Is God More Honored or Dishonored in the World?

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00:00:04.000 | Well, obviously we live in fractured and chaotic times.

00:00:08.000 | And we also know that God's glory is important.

00:00:12.000 | The most important thing in the universe. So, when we survey our world

00:00:16.000 | and we mentally run the numbers, so to speak, to find the evidence,

00:00:20.000 | which side of the scale tips? Does this

00:00:24.000 | world bring God mostly honor, or does it bring God mostly dishonor?

00:00:28.000 | In creation, and in this drama of human history,

00:00:32.000 | which side is winning out?

00:00:36.000 | I love unique, big picture questions like this one today from a listener named Sam in Brighton,

00:00:40.000 | England. "Dear Tony and Pastor John, I have been listening

00:00:44.000 | to your podcast for two years now and have found it invaluable in my own personal journey

00:00:48.000 | towards a Christ-centered life. The key foundation of the APJ ministry

00:00:52.000 | is that God wishes to be glorified in the everyday actions of His creatures

00:00:56.000 | and that this is both satisfying and pleasing to Him. I greatly

00:01:00.000 | enjoy the study of history and what it tells us about the human condition.

00:01:04.000 | My interests are in human conflict and approaches to peace.

00:01:08.000 | So often it appears, however, that human history is full of violence,

00:01:12.000 | war, and suffering. My question is this,

00:01:16.000 | how does this enormous weight of non-God-glorifying

00:01:20.000 | acts stack up against God's desire to be glorified?

00:01:24.000 | I realize that God ultimately requires nothing from us,

00:01:28.000 | but how can He be satisfied if, quite possibly, there have been

00:01:32.000 | far more God-dishonoring acts across the span of human

00:01:36.000 | history than God-glorifying ones? How does the

00:01:40.000 | philosophy of Christian hedonism answer this imbalance?"

00:01:44.000 | Yeah, maybe, maybe it's the

00:01:48.000 | imbalance he thinks. Maybe not.

00:01:52.000 | Sam's observation is that, on the one hand, the Bible teaches

00:01:56.000 | that God aims to be glorified in this world. That's absolutely

00:02:00.000 | right. God says, for example, in 1 Corinthians 10:31,

00:02:04.000 | "Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink,

00:02:08.000 | do all to the glory of God." And Isaiah 43:7 says that

00:02:12.000 | God's people are created for the glory of God.

00:02:16.000 | And the prophets teach that eventually the earth will be

00:02:20.000 | covered with the glory of God like the waters cover the sea. In Ezekiel

00:02:24.000 | 20, several times it says that just when

00:02:28.000 | it seemed that the world or the evil got the upper hand,

00:02:32.000 | God says, "But I acted for the sake of My name,

00:02:36.000 | My glory." So it's really clear from the

00:02:40.000 | Bible that God intends for nature and history

00:02:44.000 | and redemption to serve the glorification

00:02:48.000 | of His excellence. Yes. Then on the other

00:02:52.000 | hand, Sam points out, because he's a

00:02:56.000 | student of history, that the world seems to be full

00:03:00.000 | of non-God-glorifying acts,

00:03:04.000 | more, he would think, than God-glorifying

00:03:08.000 | acts. And he wonders how I would address that, especially

00:03:12.000 | from the standpoint of Christian hedonism. So let me try.

00:03:16.000 | In maybe, let's see, six steps.

00:03:20.000 | First, I would observe that nature

00:03:24.000 | from the smallest subatomic particle

00:03:28.000 | to the largest gathering of galaxies is

00:03:32.000 | constantly, without pause, and in

00:03:36.000 | millions upon millions of ways, declaring the

00:03:40.000 | power and the wisdom of God in this world.

