Category Archives: Glory of God

Glory of God

Before the love of God, first holiness

Gleanings from Martyn Lloyd-Jones on 1 John.

“I can say it with reverence that before I begin to think and consider the love of God and the mercy and compassion of God, I must start with the holiness of God. I go further; unless I start with the holiness of God my whole conception of the love of God is going to be false ….” (Fellowship with God, 1993, 107).

The love of God is a wonderful truth and one that we depend upon for our redemption. But considering the love of God apart from his holiness is to sin against that love and it is to insult the essential nature of God. The holiness of God must never be separated from God’s Person as some embarassing anomaly in his character that needs apology instead of worship. No. You cannot understand God or redemption or his love apart from his holiness. The holiness of God is essential to who God is, his Person, and all his attributes.

Our modern day offer of the love of God to sinners is sweet and often faithful, but to say that God loves the sinner and to say nothing else, leaves aside the matters of how God loves and to what cost did he love us, and in protection of what qualities in himself does he love those that are to be saved. The holiness of God is where we must begin if we are to understand his redeeming love.

Lloyd-Jones speaks to this:

“I suggest that if you do not start with the holiness of God you will never understand God’s plan of salvation, which is that salvation is only possible to us through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary’s hill. …  If God is only love and compassion and mercy, then the cross is surely meaningless, for if God is love alone, then all he needs to do when man sins is to forgive him. But the whole message is that the cross is at the center, and without that death, God, I say with reverence, cannot forgive. … but if I start with the holiness of God I see that the incarnation must take place; the cross is absolutely essential, and the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit and every other part of the great plan as well.” (p. 108)

It is commonplace to use the cross as the symbol of God’s love. God’s redeeming love is certainly there (John 3:16); but in order to redeem people first the holiness of God must be satisfied. If sinful humans are to be made righteous (holy, pure, acceptable to God) then it is holiness that must be protected and appeased.

When we come to God for his love and forget how his holiness was working throughout our redemption, his glory is robbed. God’s love is wonderful and we should celebrate it, but we find God’s love much richer and more sublime, deeper and more substantive when we consider the holiness of the God who loves us.

The focus on the love of God divorced from holiness gives us great news about a small God who just wants some friends. Focus on the holiness of God in redemption and we have an incredible God who went to extraordinary lengths to save his people while first defending and then exalting his holiness. Salvation not only makes God new friends, it makes his friends holy, like he is holy. When God acts in defense of his holiness first, and in love of men second, he is most glorious and worthy of all praise. When the holy God loves, people who trust him are most loved. 

To recover the glory of God we must begin with his holiness. If God never loved anyone he would still be holy. The miracle of redemption is that sinful people can be reconciled with a holy God. Start with holiness. Then go to love.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Fellowship with God; Studies in 1 John, Vol. 1, Wheaton, Crossway Books, 1993, 107-108. 

Image

 

Standard
Glory of God, Worship

The heart of man in doing what God desires.

“I delight to do your pleasure, My God. Your law is within my heart.”

Psalm 40:8

How many ways can we disqualify ourselves from being the person we know God is calling us to be? We say things like: “I could obey God better if I just knew more about God. If I understood myself better. If I could deal with sin and get some victory. If I could get over the past. If I could be content. And a thousand other variations on that theme ….” We know that this isn’t faith. It is unbelief and excuse and defeat. These are some difficult, doomed ways of trying to live for God in our own ability. And it never works very well.

Faith is delighting in God. It is knowing God personally and intimately as a Friend. It is loving God with all our heart.

Faith shakes the believer by bringing him to see God’s grandeur and allowing him to be devastated by God’s holiness. Faith is how we become a person who connects with God. By faith we come to understand who God is. It brings us to claim a close relationship with God by which we experience all that God desires for us to know about himself.

Faith, from first to last, is knowing the unseen God. Knowing God is more than finding facts about God. It is knowing who he is, what he is like and knowing what he loves. True faith brings us to a point where we actually know what pleases him the most. This short verse in Psalm 40:8 is a picture of what faith looks like in a true believer.

Look at this language carefully:

“I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He calls God by the one-word name, Elohâ. This is the name of God, Elohim, added to the personal pronoun “my.” It is simply, “My God.”

Many translations handle that Hebrew word, “My-God” as an oath or a prayer, a cry: “O My God.” But that is making a tender and personal name for God into something it is not.

