salvation) is “one thing which God had in view as an ultimate end of the creation of the world.” The ten parts of Section 5 include, first and foremost, that God is pleased, in itself, to do his creatures good — which, he says, “is not merely subordinately agreeable, and esteemed valuable on account of its relation to a further end, as it is in executing justice in punishing the sins of men; but what God is inclined to on its own account and what he delights in simply and ultimately” (220–221). In other words, God genuinely loves his people. He is pleased in itself, not simply in service of his glory, to love them. He truly delights in his people “simply and ultimately.” And he loves them enough not to leave his love unrelated to his great “further end” but to love them both as end and means.

“Does God’s supreme regard to himself undermine, and even ruin, his love toward his creatures?”

So too (Part 2) God is pleased in the work of redemption itself as an ultimate end. Here Edwards visits the love of God, and love of Christ, texts we rehearse often in the modern world: John 3:16; 1 John 4:9–10; Ephesians 2:4; as well as Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:25; John 17:19. Edwards even presents Christ’s sacrificial work of “labors and extreme agonies” as satisfying in itself (Isaiah 53:10–11), “not merely as a means, but as what he rejoices and is satisfied in, most directly and properly” (223).

Third, forgiveness and salvation are for the sake of God’s goodness or mercy, meaning for his name. Fourth and fifth, Christ governs the moral universe and the whole creation for the good of his people. Sixth, God judges the wicked for the happiness of his people. Seventh, speaking again of the church (“them who are to be the eternal subjects of his goodness”) “the whole of creation, in all its parts is spoken of as THEIRS” (227). Eighth and ninth, all God’s works are good and merciful to his people, and have been preparing a kingdom and glory for them. Finally (Part 10), related to Christian ethics and the companion dissertation to come on true virtue, the good of men is an ultimate end of moral virtue.

That One Phrase

In Section 6, Edwards draws together the strands of what is meant in Scripture by the glory and name of God. To this point, he has been considering what Scripture speaks of as ultimate ends in creation; now he moves to ask what they are. First, glory of God can (1) refer to what is internal (excellency, dignity, worthiness; great possessions, or fullness of good), or (2) the (external) exhibition or communication of internal glory; or (3) the view or knowledge of God’s excellency (that is, in the sight of the beholder); or (4) signify or imply praise. “Name of God” often indicates his glory, sometimes his praise, and especially is used for the external manifestation of God’s goodness.

In the final Section (7), Edwards argues that the ultimate end of the creation of the world is one (not many), and that one end is best captured as the glory of God. “All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God’s works, is included in that one phrase, the glory of God” — that is, the “true external expression of God’s internal glory and fullness.”

Given how many conceptual threads Edwards has drawn together (glory, name, praise, goodness, grace, mercy, love, Christ, church), we might ask why Scripture contains so many different expressions for one supreme and ultimate end. “It is confessed,” he writes, “that there is an obscurity which is unavoidable, through the imperfection of language to express things of so sublime a nature. And therefore the thing may possibly be better understood by using a variety of expressions” (242). Yet these do amount to “one thing, in a variety of views and relations” (243).

This one thing, to express it afresh yet again, is “God’s internal glory or fullness existing in its emanation.”

Good News: God Loves Himself

Why marshal such energy and focus, 250 years ago or today, to argue something so obvious to most faithful readers of Scripture? Surely, many would say with Holmes, “Scripture is constantly clear that God makes Himself His end” (50).

“Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.”

This issue is a watershed, not just then but now, and not just between the contrasting theological instincts of Arminians and Calvinists, but reveals how seriously we take the Scriptures — and how functional they are in our theology and lives. Edwards serves the church in his day, and ours, with his intellect, keen observations, insights, and logic, but most of all with his knowledge of the Scriptures and by compiling into one place, in such short space, the overwhelming testimony of God himself as to what makes him happy and why he does all that he does.

It is profoundly good news that the true God — the God who is and who loves his people — does have “supreme regard to himself” and that his own God-centeredness is not in opposition with his love and mercy, but the very foundation beneath and force behind it. Such a God, who really does make much of us through his goodness and grace, is also such a God who can be our supreme joy both now and forever.

And in an often-overlooked insight in Edwards’s dissertation — which he himself does not nearly make as much of as he could — our joy in such a God not only delights and satisfies our souls, but also glorifies him. In fact, as John Piper, captures it, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Our God seeks our good in seeking his glory — and we seek his glory in seeking our full and final good in him.

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.

Audio Transcript

We’re in our tenth year on the podcast, coming up on 1,800 episodes in the archive. And over the course of that decade, we’ve covered a lot of different topics. And that includes the topic of birth control, or, better, conception control. It’s arisen three times on the podcast, in three episodes 230, 552, and 1347. The most recent being three years ago. But today we have a follow-up question, built off something you said on the podcast seven years ago, Pastor John. Here it is, from an anonymous wife and mother.

“Hello Pastor John, and thank you for taking my question. Here’s the context. My husband and I have two wonderful boys. I believe our family is complete. He does, too. We have each independently decided that two children is enough. I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested, and feels that he is done having children himself, so the potential for children in a re-marriage, if death were to end our present marriage, seems to not necessarily factor in here, a very important argument you made in a previous episode. But ultimately my husband is undecided because he’s not sure if God permits such an action. In your view of the Bible, is it okay for a monogamous husband and father of two, who is done having children with me, or any future wife, to get a vasectomy?”