00:03:44.000 | Every animal, every human mind and body,

00:03:48.000 | every flower, every tree, every cloud, every river,

00:03:52.000 | the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the

00:03:56.000 | interworkings of these realities, they all

00:04:00.000 | give an exquisite testimony

00:04:04.000 | to the brightness and truth

00:04:08.000 | of the glory of God. It would be difficult

00:04:12.000 | to quantify this and say that somehow

00:04:16.000 | this is less, say, than the

00:04:20.000 | calamities of the world which might detract from the glory

00:04:24.000 | of God. God is always and everywhere

00:04:28.000 | shouting the wisdom of all that he

00:04:32.000 | has made. The heavens are telling the glory

00:04:36.000 | of God. In wisdom he has made them all.

00:04:40.000 | And just this morning in my devotions, I read that section

00:04:44.000 | in Romans 1, 18, to the end of the chapter, where it says

00:04:48.000 | everybody knows God, and from the creation of the world, all the works that he has

00:04:52.000 | made is revealing the invisible attributes of God.

00:04:56.000 | There's just no room for saying

00:05:00.000 | God is not revealing his glory continually through

00:05:04.000 | the things he's made. That's the first thing I would observe.

00:05:08.000 | That is an overwhelming testimony, and oh,

00:05:12.000 | how blind the world is. Second,

00:05:16.000 | I would draw attention to the phrase in the Bible

00:05:20.000 | "that they may know that I am the Lord." That phrase

00:05:24.000 | occurs 88 times in the Bible. 72 of them

00:05:28.000 | are in the book of Ezekiel. That's amazing. Even more

00:05:32.000 | amazing is that this phrase is used

00:05:36.000 | both when God's people are being

00:05:40.000 | saved and when they are being judged. It's used

00:05:44.000 | when secular nations are getting the upper hand and

00:05:48.000 | when they are being punished. So I think the intention

00:05:52.000 | is that in all of history,

00:05:56.000 | whether we see it or not, God

00:06:00.000 | is acting for the sake of his name so that

00:06:04.000 | someday we will have eyes to see the way he

00:06:08.000 | worked for his name and his glory in the events

00:06:12.000 | that did not seem that way to us at all at the time.

00:06:16.000 | Third, and this is the most clear and specific and

00:06:20.000 | stunning illustration of what I just said, namely the cross

00:06:24.000 | of our Lord Jesus. As Jesus comes to the end

00:06:28.000 | of his life and he contemplates that in the next hours

00:06:32.000 | he will be crucified, he prays like this. This is John 12

00:06:36.000 | 27. "Now is my soul troubled

00:06:40.000 | and what shall I say? Father, save me from this

00:06:44.000 | hour? But for this purpose I have

00:06:48.000 | come to this hour. Father, glorify

00:06:52.000 | your name." Then a voice came from heaven.

00:06:56.000 | "I have glorified it and I will glorify it

00:07:00.000 | again." In other words, in the absolute

00:07:04.000 | worst, most sinful event in the history

00:07:08.000 | of the world, the grace of God

00:07:12.000 | was being put on display and nobody saw it.

00:07:16.000 | God's glory was shining.

00:07:20.000 | The fact that nobody saw it doesn't mean it wasn't

00:07:24.000 | there. And nobody saw it. And

00:07:28.000 | later, through the eyes of faith and with divine interpretation, we do

00:07:32.000 | see it. That's what 2 Corinthians 4, 6 says. We do

00:07:36.000 | see it. But when it happened, nobody saw it.

00:07:40.000 | And I think that's the way it is with most of what God is doing

00:07:44.000 | in this world, this fallen age. Fourth observation.

00:07:48.000 | When we ask why there is such pervasive failure

00:07:52.000 | on the part of God's people in this world to live

00:07:56.000 | a way that glorifies God and why the Bible itself is

00:08:00.000 | such a relentless history of failure by

00:08:04.000 | God's people, not to mention the nations, Romans 3,

00:08:08.000 | 19-20 gives a remarkable insight.