This line of testimony is a short-course in knowing God. He says directly, personally to God, “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.” He is using the language of prayer and the language of a profound and precious friendship. This is most beautiful.

The Psalmist is telling us how in his life of faith and service he succeeds in “doing” what God delights in. He begins with the deep under-girding of the law of God that has found a home within his heart.

He doesn’t go to the law first. He begins by going to God and on what pleases and delights him. This is the grander and much more effective route to obedience: We love him and then we want to do what pleases him. The life that pleases God comes from a heart that loves God and delights in him. This is how the life of faith sets us free from the condemnation of the law.

The Psalmist tells us that God’s law is not just “written” upon the heart. It is true that that language is used elsewhere and it is a helpful picture of the way in which our lives are transformed by knowledge of the nature of God. It implies that the content on God’s law is read by us and studied seriously, and that is a good thing to do (see Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 10:16). But here what is expressed is not the process of writing the law on the heart, it is what happens after the law is written deeply within your heart. Then you know and do what pleases God.

The law is “within my heart.” Evidence that you understand God and know him, is that you love him and delight in him. “Your law is within my heart” means that you know what God is like and you are aware of what he loves and what he hates. Sin keeps God a million miles away and it makes our language about God impersonal and disconnected from our deepest loves. Saving and sanctifying faith brings us to the place where we can address God as “My God.”

Faith makes our desire and delight to do what pleases God. Faith immerses itself in the Word of God so that the very law of God is in the deepest part of our lives, “Your law is within my heart.” Not just chiseled on the surface like on stone tablets, but internalized to become part of who we are. From the heart we delight in his pleasure because our hearts are becoming a little bit like God’s very heart. “I delight to do your pleasure, My God.”

Image

Standard
Glory of God, Jesus Christ makes God's glory known

Glory of God — the great work of the Son of God

Some have seen that holiness is “a coordinating relationship between other qualities” within the divine person. In Dutch this is Verhältnissbegriff, the coordination of the divine attributes within the divine person, working together for a common purpose: The glory of God.

Each of the attributes of God coordinates with one another, never competing, limiting, or hindering the ultimate outcome of each individual attribute, but each attribute of God propounding and protecting aspects of the divine person relevant to each, accomplishing together and ultimately all that is within the divine will. Holiness is the means by which this coordination of every divine attribute within the attributes of the divine person is established and expressed.

Wrath and love might be first thought to be competing qualities seeking different ends, just as grace might be viewed as waging war against justice. These qualities are coordinated by means of God’s overarching, holy intention to work all things together for his own glory in everything he does and says (cf. Romans 8:28, “we know that God causes everything to work together for the good …” NLT), satisfying the demands that every quality within the divine person be glorified because they are God’s.

This coordination and purposefulness within the divine person, especially seen in his holiness and glory, is most definitively displayed in the Cross of Christ. No quality within the Godhead is usurped. No aspect of God’s nature is diminished. God is wrathful toward sin and yet he loves his elect people. Certainly the most glorious aspect of the Cross is that every attribute of God is displayed without confusion, competition, or diminution; all are displayed gloriously, yet the redemption of Christ fulfilled God’s intention to save the sinful and to punish sin, thus God honored his own nature as the Holy God while magnificently displaying his love and electing grace. God acted as One to redeem (Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29).

There is a wondrous singularity in the purpose of God to save. This especially is the display of his holiness. Holiness may be studied as a particular attribute of God, along with God’s other attributes, e.g. wisdom, eternity, goodness, patience, and the like. Holiness also may be studied as a Verhältnissbegriff, by which God coordinates all his qualities and attributes in the accomplishment of his holy will. But it must be said that there is much about these matters that begin to touch the inner economy of the divine person that is necessarily, rightly, protectively, graciously, and forever hidden from our view. Some things within the divine person are unknown to us, not only because God so values our humility as creatures, but much more because he so greatly prizes within himself the glory of his divinity. He has determined that much of this divine economy has been shielded from our knowledge simply because he is God. We should study what we can and love what God has revealed, but the end of this inquiry of the economy within the divine person must be worship, not philosophy.

From More Glory by W. Thomas Warren (2013).

20130205-060350.jpg

Standard
Glory of God, Jesus Christ makes God's glory known

The love of God and glory.

The grandeur of God’s glory and of its incredible, powerful, impact on those who are redeemed. Glory works in us by the love of God for us.

We first see how glorious God is in his power and creation.

