Great Goal of Preaching: White-Hot Affections for God

Excerpt from John Piper:  A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: Why We Need Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later | Desiring God 2003 National Conference | 

A God-Entranced Vision of All Things

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You cannot elevate joy higher in the universe than this. Nothing greater can be said about joy than to say that one of the Persons of the Godhead subsists in the act of God's delight in God-that ultimate and infinite joy is the Person of the Holy Spirit. When we speak of the place of joy in our lives and in the life of God, we are not playing games. We are not dealing with peripherals. We are dealing with infinitely important reality. So joy is at the heart of what it means for God to be God. And now let us see how it is at the heart of what it means for us to be God-glorifying. This follows directly from the nature of the Trinity. God is Fatherknowing himself in his divine Son, and God is Father delighting in himself by his divine Spirit. Now Edwards makes the connection with how God's joy in being God is at the heart of how we glorify God. What I am about to read has been for me the most influential paragraph in all the writings of Edwards:

God is glorified within Himself these two ways: 1. By appearing... to Himself in His own perfect idea [of Himself], or in His Son, who is the brightness of His glory. 2. By enjoying and delighting in Himself, by flowing forth in infinite . . . delight towards Himself, or in his Holy Spirit...So God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to... their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself...God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it. ⁸

The implications of this paragraph for all of life are immeasurable. One of those implications is that the end and goal of creation hangs on knowing God with our minds and enjoying God with our hearts. The very purpose of the universe-reflecting and displaying the glory of God-hangs not only on true knowledge of God, but also on authentic joy in God. "God is glorified," Edwards says, "not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in."

Here is the great discovery that changes everything. God is glorified by our being satisfied in him. The chief end of man is not merely to glorify God AND enjoy him forever, but to glorify God BY enjoying him forever. The great divide that I thought existed between God's passion for his glory and my passion for joy turned out to be no divide at all, if my passion for joy is passion for joy in God. God's passion for the glory of God, and my passion for joy in Godare one.

What follows from this, I have found, shocks most Christians, namely, that we should be blood-earnest-deadly serious-about being happy in God. We should pursue our joy with a passion and a vehemence that, if it must, would cut off our hand or gouge out our eye to have it. God being glorified in us hangs on our being satisfied in him. Which makes our being satisfied in him infinitely important. It becomes the animating vocation of our lives. We tremble at the horror of not rejoicing in God. We quake at the fearful lukewarmness of our hearts. We waken to the truth that it is a treacherous sin not to pursue that satisfaction in God with all our hearts. There is one final word for finding delight in the creation more than in the Creator: treason.

Edwards put it like this: "I do not suppose it can be said of any, that their love to their own happiness . . . can be in too high a degree."⁹ Of course, a passion for happiness can be misdirected to wrong objects, but it cannot be too strong.¹⁰ Edwards argued for this in a sermon that he preached on Song of Solomon 5:1, which says, "Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!" He drew out the following doctrine: "Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites." Rather, he says, they ought

to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. . . . Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can't be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. . . . [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement...¹¹There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.¹²

This led Edwards to say of his own preaching and the great goals of his own ministry:

I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.¹³

White-hot affections for God set on fire by clear, compelling, biblical truth was Edwards's goal in preaching and life, because it is the goal of God in the universe. This is the heart of Edwards's God-entranced vision of all things.

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