You Cannot Glorify God If You Find Him Boring
00:00:00.000 | Today I want to talk about faith, joy, and knowledge, and I want to put them
00:00:05.240 | together if possible. So Pastor John, as I'm sure you've heard, Augustine, of
00:00:09.760 | course, famously said, "Faith seeks understanding." And 700 years later,
00:00:14.680 | Anselm said, "I believe in order that I might understand." That's profound. In a
00:00:20.200 | sense, faith is the doorway into more knowing. And then 800 years later, after
00:00:25.420 | that, Karl Barth came along and seems to push this one step further, essentially
00:00:29.460 | saying, "I believe in order to understand, and I seek to understand in order to
00:00:34.380 | rejoice." So for him, there's a progression, and joy is the possession of those with
00:00:40.320 | a knowledgeable substance to their faith. But I want to hear from you. How would
00:00:43.780 | you connect this train of belief, and reason, and affection? Well, I have to
00:00:50.720 | admit, Tony, that I have always been a little uncomfortable with the sentence, "I
00:00:58.500 | believe in order that I might understand." I admit that I have not read the
00:01:06.000 | extended contexts in Anselm or Augustine to know precisely how they understood
00:01:14.080 | those phrases, and I probably should keep my mouth shut in any critical
00:01:18.720 | sense of them. But the reason for my hesitation, just given the phrase itself,
00:01:25.020 | is that believing and knowing have so many different meanings and connotations,
00:01:30.640 | even in the Bible. Sometimes believing is described as preceding knowing, and
00:01:35.820 | sometimes, in fact, more often, I think, knowing is described as preceding
00:01:41.280 | believing. A couple of examples. "Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I
00:01:50.240 | believe in your commandments." So here, believing is the foundation of his
00:01:56.600 | prayer for knowledge. Or John 10:38, Jesus says, "If I do these works, even though you
00:02:06.840 | do not believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the
00:02:15.560 | Father is in me, and I'm in the Father." So Jesus says there's a kind of believing
00:02:19.640 | that can lead into a kind of knowing. So clearly those guys are onto something,
00:02:26.120 | right? However, more often, I think, at least in my surveys, we read things like
00:02:33.840 | this from John 16:30, "Now we know that you know all things, Jesus. This is why we
00:02:42.000 | believe that you came from God." Or Psalm 9, verse 10, "Those who know your name put
00:02:50.880 | their trust in you." Or Proverbs 22, 19, "That your trust may be in the Lord, I
00:02:59.760 | have made them known to you this day, namely the sayings of the wise." So
00:03:05.200 | knowing is a means to trusting, a means to believing. So we know from Scripture
00:03:12.560 | that it works both ways, depending on what you mean by believing and knowing.
00:03:19.040 | Knowing is the foundation for believing, in some sense, and believing takes you
00:03:24.600 | deeper into knowing, in some sense. If somebody were to ask me or say to me,
00:03:30.600 | "Believe in order that you might know," I would probably respond by saying, "What
00:03:37.360 | truth do you want me to believe that I might know the truth?" So you can see the
00:03:42.920 | problem immediately. It would be a very, I think, a very serious mistake to
00:03:49.920 | encourage people to believe in a Jesus they knew nothing about. Believing
00:03:56.240 | without content, without some knowing of information and truth, is empty mysticism.
00:04:04.760 | And the biggest problem with this kind of mysticism is that an unknown Christ
00:04:10.920 | cannot be trusted and cannot be glorified. You can only glorify
00:04:16.680 | intentionally something you know to be glorious. This is why preaching the
00:04:22.040 | gospel precedes faith, and grasping it, knowing the meaning of what is preached,
00:04:29.240 | precedes faith. How are they to believe in whom they have never heard? So faith
00:04:37.240 | comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ. And I would add, and I
00:04:41.640 | think Paul assumes it, faith comes from hearing and understanding what you hear
00:04:47.720 | so that it's not gibberish. You know, it doesn't do any good to preach in Chinese,
00:04:51.480 | to an English speaker, about the gospel because he can't construe it. He can't
00:04:56.680 | know it in some sense. But it is also true that genuine faith opens the heart
00:05:06.200 | and mind to deeper and higher and wider knowing. True saving faith is humble and
00:05:15.560 | teachable and in harmony with God and less vulnerable to Satan's deceptions.
