Is God For Us or For Himself?

I would like to try to persuade you that the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy himself forever. Or to put it another way: the chief end of God is to enjoy glorifying himself.

The reason this may sound strange is that we tend to be more familiar with our duties than with God's designs. We know why we exist - to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But why does God exist? What should he love with all his heart and soul and mind and strength? Whom should he worship? Or will we deny him that highest of pleasures? It matters a lot what God's ultimate allegiance is to!

If you asked my four sons, "What's the most important thing to your dad?" and they said, "I don't know," I'd be really disappointed. But if they said, "I don't care," I'd be crushed – and angry. It ought to matter to a son what a father regards as ultimately important. It ought to matter a lot to us what God is committed to with all his heart and soul and mind and strength. What is the impulse that drives the Almighty? What does he pursue in all his plans?

God did not leave us to guess in this affair. He answers the question at every point in redemptive history from creation to consummation. Let's survey some of the high points to see what he says.

Why did God create us? Isaiah 43:6-7, "Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth (says the Lord), everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory."

Why did God choose a people for himself and make Israel his possession? Jeremiah 13:11, "I made the whole house of Israel ... cling to me, says the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise and a glory."

Why did God rescue them from bondage in Egypt? Psalm 106:7-8, "Our fathers, when they were in Egypt, did not consider thy wonderful works...but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea. Yet he saved them for his name's sake that he might make known his mighty power."

Why did God spare them again and again in the wilderness? Ezekiel 20:14, "I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out."

Why didn't God cast away his people when they rejected him as king and asked for a king like the nations? 1 Samuel 12:20-22, "Fear not, you have done all this evil yet do not turn aside from following the Lord ... For the Lord will not cast away his people for his great name's sake."

Why did God use his sovereign power to bring back his people from exile after punishing four generations of sin? Isaiah (48:9,11) put it like this, "For my name's sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you ... 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."

Ezekiel 36:22-23,32 puts it like this: "Thus says the Lord God, 'It is not for your sake, 0 house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name ... And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name ... and the nations will know that I am the Lord. It is not for your sake that I will act,' says the Lord God. Let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, 0 house of Israel.'"

Why did the Son of God come to earth and to his final decisive hour? John 17:1, "Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee." A beautiful conspiracy to glorify the Godhead in all the work of redemption!

And why will Jesus come again in the great day of consummation? 2 Thessalonians 1:9-10, "Those who do not obey the gospel will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at in all who have believed... "

From beginning to end, the driving impulse of God's heart is to be praised for his glory. From creation to consummation his ultimate allegiance is to himself. His unwavering purpose in all he does is to exalt the honor of his name and to be marveled at for his grace and power. He is infinitely jealous for his reputation. "For my own sake, for my own sake I act," says the Lord. "My glory I will not give to another!"

My experience in preaching and teaching is that American evangelicals receive this truth with some skepticism if they receive it at all. None of my sons has ever brought home a Sunday school paper with the lesson title: "God loves himself more than he loves you." But it is profoundly true, and so generation after generation of evangelicals grow up picturing themselves at the center of God's universe.

I am going to make the assumption, though, that the vast majority of you do not want to usurp God's place at the center of his universe. You probably have two other objections coming to your minds against making God so self-centered. One is that we don't like people who act that way, and the other is that the Bible teaches that we shouldn't act that way. I'll try to answer these two objections, and in doing so, I hope I can also show why God's commitment to his own glory is immensely relevant for your life.

We just don't like people who seem to be very enamored by their own skill or power or looks. We don't like scholars who try to show off their specialized knowledge or who recite for us all their recent publications and lectureships. We don't like businessmen who go on and on about how shrewdly they have invested their pile of money and how they stayed right on top of the market to get in low and out high every time. We don't like children to play one-upmanship hour after hour. Unless we are one of them, we disapprove of women and men who dress, not functionally, simply and inoffensively, but to be in the latest style. They do this so they will be thought in or cool or preppy or north-woods or laid-back or whatever the world this week says you are supposed to look like.

