What Joy Did Jesus Not Already Have?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Anne from Hattiesburg, Mississippi writes in
00:00:07.840 | to ask this, "Pastor John, if Jesus is infinitely satisfied
00:00:11.800 | "in the fellowship of the Trinity with perfect joy,
00:00:14.380 | "in what sense did he endure the cross
00:00:16.260 | "for the joy set before him?
00:00:18.080 | "How could his joy be increased
00:00:19.720 | "if he was perfectly satisfied already?"
00:00:22.820 | - I don't know if Anne realizes
00:00:24.640 | what a massive question she's asking.
00:00:26.680 | (laughs)
00:00:27.920 | I mean, there are philosophical names
00:00:31.000 | for this kind of question that she wouldn't even recognize.
00:00:34.000 | It is an excellent question.
00:00:38.920 | It's not quirky, it's not new, it's part of a bigger issue.
00:00:42.360 | For example, if God was perfectly happy
00:00:46.000 | in the fellowship of the Trinity from all eternity,
00:00:48.760 | what motive would there have been to create the world?
00:00:51.500 | That's one of the ways this question is asked.
00:00:54.320 | Was there joy in creating the world?
00:00:58.400 | If so, was God deficient before he actualized that joy
00:01:03.400 | in creating the world?
00:01:06.100 | Or if God can get angry at Israel, which he does,
00:01:11.100 | and threatens to wipe her out,
00:01:15.720 | and Moses intervenes and God relents,
00:01:19.720 | was his joy in Israel constant through that?
00:01:23.700 | Or did it go up and down?
00:01:24.920 | And if his joy goes up and down,
00:01:26.340 | how can we talk about him being consistently and perfectly
00:01:29.440 | and all satisfyingly happy?
00:01:31.860 | Or what does it mean in Psalm 115, verse three,
00:01:35.960 | "Our God is in the heavens, he does all that he pleases."
00:01:39.760 | Or Isaiah 46, nine and 10, "I am God, there is no other,
00:01:43.400 | "I am God and there is none like me,
00:01:45.800 | "saying my counsel will stand,
00:01:48.000 | "I will accomplish all my good pleasure."
00:01:52.080 | The same word that was used up there in Psalm 115, three,
00:01:55.960 | he does all that he pleases,
00:01:57.160 | he accomplishes all his good pleasure.
00:01:59.580 | Well, if he does, in what sense can he be displeased?
00:02:04.580 | And the Bible clearly says we can displease him.
00:02:09.740 | Ephesians 5, 10 says,
00:02:11.620 | "Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord,
00:02:15.540 | "as though you sometimes do and you sometimes don't."
00:02:18.920 | And that's right, we don't always please the Lord,
00:02:22.160 | therefore the Lord is sometimes displeased with us.
00:02:26.720 | So Anne, you have asked a huge, huge problem.
00:02:31.720 | And her problem, of course, was, it says in Hebrews 12, two,
00:02:41.160 | "For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross."
00:02:47.280 | So as if, well, it's not fully there
00:02:50.800 | in his Gethsemane experience,
00:02:54.400 | he's just got it out in front of him,
00:02:56.160 | and so how can he, as a member of the Trinity,
00:02:59.880 | be fully and completely satisfied?
00:03:01.880 | So there's the question, now here comes Piper's,
00:03:04.420 | (laughs)
00:03:05.400 | Piper's little puny effort to try to respond to this,
00:03:09.440 | and I've thought a lot about it,
00:03:10.880 | so I have some thoughts,
00:03:11.960 | and I'll throw them out for people to ponder.
00:03:15.320 | Number one, God does not experience emotions,
00:03:20.320 | positive or negative, the way we do.
00:03:23.980 | We have very little control over how we feel.
00:03:30.000 | Things happen to us, and they have an effect on us.
00:03:34.880 | They sneak up on us, or we don't want them to happen,
00:03:37.720 | and they happen, and they make us feel a way,
00:03:39.600 | and we wouldn't have chosen to feel that way,
00:03:41.320 | but we feel that way because it happened to us.
00:03:44.320 | God's not like that.
00:03:45.960 | Nothing sneaks up on God.
00:03:48.000 | Nothing overtakes God that he doesn't see coming,
00:03:51.880 | and permit to come or not permit to come,
00:03:54.700 | and therefore plan to respond to or not to respond to.
00:03:58.280 | Nothing is whimsical about God.
00:04:01.120 | He's not under the control of any of his emotions.
00:04:06.120 | They are all planned.
00:04:09.280 | God is never the victim of emotion.
00:04:12.540 | They're all part of his totally unified, integrated,
00:04:15.680 | complete perfection, rising and falling
00:04:19.960 | precisely the way he plans and wills.
00:04:23.760 | So whatever variation there appear to be in God,
00:04:28.760 | it's part of a much larger constancy and unity
00:04:33.240 | and coherence and stability.
00:04:35.720 | That's the first thing to say.
00:04:37.320 | God's emotional life is not the same as our emotional life.
00:04:42.420 | It's not the same as ours.
00:04:43.540 | Number two, part of the issue with regard to Hebrews 12, two,
00:04:47.620 | the joy set before him is owing to the mystery
00:04:50.840 | of Christ's two natures.
00:04:53.140 | He is human and divine at once.
00:04:57.820 | His divine nature and his human nature
00:05:00.980 | do not have identical subjective responses
00:05:05.580 | to what Jesus goes through.
00:05:08.780 | Therefore, whatever his divine nature experienced,
00:05:13.160 | and I don't know how to fully describe or discern that,
00:05:17.400 | whatever his divine nature experienced,
00:05:20.640 | we are surely supposed to think of Jesus' human nature
00:05:25.160 | during his last hours as extremely oppressed
00:05:29.560 | and weighed down and sorrowful and in great agony
00:05:34.040 | at certain times of that night and the next morning.