00:08:12.000 | So Paul has just finished inditing the

00:08:16.000 | whole human race, Jew and Gentile, under the power

00:08:20.000 | of sin. And then he says this. Now we know

00:08:24.000 | that whatever the law says, all those Old Testament quotations

00:08:28.000 | he's just given to show the pervasive sinfulness of the human race,

00:08:32.000 | we know that whatever the law says, it speaks

00:08:36.000 | to those who are under the law, that's Jewish people,

00:08:40.000 | so that every mouth might be stopped and the

00:08:44.000 | whole world may be held accountable to God,

00:08:48.000 | for by works of law, no human being

00:08:52.000 | will be justified in his sight. In other words,

00:08:56.000 | one of the purposes of the history of failure among

00:09:00.000 | God's people is to stop the mouth of every

00:09:04.000 | human being and make clear that no one can get right

00:09:08.000 | to God through law-keeping but only through absolutely

00:09:12.000 | free, glorious, sovereign grace.

00:09:16.000 | So God intends to show that humans are in an

00:09:20.000 | absolutely hopeless condition and thus to

00:09:24.000 | magnify the freedom and the beauty of his grace.

00:09:28.000 | Fifth, this leads to the

00:09:32.000 | observation that in the end, we will be able to

00:09:36.000 | see the God-glorifying purposes of God

00:09:40.000 | more clearly than we can now. Consider two images.

00:09:44.000 | You've probably all heard these. I find them both very helpful.

00:09:48.000 | First, the imagery of a tapestry.

00:09:52.000 | I think Corrie ten Boom used to talk about this.

00:09:56.000 | Now we see the ugly, loose strands at the

00:10:00.000 | bottom of the tapestry. Nothing beautiful about it that we can

00:10:04.000 | see except by the eye of revelation. But

00:10:08.000 | then we will see it from the top

00:10:12.000 | and the tapestry will be complete, it will be beautiful,

00:10:16.000 | with the strands all in their proper place, and that will be what history is.

00:10:20.000 | Or consider the image, similarly, of a painting.

00:10:24.000 | God is now painting a mural of universal

00:10:28.000 | history and creation and redemption. And as that mural

00:10:32.000 | comes into being, we see this corner, we see that corner, we see

00:10:36.000 | this darkness, we see that little bright spot, and we can't make much

00:10:40.000 | sense out of it as a whole, just staring at a history

00:10:44.000 | with all of its mixed colors and shapes. But

00:10:48.000 | in the end, when it's complete, everything

00:10:52.000 | will fit together, everything will make sense,

00:10:56.000 | it will be a perfect display of the glory

00:11:00.000 | of God's wisdom and power and grace.

00:11:04.000 | And the last thing I would say is

00:11:08.000 | Christian hedonism says that

00:11:12.000 | God will succeed in finishing the tapestry

00:11:16.000 | and completing the mural in such

00:11:20.000 | a way that there will be a perfect communication

00:11:24.000 | of the perfections and beauties of God in all their

00:11:28.000 | proper proportion. And God will succeed also

00:11:32.000 | in creating a people for himself who

00:11:36.000 | finally have eyes to see that glory

00:11:40.000 | for what it really is, and hearts finally

00:11:44.000 | able, with appropriate intensity, to delight in

00:11:48.000 | God's beauty the way they should. And that delight

00:11:52.000 | will be the consummation of the demonstration

00:11:56.000 | of the glory of the grace of God.

00:12:00.000 | Amen. Thank you, Pastor John. Great question. I love it when questions get us into

00:12:04.000 | these huge macro discussions. And thank you for joining us today

00:12:08.000 | for it. You can ask a huge macro question of your own. Search our growing archive or subscribe

00:12:12.000 | to the podcast all at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn

00:12:16.000 | Next week begins

00:12:20.000 | with a bang. We're going to hear Pastor John give us 10 or

00:12:24.000 | 11 of his favorite texts for his hardest battles in life.

00:12:28.000 | John Piper's favorite biblical promises for life's

00:12:32.000 | hardest battles. Cannot wait for that. But I must

00:12:36.000 | wait for that. And you'll have to wait for that too, because it comes on the other side of the

00:12:40.000 | weekend. I'm your host Tony Rehnke. We'll see you back here on Monday morning. Thanks for listening.

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Is God More Honored or Dishonored in the World?

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