The older I get, the more skeptical I become of the freedom I think I have from being formed by my own culture. Let me put it in another way. The older I get, the more suspicious I become that I am more a child of my historical and cultural circumstances than I once thought I was.

Now, one of the reasons I say this is to help people like this couple not take offense when I wave a yellow flag (not a red flag, but a yellow flag, a big yellow flag) warning us all that when it comes to children and sex and family and personal freedom and comforts, we are almost certainly deeply infected by a contemporary culture that for decades, through television, movies, videos, advertising, books, articles, and podcasts, has shaped our mindset about marriage and children and sex and freedom of the unencumbered self.

None of us comes to the Bible with a blank slate in these matters. We are profoundly shaped by the cultural air we breathe. And that culture (and it’s been this way for a long time) does not rejoice at the blessing of children. It does not gladly embrace the enormous cost and effort of raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It does not see marriage as forming a beautiful, meaningful, lifelong, faith-building, character-forming matrix for growing the next generation.

“Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them.”

It doesn’t put any value on the pain that inevitably comes with deep covenant commitments to spouses and children, but instead justifies every possible means of minimizing our own personal frustration and pleasure and maximizing personal freedom, whether through postponing marriage, or not having children, or avoiding any kind of commitment, or divorcing in order to get out of an uncomfortable marriage, or neglect of children, sticking them in some kind of institution while we go about our careers.

Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them, namely woven into the covenant commitments of lifelong marriage. These and dozens of other ways, we are all infected by the spirit of our times. All of that to say, I speak with the kind of trembling that I may be more a child of my times than I wish. I try to be under the Scriptures. I want to be shaped by the Scripture. I want to be counter-cultural in a biblical way. I want to be radical for Jesus, but I know how inevitable it is that I speak from a particular cultural time, place, not to mention my own sinfulness and intellectual limits.

Are Marriage and Children Normative?

So, with that confession, let me just rehearse briefly what I have said more extensively elsewhere. I believe marriage is normative for Christians, normative. It’s normative to be married because Genesis 2:18 says it’s not good for man to be alone.

And because we are so wonderfully designed, I think physically and psychologically, by God to form covenant commitments, consummated in sexual union with the glorious wonder of making and raising babies. Nevertheless, though I believe that’s normative, I can see in the life of Jesus and in the life of the apostle Paul and their teachings, that marriage is not an absolute requirement of Christians, but that for kingdom purposes, for God-centered, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing, church-building, soul-saving, sanctifying purposes, one might choose a life of singleness.

“Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union.”

By analogy, I believe having children in marriage is normative. Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union. To turn away from procreation in marriage for the sake of some worldly gain rather than being motivated by God-centered, Christ-exalting, kingdom advancement is a sin.

Nevertheless, on the analogy of marriage, just as for kingdom reasons singleness may be chosen, it is possible for Christ’s sake and for holy purposes that limiting the number of children would be chosen also. The principle in both cases, getting married and having children is one of self-denying, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing motivation — what’s your motivation? — rather than simply following the course of the age in order to maximize worldly freedoms and worldly comforts.

Now that puts a huge burden on all of us to honestly know our own hearts, doesn’t it? Search me oh God and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me governing these choices. This must be our cry because we are also prone to come up with a theology and an ethics that justify our desires. So, I think you can see in these observations that I don’t regard all birth control, or better conception control, as sinful.

Using abortifacients that kill a conceived child would be sin. But choosing not to conceive may not be a sin, which means that the methods and the timing of such choices will become a matter of biblically and medically-informed wisdom.

Three Questions About the Question

So what would my advice be that might contribute to the wisdom of this couple besides what I’ve tried to say?

Let me pick one sentence from what she wrote. She says, “I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested and feels that he is done having children. So the potential for children in a remarriage, if death were to end our present marriage seems not necessarily to factor in here.” Three questions about that sentence. First, the word feels, he feels that he is done having children.

Feelings are notoriously temporary. And even if she had said, “He thinks that he is done,” I would say the same thing. We just don’t know in such circumstances what may happen in our lives that would make an irreversible sterilization tragic.

Second question. The word “seems.” She says the potential for children in a remarriage if death were to end our present marriage “seems not to necessarily factor in here.” Seems is a pretty weak word. Death is a real possibility in a marriage, and in that case, remarriage would be both likely and I think good. How does he know what his heart would say in that new marriage? How does he know? “It seems that it may not be a factor.” Well, that’s pretty flimsy.

Third, nothing is said about the wife in that possible new marriage. Seems like he would be only taking into account his own preferences about whether he would want children in that new marriage. What about hers? And be careful about assuming that you’re too old to become a parent. Noel and I adopted when I was 50. What if a 50-year-old man marries a 35-year-old single woman who has always dreamed of giving birth to her own child?

Plead with God for Guidance

So my fallible contribution to your effort to act biblically — and I admire you for it — and to act wisely is to simply say one, search your hearts so that your decision to have no more children is a Christ-honoring decision, a mission-advancing decision.

Second, be very slow to implement that decision with a kind of sterilization that would cut off godly future possibilities which you cannot presently see.

And maybe just one other word of counsel. Sit down together and open your Bible and read the first 12 verses of Psalm 25. I say that because I don’t know any other passage of Scripture that is better for putting into word words our cry for guidance and wisdom from God.