Why don't we like all that? I think it is because all those people are inauthentic. They are what Ayn Rand calls "second-handers." They don't live from the joy that comes through achieving what they value for its own sake. Instead, they live second-hand from the praise and compliments of others. We don't admire second-handers, we admire people who are composed and secure enough that they don't feel the need to shore up their weaknesses and compensate for their deficiencies by trying to get as many compliments as possible.

It stands to reason, therefore, that any teaching which would seem to put God in the category of a second-hander would be suspect to Christians. And for many the teaching that God is seeking praise and wants to be admired and is doing things for his own name's sake, does in fact seem to put God in such a category. But should it? One thing we may say for certain. God is not weak and has no deficiencies. "All things are from him and through him and to him" (Romans 11:36). He always was. Whatever else is, owes its being to him and so can add nothing to him which is not already flowing from him. That is simply what it means to be God and not a creature. Therefore, God's zeal to seek his own glory and to be praised by men cannot be owing to his need to shore up some weakness or compensate for some deficiency. He may seem, at a superficial glance, to be in the category of second-handers. But, he is not like them and the superficial similarity must be explained another way. There must be some other motive that prompts him to seek the praise of his glory.

There is another reason, from experience, why we don't like those who seek their own glory. It is not merely that they are inauthentic, trying to conceal weakness and deficiency, but also that they are unloving. They are so concerned for their own image and praise that they do not care much for what happens to other people. This observation leads us to the Biblical reason why it seems offensive for God to seek his own glory. 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, "Love seeks not its own." Now this indeed seems to create a crisis, for if, as I think the Scriptures plainly teach, God makes it his ultimate goal to be glorified and praised, how then can he be loving? For "love seeks not its own." "For my own sake, for my own sake I act, my glory I will not give to another" (Isaiah 48:11). But if God is a God of love, he must be for us. Is God for himself or is he for us?

Here is the answer of which I want to persuade you. Since God is unique as the most glorious of all beings and totally self-sufficient, he must be for himself if he is to be for us. If he were to abandon the goal of his own self-exaltation we would be the losers. His aim to bring praise to himself, and his aim to bring pleasure to his people, are one aim. They stand or fall together. I think we will see this if we ask the following question.

In view of God's infinitely admirable beauty, power and wisdom, what would his love to a creature involve? Or to put it another way: what could God give us to enjoy that would show him most loving? There is only one possible answer, isn't there? HIMSELF! If God would give us that which is best and most satisfying, that is, if he would love us perfectly, he must offer us no less than himself for our contemplation and fellowship and joy. "In thy presence is fullness of joy. In thy right hand are pleasures for evermore." (Ps. 16:11)

This was precisely God's intention in sending his son. Ephesians 2:18 says that Christ came that we might "have access in one Spirit to the Father." And 1 Peter 3:18 says, "Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God." God is after us to give us what is best – not prestige, wealth or even health in this life, but a full-blown vision of, and fellowship with, himself.

Now we are on the brink of what, for me, was a grand discovery, and is the solution to our problem. To be supremely loving, God must give us what will be best for us and delight us most; he must give us himself. But what do we do when we are given or shown something excellent, something we enjoy? We praise it. We praise new little babies that manage not to be all bent out of shape in birth; "O, look at that nice round head; and all that hair; and his hands, aren't they big!" We praise a lover's face after a long absence. "Your eyes are like the sky; your hair is like silk; 0, you are beautiful to me." We praise a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when we are down by three runs. We praise the trees in the fall.

But the great discovery I made, with the help of C. S. Lewis and Jonathan Edwards, was not only that we praise what we enjoy, but that this praise is the climax of the joy itself. It is not tacked on later; it is part of the pleasure. Listen to the way Lewis describes this insight from his book on the Psalms.

There's the key: we praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate, what we love and praise, what we admire, our joy would not be full. Jonathan Edwards said, "Joy is a great ingredient in praise ... Praise is the most joyful work in the world." Therefore, if God is truly for us, if he would give us the best and make our joy full, he must make it his aim to win our praise for himself. Not because he needs to shore up some weakness in himself or compensate for some deficiency, but because he loves us and seeks the fullness of our joy that can only be found in knowing and praising him, the most beautiful of all Beings.