Psalm 89:
Vs. 5 “Let the heaven praise your wonders…”
Vs. 8 “Who is mighty as you are?”
Vs. 9 “You rule the raging of the sea …”

We see how amazing God is in his nature and wonders.

Exodus 8
Vs. 10 “There is no one like the LORD …” (see 9:14 for parallel)
Vs. 22 “That you may know the I AM the LORD in the midst of the earth…”

Exodus 10
Vs. 2 “That you may know what I have done … that you may know that I AM the LORD.”

From these few verses (and there are dozens more in the Old Testament) we see that God desires people to see him, to know his excellencies, and to experience who God is by what he has done. When we see what God has done, we know there is no one like Him.

But how does God’s glory translate into the lives of people? Into the lives of God’s people?

God’s glory is “vastly distinguished” as being utterly different from anything in humans. He is categorically different from his creation. He is far more wonderful! But he wants people to know how immeasurably rich is his glory, and how unsearchable he is as God.

Glory is not just touting God’s greatness. Glory becomes a personal interaction between God and his people. God wants them to know the glorious God, and to know that glory as worthy of every praise by those who worship him.

How does glory turn into worship?

It happens only through the working of the love of God. Love makes the glory of God known in people. The glory of God for the believer is supremely seen and experienced in the love of God for sinners. What a surprise this is! Glory leads us to his love — his eternal, saving love for his people is where glory is made perfect!

When Jonathan Edwards (one of the greatest minds every to write on theology and the nature of God) sought to describe how the Holy God could come into a relationship with sinful people, he found that language failed him. He could not express what he was experiencing as a Christian adequately, even in the loftiest language. His great gifts, his mighty intellect, could not describe the glory of God well-enough. But love could.

Edwards used the language of love to describe God’s glory! He could only turn to the language of love to describe how the Glorious God had come into his life. We see that the love of God is tied to the glory of God.

We will unpack some of the archaic phrases Edwards uses, but look for the language of love:

Edwards wrote this way, “Tis the soul’s relish of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature, inclining the heart to God as the chief good” (Edwards, Treatise on Grace, 48).

He speaks of relish (delight of the soul), of inclining the heart, and of God as the “chief good.” Edwards didn’t leap into complex language about the attributes of God or even the stilted language of redemption (reconciliation, substitution, salvation, propitiation, and the rest) to describe God’s glory. He spoke of God as the greatest good.

God is the most wonderful Person in his life, “inclining the heart to God as the chief good.” We might say that we are “declaring our love for God as our most precious and enduring Treasure. He is more to us than anything or any one.” The language of love becomes the way we offer praise and glory to God.

We are drawn to love the glory of God by the love of God. We worship God most gloriously when we know his love and receive his redemption most personally.

Then God become our “chief good.” He is our greatest love. God is known in us, by his love for us, as most glorious.

From More Glory, W. Thomas Warren.

20130201-132634.jpg

Standard
Glory of God, Understanding Christ at the focus of God's glory.

Making distinctions regarding the local church.

What does the local church look like and what does it do? Churches function according to their central core beliefs. They always do what they accept to be their mission and purpose. A church may have been founded to be a center for worship for local Christians, but over time it chose to become a center of recreation, a school, and a place to serve the needs of the poor. And the founding principles were lost.

The YMCA is the often-used example of an organization that was founded to “make disciples of young men” and it became a gym. Most fraternities were founded to be “little churches” on the campuses of colleges, where men learned to live the Christian faith, where prayer and study of God’s Word were essential to the fraternity’s values, and where Jesus Christ was exalted in their pledges and covenants. Today, of course, they are social clubs that have nothing to do with the Gospel of Christ at all.

Here are some distinctions between the Biblical Local Church and what we see almost universally in the local churches of our day. No church is perfect. But today, so many churches have become something different, something essentially alien to the Biblical model, that we hope to recover the Glorious Local Church, for the salvation of men and women, and supremely for the glory of God. Here are some distinctions. This is short-hand, and much more could be said about each of these. These are intended to spur your own thinking and reflection.