00:05:22.960 | And so for all those reasons, and probably more that Augustine and Enzel
00:05:27.560 | saw that I don't, for all those reasons, faith is much more able to see things
00:05:34.760 | and know things about God than the proud, independent, deceived heart can know. So
00:05:42.380 | faith leads to understanding, and it wouldn't be wrong at all to say, "I have
00:05:48.000 | faith so that I may understand in that sense." However, now what you really were
00:05:54.480 | getting at was the joy piece. I haven't even touched it yet. When you stir joy into this
00:06:00.360 | mix, the Bible shows—it gets really complicated and yet glorious, I think—the
00:06:06.760 | Bible shows that joy is the outcome of both believing and knowing. Galatians 5:22,
00:06:13.840 | "Joy is the fruit of the Holy Spirit." We know that the Holy Spirit is given
00:06:18.320 | through faith. Galatians 3:5, "So joy is a fruit of faith as the Holy Spirit works
00:06:25.080 | through faith." And Romans 5:3, Paul says, "We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that
00:06:32.040 | suffering produces endurance." You have to know something for this joy to kick in in
00:06:37.040 | the midst of suffering. And 1 Peter 1:6 says, "In this you rejoice, though now for
00:06:44.360 | a little while you endure various trials." And the "this" refers back to—I count
00:06:48.760 | about ten things in verses 3 through 5—of glorious things. We're born
00:06:55.400 | again, we have a living hope, Jesus is raised from the dead, we have an
00:06:58.960 | inheritance that's incorruptible, we're being kept by God. And he says, "In
00:07:03.400 | this you rejoice," meaning you know this. I've just told you this, and you've read
00:07:08.960 | this, so now you know it and you trust in it and you rejoice in it. Now, Karl Barth
00:07:18.120 | is right, then, that we pursue knowing and we pursue believing, not as ends in
00:07:23.600 | themselves, but in order that we might go higher and deeper in our joy.
00:07:30.280 | Now, I would only add two things to that. This is why I said it may get a little
00:07:35.120 | complicated. One is that the reason God designed it that way is that God is not
00:07:43.720 | glorified when all that we know about him bores us. In other words, God does
00:07:51.960 | not design the world just so that we might know things about him truly,
00:07:57.440 | because if you know something truly and it bores you, God is not glorified in
00:08:03.080 | your knowing. And God didn't create the world to present himself as boring.
00:08:07.720 | He created the world to present himself as glorious, and therefore we must move
00:08:12.440 | beyond knowing, believing, to joy. Otherwise, God doesn't look beautiful,
00:08:18.040 | doesn't look valuable. And the last thing I would say, and this is probably the
00:08:22.040 | most controversial, we might need a whole session on it, but I'll throw it out
00:08:27.760 | there because I don't think I can leave it unsaid since everything else seems to
00:08:31.960 | pass over it. Delight, satisfaction in the glory of God as revealed in Christ, the
00:08:41.880 | gospel, is not simply at the end of the process of knowing and believing. It's
00:08:49.360 | also at the beginning of it. I think treasuring Christ, that is, valuing him,
00:08:57.760 | preferring him above all others, which includes delight in him, is an essential
00:09:04.720 | ingredient in the very nature of saving faith at the front end of salvation. So,
00:09:12.400 | in order even to make a start in the Christian life, God must open the eyes of
00:09:19.160 | the heart to see and know and believe that the glory of God in Christ is more
00:09:25.720 | precious and more sweet than anything. That's how we get started. We discover a
00:09:32.960 | treasure hidden in a field and sell everything to have it, which means in
00:09:37.440 | order to be saved, God awakens in us not only a knowing and not only a believing,
00:09:45.120 | but also a valuing and a delighting in the glory of God. So, conclusion, last
00:09:52.840 | sentence, the new creation in Christ, you and me, the new creation in Christ is
00:09:59.080 | born, brought into being through the creation of joy and goes on for eternity
00:10:06.760 | from joy to joy. Yeah, there's a lot to chew on there, Pastor John. Thank you for
00:10:12.160 | looking at these historic theological formulas. If you have a formula of your
00:10:16.040 | own, a line from a creed or from a hymn, and you wonder what Pastor John thinks
00:10:19.400 | of it, send it to us. We'd love to hear from you on that topic. Send it to us
00:10:22.480 | from our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your
00:10:27.600 | host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you on Wednesday.
00:10:32.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]