00:05:38.320 | And yet he was sustained by the hope
00:05:42.360 | of the total success of his mission, the joy set before him.
00:05:47.360 | He could taste that, and he could taste it enough
00:05:51.100 | of this joy to carry him through.
00:05:53.720 | I think that's the meaning of that text.
00:05:56.800 | It doesn't mean that his divine nature
00:05:59.720 | was any less in communion and fellowship
00:06:03.140 | with the Father and the Spirit as he always had been,
00:06:07.200 | but these things are very difficult to conceive,
00:06:11.360 | and we just need to stir in the fact
00:06:13.040 | that the two natures always have to be in front of us
00:06:16.080 | when we ponder how to describe the experiences
00:06:19.200 | of Christ on earth.
00:06:20.440 | Here's the last thing to say,
00:06:21.960 | and probably the most important,
00:06:24.160 | at least from my effort to manage my own emotional response
00:06:29.160 | to these things in God.
00:06:30.900 | The two natures of Christ are not the solution
00:06:34.280 | to the larger issue of the joy God had in creation
00:06:39.080 | and the pleasure he has in the obedience
00:06:41.680 | of his children and so on.
00:06:43.760 | These are real joys that vary in God.
00:06:48.720 | So what sense does it have to speak of his joy
00:06:52.880 | in the fellowship of the Trinity being full and perfect
00:06:56.760 | if there can be displeasures of God with our behavior
00:07:01.480 | or with Israel or joy in the repentance of one sinner
00:07:06.080 | who repents more joy in heaven than 99 righteous person?
00:07:11.080 | And here are my two responses to that.
00:07:14.180 | God can look at any event through two lenses,
00:07:20.400 | a narrow lens that focuses on the thing itself
00:07:24.420 | without reference to the totality of things,
00:07:27.480 | and the broad lens, the wide lens,
00:07:30.100 | that sees the thing in relation to the entirety
00:07:34.680 | of all that he does.
00:07:35.980 | So when he looks at an evil, like my sin,
00:07:40.760 | I'm his child, I sin, and he's displeased with that.
00:07:44.480 | When he looks at my sin or just some evil in the world,
00:07:48.720 | through the narrow lens, he sees it as ugly,
00:07:53.140 | and it displeases him in its ugliness.
00:07:56.840 | But when he sees it through the wide lens,
00:08:00.540 | he sees it in relation to all things,
00:08:03.940 | like a thread, a dark thread or tattered thread
00:08:08.340 | in a bright tapestry that in relation to the whole
00:08:12.220 | performs its perfect role,
00:08:15.060 | though the thread itself may be imperfect.
00:08:18.960 | And he rejoices.
00:08:20.540 | He rejoices when he sees through the wide lens like that
00:08:23.900 | over how my sin fits into the big picture.
00:08:28.900 | And the mystery is that God looks through these lenses
00:08:33.920 | simultaneously.
00:08:36.800 | And what appears to us as variableness in God
00:08:40.920 | as he is pleased or displeased is really part
00:08:45.160 | of the complexity of his glorious, unified, constant,
00:08:49.560 | stable, pure, coherent mind.
00:08:54.140 | That's the first thing to say.
00:08:55.140 | Second thing, these are two pictures.
00:08:57.340 | So the picture of the lenses,
00:08:58.980 | and here's a second picture of a fountain.
00:09:01.740 | And I get this from Jonathan Edwards.
00:09:03.980 | When we say that God found joy in creating
00:09:07.900 | or redeeming the world,
00:09:10.340 | do we mean that this joy made up for a deficiency in God
00:09:15.340 | that wasn't there?
00:09:16.940 | I mean, the joy wasn't there, so he had a deficiency.
00:09:19.960 | First there was a deficiency and then he created,
00:09:22.960 | and now he has joy and the deficiency is compensated for.
00:09:26.760 | And the answer to that is no, no, no, no.
00:09:29.160 | That's not the way to think about this.
00:09:31.660 | Edwards says, "It is no sign of the deficiency of a fountain
00:09:36.660 | "that it is prone to overflow."
00:09:39.840 | So it seems to me we want to retain two biblical truths.
00:09:45.280 | God experiences joy in doing things,
00:09:48.820 | and God's joy was full before he did them.
00:09:53.460 | And the way I would say this is the joy God experiences
00:09:58.460 | in doing things does not make up for any deficiency of joy,
00:10:03.500 | but rather expresses a fullness of joy.
00:10:07.940 | God's joys in relation to creation
00:10:12.260 | are not additions, but overflow.
00:10:16.440 | So Tony, these are weighty, weighty matters,
00:10:19.760 | and that's my best effort to tackle this question.
00:10:23.560 | - Wow, yes, those are weighty matters.
00:10:26.760 | Thank you as always for tackling it, Pastor John.
00:10:29.000 | And as a follow-up,
00:10:30.620 | I commend an Ask Pastor John podcast episode we recorded,
00:10:33.240 | which is titled, "If God is so happy,
00:10:35.580 | "why does he seem so angry?"
00:10:37.780 | That's episode number 133, check that out.
00:10:40.180 | And tomorrow we return to talk about a very,
00:10:42.680 | very painful chapter from Pastor John's ministry in church
00:10:45.680 | and what he learned from the painful experience.
00:10:49.040 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:49.880 | We'll see you tomorrow.
00:10:50.980 | (upbeat music)
00:10:53.560 | (upbeat music)
00:10:56.140 | [BLANK_AUDIO]