God is the one Being in the entire universe for whom self-centeredness, or the pursuit of his own glory, is the ultimately loving act. For him, self-exaltation is the highest virtue. When he does all things "for the praise of his glory," he preserves for us and offers to us, the only thing in the entire world, which can satisfy our longings. God is for us, and therefore has been, is now and always will be, first, for himself. I urge you not to resent the centrality of God in his own affections, but to experience it as the fountain of your everlasting joy.

A pastor of mine once said that "the chief purpose of God is the salvation of mankind."

Man-centered navel-gazing hogwash. Twaddle.

The chief purpose of God is His Own glory. If we cannot agree with that, we are yet infants, and unread of the scriptures to boot.

Exactly. If God's purpose was indeed the salvation of mankind, then one could argue--based on the number of people who end up in hell--that God is a miserable failure.

I think this particular error arises out of Jesus' stated purpose "to seek and save the lost". From there faulty logic states that:

Jesus' purpose is to save mankind and Jesus is God therefore God's purpose is to save mankind.

In addition to improperly conflating the Trinity, this simplistic formula also overlooks the scriptural fact that Jesus' stated purpose of saving only applies to His first advent. His second advent will be of an entirely different character. The first time, he came to find the sheep. The second time he is coming to deal with the goats.

“We know why we exist - to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Piper seems to take this concept as his foundational “given;” upon which his entire “proof” of his theory of God. I tried to find it, in the Bible, but couldn’t. I understand that it is in the Shorter Westminster, so it should be easily found in Scripture—does anyone know where?

In looking for it, I did find this:

Ecclesiastes 12:13
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

Let’s see… one says “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever;” the other says “Fear God and keep his commandments.” They both have the same sort of rhythm, but the words are not the same at all.

If this concept is not found in scripture, and is merely a human conception; then it makes a poor foundation for a major doctrine about the character of God.

Matthew 7
²⁶"Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.
²⁷"The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell--and great was its fall."

DG
p.s. Didn’t we already dispose of this conception here?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1321770/posts

"Piper seems to take this concept as his foundational “given;” upon which his entire “proof” of his theory of God. I tried to find it, in the Bible, but couldn’t."

Piper used a number of meaningful references including Isaiah 43:6-7, Jeremiah 13:11, Psalm 106:7-8, Ezekiel 20:14, 1 Samuel 12:20-22, Isaiah (48:9,11), Ezekiel 36:22-23,32, John 17:1, and 2 Thessalonians 1:9-10 to build his case. You are, of course, welcome to your opinion. I don't see Piper quoting from the Westminster Confession in this article.

DG: "Let’s see… one says “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever;” the other says “Fear God and keep his commandments.” They both have the same sort of rhythm, but the words are not the same at all."

Have you considered what is implied by fearing God and obeying Him? This is really a re-phrasing of "Glorifying God". When we fear God and obey His commands, we glorify Him.

As for enjoying God, scripture abounds with examples - it is a natural response to glorifying Him.

[You wrote:]

I don't see Piper quoting from the Westminster Confession in this article.

[Piper’s second paragraph (emphasis mine):]

“The reason this may sound strange is that we tend to be more familiar with our duties than with God's designs. We know why we exist - to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But why does God exist? What should he love with all his heart and soul and mind and strength? Whom should he worship? Or will we deny him that highest of pleasures? It matters a lot what God's ultimate allegiance is to!”

[The Westminster Shorter:]

The Westminster Shorter Catechism		Questions 1-25

Q1: What is the chief end of man?
A1: Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/anonymous/westminster1.i.i.html

Is this concept also found in the Bible? Apparently not. And yet…Piper not only presumes it to be the absolute bedrock reason for our existence, he extrapolates that presumption to include God. Thus, Piper uses a faulty human construct to define the “chief end of God…”

Instead of forcing the Creator to fit into our human constructs, would it not be better to look to His WORD to find out about His character?

DG

Have you considered what is implied by fearing God and obeying Him?

Yes.

This is really a re-phrasing of "Glorifying God".

“Re-phrasing” the Word of God is not necessarily a good idea. Consider the following “re-phrasing:’

Genesis 2
¹⁶The LORD God ^(Q)commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
¹⁷but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it ^(R)you will surely die."