Churches don’t provide services for people. We serve God.
Churches are not commanded to have programs. We worship God.
Churches in Scripture did not advertise or sell services. The Glorious Local Church is captured by the Christian Gospel and we give all to advance the spread of Christianity in every way we can, even at the price of our fortunes and our lives.
Churches don’t convince or convert anyone. God redeems. God gives faith. God makes dead men and women alive. God gives grace. Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save those who are lost” Luke 19:10.
Churches don’t seek members to join them. We gather those who are saved for instruction, for worship, and for ministry and mission.
Membership is not about the local church. Membership in the Church of Jesus Christ is governed by God. Men have nothing to do with it, other than to test the faith of those claiming to believe, so that the local church is kept as pure as possible.
The church is for believers not for those in need, not for the lost, not for those needing a class or an intervention.
The church may minister to those in need as God commands, but “confessing the good confession” 1 Timothy 6:12, is the standard for entry into the local church.
We must not confuse the local church with the Church of Jesus Christ. One is a human, broken, failing institution. But it is to come as close as possible to the Glorious Body of Christ as we can. We are the eternal Bride of Christ, the assembly of the victorious, the fellowship of the redeemed.
Churches do not entertain or provide performances in the name of worship. We are Christians that, as a gathering of the redeemed, worship God. We do not relegate worship to a few people standing up front.
Worship is the passion of our lives, the undergirding strength for facing every trial, our great joy, and our astonishing privilege. We will not delegate it to others, even if they sing better than we.

The Biblical Local Church grows not by programs or by structures. It doesn’t expand through marketing campaigns and targeting segments of the population. We grow by the faith and beauty of the lives of those who make up the worshiping assembly. People are changed by true worship. Our lives are enriched by coming together and all of us worshiping God together. Our minds are instructed. We learn about God. We hear his Word. We love one another as God loves us.

Churches can’t repair peoples’ lives. God alone can. We must decide what is first (the Worship of God) and what else should be done in obedience to God’s commands and instructions in his Word. We must never lose sight of our first duty to God: To worship and praise — to Give Glory to God in worship, in our lives, in prayer, in obedience, in service, in sacrifice, and in holiness.

True worship is the wonderful gathering of Christians, in which all believers stand before God personally praising, saying the content of our faith, listening to the Word of God, singing praise to our Redeemer, joining our song and confessions with others who love God and who have been transformed by his amazing grace, too. Worship involves everyone in the room. Christians must worship God alone. But we worship him together.

The essential point is this:

Churches are for believers. What we do in worship may be shared with friends and family who visit, but everything we do is focused on the Church coming before our Loving Redeemer God in worship, growing unto maturity so we can serve him, and living lives that bring honor to God and praise to Jesus Christ.

The highest and most glorious commitment of the Local Church must be the glory of God. When that is in focus, everything else becomes clear as to what we are to do, and how we are to do it. God is to be glorious among his people.

20130131-095731.jpg

Standard
Glory of God, Understanding Christ at the focus of God's glory.

Trinitarian glory.

From Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, 1774.

“It was his design that the Son should thus be glorified and should glorify the Father by what should be accomplished by the Spirit to the glory of the Spirit, that the whole Trinity, conjointly, and each person singly, might be exceedingly glorified. The work that was the appointed means of this was begun immediately after the Fall and is carried on until, and finished at, the end of the world, when all this intended glory shall be fully accomplished in all things.”

We are not, in this age of texting and uncomplicated paragraphs, as able as earlier readers were, to be able to follow such tight and weighty language from Edward’s pen. But this little paragraph contains some of the loftiest and most important information about God’s heart, what matters to him, and what he will do to ensure his glory is displayed and vindicated. This is the work of the Trinity. Edwards was saying that each Person in the Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit would be working both for the glory of each other member of the Trinity and that they would each also be working for their own glory. There is nothing more important to the mind of God than his glory.

His glory will be fully displayed in all things that have been made and in all events and occurrences that have ever happened in the past or ever will take place in the future. This involves our lives, our choices, and our future eternity.

But this is the work of God to glorify God fully and absolutely. There is no higher purpose in God’s being than the defense and display of his glory. He is God and he would not be glorious as God if he did not defend and propound his virtues. How unlike people God is!

20130127-220338.jpg

Standard
Glory of God, Philosophy of ministry.

From Glory to Worship

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’” (Luke 4:8)

Jesus’ command is very hard to bear. The exclusionary command to worship and serve only God sweeps away human (or demonic) ambition, pride, and our insatiable hunger to be first. Jesus didn’t say, “Worship God alongside other people and all your possessions and ambitions.” His words point to a new, a greater ambition for believers in Christ: to place God first with no second in view; to have him and no other (cf. Luke 14:33); to have him with nothing of equivalent value—and there to learn that God’s glorious presence in our lives defines, evaluates, judges, and potentially redeems, every other love and longing we have. To know God is to gain everything we had longed for and to lose everything we had cherished in place of him (cf. Matthew 13:46).

