Today's question comes from an international listener named Weiganjo Camotho. "Hello Pastor John, my question is over a few lines from your daily devotional dated August 21st, 2016. It all made perfect sense to me until I got to this line where you write this, 'All the works of God culminate in the praise of His redeemed people.'" And this was even more confusing when you wrote, "The climax of God's happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of His saints." Maybe it's due to the length of the sentence, I don't know, but please elaborate what you mean.

The rest I understand. Well, I'm happy, happy, happy, happy to elaborate on that sentence because it is one of my favorites. Let's take the second sentence, the one that Weiganjo, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. Weiganjo. The one that Weiganjo says is "even more confusing," and break it down to see if I can help make it clearer.

I think this is worth doing because this sentence is one of those incredibly important expressions of what the heart of Christian hedonism is, and I think what the heart of biblical truth is. Let me say this sentence again. "The climax of God's happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints." It's true that when you read a sentence like that, if you're not familiar with the thinking and concepts behind it, you will need to slow down and take it phrase by phrase and seriously think about the relationships between those phrases.

So I would really encourage you not to give up too quickly when you read a perplexing sentence if there are reasons to believe that the author might have genuine insight and not just be confused himself. There are confusing sentences that are owing not to the complexity of reality, but to the confusion of the author.

Yes, there really are. And whether I am that, maybe you'll know by the end of this podcast. So let me try to deliver myself and my sentence from confusion by looking at, what, three, four of the phrases. Number one, let's start at the end of the sentence. "The praises of the saints." And I've argued in many places that the goal of history, all of creation, all divine activity, is to bring the saints, Christians, believers from every tribe, tongue, and nation, into white-hot, heartfelt, joyful praises of God's infinite value and beauty.

The whole panorama of His excellencies. Praising, praising God and His excellencies. That's what this phrase signifies. The praises of the saints. That's the great goal of history. And I'm picturing the consummation of the ages in the whole assembly of the redeemed from all the centuries and all the ethnicities and all the cultures, praising God with white-hot joy in the excellence of God.

Joy in God and His excellence. Now, number two, the phrase just before that, "The echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints." So I'm saying that because our praises are the praises of God's excellence, when one hears those praises, he hears echoes of God's excellence. In other words, the praises of God are a reflection or a highlighting or a speaking forth of God's excellence.

I call that the echo. It's an echo of God's excellence. When you hear an echo in a canyon, you are hearing a sound that is not identical to the original sound, but a kind of reflection of the sound or a passing along of the sound. In the same way, the praises of God's excellence are not identical with the excellence itself, but they're caused by the excellence of God, like a shout causes an echo.

They are responses to the excellence of God, and as they are verbalized, these praises give some expression of the excellence of God. And in that sense, I see them as echoes of God's very excellence. So those are the last two phrases. Here's the third, the one just before. Third phrase to look at.

God delights in the echoes of his excellence in the praises of the saints. So I add, God delights in those echoes. And what I'm getting at here is that God is not an idolater. That is, he has no God, small g, that he values above the true God, namely himself.

In other words, for God to be righteous and holy, he must value supremely what is supremely valuable. He must admire fully what is fully admirable. He must delight in most intensely what is most intensely delightful. And God himself is the one who is supremely valuable and fully admirable and most intensely delightful.

The reason God created man and destined him for white-hot, joyful praises of God is so that we might share in the very joy that God has in himself, in the fellowship of the Trinity, in God's contemplation of all the glorious perfections that he is. So when God hears the echoes of his own excellence in the joyful praises of his people, he delights in it.

He would be unrighteous not to delight in the echoes of what is most infinitely delightful. Finally, I say at the front of that sentence that this delight or this joy that God has in the echo of his excellence in the praises of his people, this delight is the climax of God's happiness.

In other words, there is no higher or greater happiness that God is looking forward to beyond the delight that he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the supremely happy praises of the saints. And this, I think, is the heart of the biblical message, that God's purpose in creation and through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, God's purpose is to bring his redeemed people to full and lasting happiness in himself, which is also God's happiness in God, because our happiness in him is an echo of his excellence.

So I'll say the sentence one more time and hope it's not as confusing as it was at first. The climax of God's happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praises, the white-hot, joyful praises of the saints. Well, it doesn't get more foundational or more glorious than that.

Thank you, Pastor John. And to find a bunch of old episodes on Christian hedonism and this joy theme in Scripture and praise and glory, visit our episode archive, type in your keywords into the search bar at our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Almost a thousand episodes there now that you can search any time of the day.

Well, if we're going to put our Bibles together and make sense of the whole story from Genesis to Revelation, we have to be clear on covenants. Covenants are the skeletal structure of redemptive history, and we're going to do that very thing when we return on Friday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

We'll see you then. © The Blue Devils Publishing Company, LLC. Thank you.