the love of god. also, god is happy. also, god delights in being god.

Here is the view to my right as I sit down this afternoon to finish up this little four-part discussion of God.

Hyacinth is asleep on the floor to my left. Bunch of lazybones. :) I should make them get jobs.

So.

I am glad that the fate of the universe is not up to me, and you should be, too. I am a terribly undisciplined, always disorganized, frequently reclusive woman who does not suffer fools and, frankly, could care less about politics. I am well-intentioned but uneven in my sympathies, passions, and duties, and I would make a lousy sovereign. 

The planet would shudder and then go kaput if I were in charge. 

But none of you is qualified, either. I'm sorry to have to tell you that. :)

God is in ultimate control of the world, and He does not need us to accomplish his purposes. In fact, He does not need us for any reason. God is perfect and complete in Himself. He is not deficient without us. We are deficient without Him. 

I am sorry if the idea that you are not needed by God is upsetting to you, and I am not being sarcastic in saying that I am sorry. I really am sorry, because I know it is initially a very discombobulating thought. It took me a very long time (about two years) to come to grips with that Biblical truth.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ (Acts 17:24-28)

Many people believe that God created humankind because He was lonely and needed someone either to love, or to love Him. That is not a Biblical idea, and it is therefore not the truth about God. Before we begin talking about God's love, and His love for us, it's really important to know that "need" does not factor into his love for us.

Augustine wrote this:

For whatever comes from God is so dependent upon Him that it owes its existence to Him, but He does not owe His happiness to any creature He has made. 

God was overflowingly happy in the Trinity before He created us, and is overflowingly happy in the Trinity now. God is gloriously happy. If you have never thought about that before, I am glad that you can think about it now. :) Jesus invites us to spend eternity with a happy God when he says "Enter into the joy of your master." (Matthew 25:23) Jesus lived and died that his joy—God’s joy—might be in us and our joy might be full (John 15:11; 17:13).

God's happiness is, first and foremost, a happiness in His Son. John Piper (whose sermons and Biblical exposition are helping me explain this today) explains this very well:

... when we share in the happiness of God we share in the very pleasure that the Father has in the Son. This is why Jesus made the Father known to us. At the end of his great prayer in John 17 he said to his Father, “I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them”.

He made God known so that God’s pleasure in his Son might be in us and become our pleasure.

So here you were, all along thinking that God needed to make us to have someone to love, and it turns out that in fact God wanted to share with us this already-existing and perfect love, and by doing so, bring glory to Himself.

Piper is known for explaining it like this: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

Here's more:

If God’s pleasure in the Son becomes our pleasure, then the object of our pleasure, Jesus, will be inexhaustible in personal worth. He will never become boring or disappointing or frustrating. No greater treasure can be conceived than the Son of God. Moreover, our ability to savor this inexhaustible treasure will not be limited by human weaknesses. We will enjoy the Son of God with the very enjoyment of his Father. God’s delight in his Son will be in us and it will be ours. And this will never end, because neither the Father nor the Son ever ends. Their love for each other will be our love for them and therefore our loving them will never die.

God absolutely delights in His Son!

This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him. (2 Peter 1:17–18; Matthew 17:5).

God delights in being God! 

Why do I keep saying this? :) Because if you can't get a grip on this idea that we are not needed by God, it is going to forever taint the way that you understand God's greatest act of love toward us. You cannot understand God's love for us if you don't understand His delight in Himself and His passion for His own glory. If you think the Gospel's driving force is our value rather than God's value, you're not going to understand what it is God did for us. Your understanding of the Gospel will be skewed because you will be sticking yourself in the center of it.

Piper puts it this way (emphasis mine):

... the gospel is the good news that God is the all-satisfying end of all our longings, and that even though he does not need us, and is in fact estranged from us because of our God-belittling sins, he has, in the great love with which he loved us, made a way for sinners to drink at the river of his delights through Jesus Christ. And we will not be enthralled by this good news unless we feel that he was not obliged to do this. He was not coerced or constrained by our value. He is the center of the gospel. The exaltation of his glory is the driving force of the gospel. 

Read your Bible and see God being God. See His passion for His own glory. See humankind in that light.

... bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” (Isaiah 43:6-7)

Look at the lives of the people in the Bible who mistakenly think they are God. They do not end well. God is God. We are not God. Again, His passion is for His own glory. That is also what our passion should be for. This is a truth to embrace, and you are not going to understand His love for us until you see His own supremacy over everything. Every. Little. Thing.

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.  Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called! I am he; I am the first, and I am the last.  My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I call to them, they stand forth together. (Isaiah 48:11-13)

... for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’  calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it. (Isaiah 46:9-11)

As believers submit to God and pray in Jesus' name (with all that means, as we discussed earlier), He answers us always in the way that will bring the most glory to Him. And every answer to prayer from God, no matter how difficult, is an answer that will work for ultimate good in the lives of His believers. 