From More Glory, W. Thomas Warren.

20130125-205345.jpg

Standard
Glory of God

The glory of God as the reason for all ministry in the local church.

The glorious church exists to praise God and to give him all honor.The focus on the glory of God means that people are worshipers and recipients of the grace of God, and they are never to be used. People bring their gifts and talents, their faith and their abilities, but what they give to God does not make God more glorious. It makes God’s people more aware how glorious God is. The church adds nothing to the glory of God. Since God has all the glory that exists, there is no glory to be extracted from God’s people. There is nothing from the efforts of people that will ever make the church greater in glory or more pleasing to God. The best it can do is experience the glory that God has made known about himself.

The church is great because of the Christ who is at the center of all we do. We believe that the Gospel has enough power in itself to provide for the needs of the glorious church. The Gospel doesn’t need the church. The church needs the Gospel. Only when Christ is our Substitute, our Savior, our Only Qualification, our Great Hope, are we pleasing to God.

The glorious church does not exist for greater numbers of people and for fabulous amounts of money. That implies that bigger is better in glory. But all glory is already God’s, so the numbers’ game is foolish.

In the glorious church, numbers never come into the equation in considering whether or not to create a new ministry or a mission. Practically, to be sure, there is an accounting of what is possible (do we have people with the gifts necessary to do this work? or do we have enough financial resources available to complete this work?). There will never be indebtedness for ministry. But we will be free from the love of money, knowing that God will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).

Our ministry scope and reach is only calculated on the basis of the glory that God possesses, not on numbers and finances. This changes the reasons for which we exist and the purpose for every ministry. We never use the calculus that “if we could attract X number of people, then we could generate Y amount of money.” We may ask, “How can we tell more people about the glory of God?” “Who in our church has a vision-yet-unfulfilled that we can help bring into reality, so God’s glory will be praised, displayed, and experienced through these wonderful believers who have themselves experienced the glory of God and desired to tell others about this glorious God that they have known by faith in Jesus Christ?”

“For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

2 Corinthians 4:6

Image

Standard
Glory of God

The glory of God as the reason for all ministry in the local church.

The glorious church exists to praise God and to give him all honor.The focus on the glory of God means that people are worshipers and recipients of the grace of God, and they are never to be used. People bring their gifts and talents, their faith and their abilities, but what they give to God does not make God more glorious. It makes God’s people more aware how glorious God is. The church adds nothing to the glory of God. Since God has all the glory that exists, there is no glory to be extracted from God’s people. There is nothing from the efforts of people that will ever make the church greater in glory or more pleasing to God. The best it can do is experience the glory that God has made known about himself.

The church is great because of the Christ who is at the center of all we do. We believe that the Gospel has enough power in itself to provide for the needs of the glorious church. The Gospel doesn’t need the church. The church needs the Gospel. Only when Christ is our Substitute, our Savior, our Only Qualification, our Great Hope, are we pleasing to God.

The glorious church does not exist for greater numbers of people and for fabulous amounts of money. That implies that bigger is better in glory. But all glory is already God’s, so the numbers’ game is foolish.

In the glorious church, numbers never come into the equation in considering whether or not to create a new ministry or a mission. Practically, to be sure, there is an accounting of what is possible (do we have people with the gifts necessary to do this work? or do we have enough financial resources available to complete this work?). There will never be indebtedness for ministry. But we will be free from the love of money, knowing that God will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).

Our ministry scope and reach is only calculated on the basis of the glory that God possesses, not on numbers and finances. This changes the reasons for which we exist and the purpose for every ministry. We never use the calculus that “if we could attract X number of people, then we could generate Y amount of money.” We may ask, “How can we tell more people about the glory of God?” “Who in our church has a vision-yet-unfulfilled that we can help bring into reality, so God’s glory will be praised, displayed, and experienced through these wonderful believers who have themselves experienced the glory of God and desired to tell others about this glorious God that they have known by faith in Jesus Christ?”

“For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

2 Corinthians 4:6

Image

Standard

Soli Deo Gloria.

True worship is self-less. It seeks God alone. It desires to ascribe all glory in a singular focus. To God be the glory forever (Romans 11:36; 16:2; Philippians 4:20; 1 Timothy 1:17).

Glory of God, Symbols and captures to illustrate glory.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Image