Genesis 3
¹Now ^(A)the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"

When we fear God and obey His commands, we glorify Him.

OK. A problem arises, however, from the use of the converse: “When we glorify God, we are fearing Him and obeying Him.” It is not hard to imagine someone who sings psalms on the Lord’s Day, and imagines that such “glorifying” means that he is “fearing and obeying God;” whereas that person actually may commonly be engaged in abusing his family and servants, and cheating his customers, all the rest of the week.

As for enjoying God, scripture abounds with examples - it is a natural response to glorifying Him.

One might infer that conception. Such inference does not add up to the absolute and universal construct of the Westminster Shorter (Q 1); much less the extrapolation of that concept to the Creator of the Universe.

DG

I'm sorry. At the risk of sounding impolite, if you do not believe that a Christian's chief aim should be to glorify God I would suggest you reexamine yourself to see if you are in the faith.

"Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven." Matt 5:16

This is a bedrock, fundamental principle of the Christian faith which all true Christians believe.

A pastor of mine once said that "the chief purpose of God is the salvation of mankind." Man-centered navel-gazing hogwash. Twaddle. The chief purpose of God is His Own glory. If we cannot agree with that, we are yet infants, and unread of the scriptures to boot.

Sounds like this is a case of where you both may be right. John 12 tells us that the 'glory' of God was in Jesus' death on the cross.

John 12:28 Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.
29 The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.
30 Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.
31 Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.
32 And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
33 This he said, signifying what death he should die.

DG: "“Re-phrasing” the Word of God is not necessarily a good idea."

Regrettably, I did not use the best of terminology. What I actually intended to say is that fearing God and obeying Him are aspects of glorifying God. Certainly there are many other ways in which God is glorified!

DG:"It is not hard to imagine someone who sings psalms on the Lord’s Day, and imagines that such “glorifying” means that he is “fearing and obeying God;” "

If a man is singing psalms and praising God in worship (and it is genuine worship), this is, by definition, obeying God. Don't you think worship is an aspect of obedience and Godly fear?

DG:"whereas that person actually may commonly be engaged in abusing his family and servants, and cheating his customers, all the rest of the week."

So how does this activity (cheating, abusing) get construed as glorifying God? I think you have misunderstood "glorifying God" just as the man in your example may have done. You both are assuming that your sabbath worship is the sum total of our glorifying God. If you read the catechism past the first question, you will notice it actually tells the Christian how to glorify God (by loving Him and keeping His commands).

Another misconception you seem to harbor is that the catechism is a regurgitation of the Bible. Certainly there are many Biblical proofs for the teaching of the catechism, but it is not intended as a word-for-word reiteration of Scripture. In fact, the catechism intentionally restates Biblical truths in order to provide a condensed "statement of faith" for the new believer. Certainly the catechism (and confession of faith, for that matter) should not replace diligent study of the Scriptures themselves, but it is a great tool to augment young believers in understanding biblical truth.

Certainly there are many other ways in which God is glorified!

Agreed.

If a man is singing psalms and praising God in worship (and it is genuine worship), this is, by definition, obeying God.

OK.

Don't you think worship is an aspect of obedience and Godly fear?

“AN aspect.” One of many aspects. I intended that the remainder of my sentence would show that, if one ignores these “other aspects,” and imagines that “praising God in worship” is ALL of one’s duty to God, one would be in error.

So how does this activity (cheating, abusing) get construed as glorifying God?

It does not, at least to me. I cannot understand how you came to this misunderstanding of my position.

You both are assuming that your sabbath worship is the sum total of our glorifying God.

Of course, I hold no such assumption.

Another misconception you seem to harbor is that the catechism is a regurgitation of the Bible.

Actually, I do not harbor that particular misconception. I only wish that it were the case. Unfortunately, catechisms and creeds err, and promulgate error, when (and IF) they declare as a bedrock dogma that a human construct is “the chief end of man.”

If the Bible says that our duty is to LOVE God, and a human document says our duty is to GLORIFY God, which is true? Those who do not LOVE God can and do GLORIFY God (see Matthew 5:16 and 1 Peter 2:12).

DG

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