God does according to his will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth and none can stay his hand or say to him, "What doest thou?" (Daniel 4:35)

But he is unchangeable and who can turn him? What he desires, that he does. For he will complete what he appoints for me. (Job 23:13, 14)

Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3)

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

If you find yourself having a "well, who does this guy think He is?" reaction to these verses, don't forget that God is untainted in any way by evil. He is wholly good, and there is no darkness in Him at all. I have always liked this verse:

You are good and do good; teach me your statutes. (Psalm 119:68)

He is good, and He does good. All our past-experience with self-loving people who want to be in charge of the universe has been with reprobate sinners and evil despots, not with a Holy God.

Keep track of your emotional response to the idea that God is sovereign, and if you find yourself thinking bad things about His zeal for His own glory, keep reminding yourself that while it would be evil for us to have a passion for the glory of our own self and our own name, it is not evil for God to have this passion for Himself. I would also really urge you to pray for the state of your own soul. You do not want to remain in rebellion against the sovereign God of the universe. 

I am the LORD; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols. (Isaiah 42:8)

Because He is who He is, we are called to love God.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

And our behavior towards other people will reflect this love for God.

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he [Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:36-40)

God calls us to love our neighbor:

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:18)

Look how "take vengeance" refers to an action and "bear a grudge" refers to what is going on in your heart. We're supposed to love in both deed and attitude.

And He also calls us to love strangers:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

 We're supposed to show to other people the same love that God has shown us.

What is the nature of God's love? What is the nature of His love for us?

Here is a verse you are probably familiar with.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:7-10)

God is love! There have always been two persons in God between whom love could flow. The Father, as we have said, loves the Son. (Matthew 3:17, Ephesians 1:6, John 5:20.) The Son loves the Father. (John 14:31) The Father and Son have never existed without love and delight flowing between them. 

"What about the other part of the Trinity?" you might be wondering right about now. "What about the Holy Spirit?"

Look at 1 John 4:12-13:

No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is this love and delight flowing between the Father and the Son.  As Piper says, it is "the esprit de corps of the Godhead." He explains:

In responding to each other’s infinite glory, the Father and Son put all that they are into the act of love. And therefore the Spirit is all that they are and exists as a Person in his own right, yet one with the Father and the Son.

That's the nature of God's love. Wowzers. Now what does His love for us look like?

God does not look at you and say, "Oh, you're kind of messed up, but that's okay. I like you anyway." He could never do that, because he is untainted and pure, and we are sinful. He cannot do anything that is against His nature. He never blinks at sin. Ever. But He didn't leave us floundering without Him. He offered a way to Him. The cost of sin (which R.C. Sproul likes to describe as "cosmic treason against the Most High God", and that's a pretty good definition) is death. Jesus paid the cost.

Look at John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 

Here is the Gospel in a nutshell:

The Gospel is the news that Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, died for our sins and rose again, eternally triumphant over all his enemies, so that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy.

If you accept this truth, and bow before Jesus in repentance and acceptance, you can share in the apostle Paul's joy when he writes in Galatians 2:20:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

You can share Paul's certainty as he writes in Romans 8:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?

As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”  

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39 ESV)

 Paul wanted us to know how he felt, being loved by Christ. He wanted us to know what that is, what that feels like. I want you to know that, too, if you do not already. :)

I pray this for you:

… that you might have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)

 Do you remember how we were talking about Jesus comforting His disciples the night before He would be crucified? Do you understand the love He had for these men?

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 

Who does Jesus love? He loves His own. He loves His sheep, His friends, His believers:

He calls his own sheep by name and they follow him. (John 10:3)

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:15, 

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

I do not pray for these only but for all who will believe on me through their word. (John 17:1)

Look at John 10:27:

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.

I and the Father are one.

Piper explains it like this:

If you believe in Jesus Christ, don’t think of his love for you merely in terms of the love he has for the world. Think of the love that takes captive and cleaves and unites and cherishes and defends. Think of a marriage covenant between you and him in which he has sworn by his holiness to love you with a saving, cleansing, glorifying love.

What does it mean that Jesus loved His believers to the end? Here is the last bit of Piper exposition I am going to share with you, and then I'm going to let you chew on all this stuff, all these words and verses from the past few days, and ponder God's sovereignty, His supremacy, His awesomeness, and His unfathomable love for His creatures:

He loved us in life and he loved us in death. Having loved us in the easiest times he loved us in the hardest times. Having loved us with words and bread and touch he loved us with blood and pain and death. Having loved us extensively over years he loved us intensively to the depths.

We are moved to believe that someone loves us when two things appear—they stick with us over time, and they stick with us when it is costly. These are the two things I see here in this verse: having loved us over the years (patient with all our sin and misunderstanding) he now loved us to the uttermost, to the depths of suffering for us.

This is what we long for, and this is what we have by faith—an experience of being loved with a love that lasts, that is not fickle, or uncertain, or capricious, but durable, constant, stable. But not only a love that is extensive, that lasts over time, all time, but also a love that is intensive. We long to be loved radically, deeply, excessively, passionately.

And the word tells us, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”