Our Delight and Satisfaction in God
Jay Wegter
God is tri-personal—He is a holy ‘community’ of divine beings comprising one God. He is absolute personality, and He is transcendent, and He is self-contained. He doesn’t need creation to define Himself. He is not relative to the creation. He made the creation to extend His glory. Man is made to find his highest purpose in Him. Creation becomes a theater, a backdrop, a stage, a worshipping chorus for the drama of redemption. Only God knows how wonderful He is. He wants to share Himself. He wills to be known. People and angels are the two orders of creatures made to run on God. Man is the only creature made in His image. He is to find his highest joy, and good in Him. God doesn’t need creation. Creation needs Him. God isn’t defined by the cosmos, but the cosmos is defined by Him. Because our first parents chose to reject God, our sin darkened our understanding of who God is. We lost our ability to know that God is wonderful, to see His glory, and to find our highest good in Him. We saw Him as dangerous, selfish, threatening, a spoiler, punitive, and vindictive.
God does not need us, our praise, or our worship. He is totally satisfied in the perfect love, respect and glory of the Trinity. Because He wants to extend His glory to us, He sent His Son Christ in the flesh, in our nature to satisfy His demand for a perfect righteousness and to satisfy His demand that every sin be punished and judged. Our part is to know God through this work of redemption. God’s plan to bring about redemption through Christ was a mystery locked in the bosom of God from all eternity. No man could have conceived that Christ would come in the flesh and satisfy God’s demand for perfect righteousness and justice against our sins (Rom 16:25-27).
If we believe and repent, God sees us in Christ. We define ourselves by our lack of performance, our sin, our moral ups and downs, our victories and defeats. We are self-focused. Because God is satisfied in Himself, because of Christ, He has set us free to enjoy Christ’s satisfaction. He has invited us into God’s glory story. He bids us to be satisfied in Him. He’s going to give us the joy of the trinity. By beholding the glory of the Lord, by seeing who God is through Christ, we become like Christ (2 Cor 3:18). As we seek satisfaction in God, He changes us to be Christ-like. God’s cause (to extend His glory through the redemption and perfection of sinners) becomes our cause—we glory in what God glories in (God’s zeal for His name and His cause). He gives us a heart of flesh instead of stone. He sent Christ to suffer in our place, to satisfy His justice. Because of this, God is now able to freely bless us wretches and be utterly committed to blessing us without compromising or profaning His Name.
God is righteous when He justifies the ungodly. He takes joy in justifying the ungodly. He is glorified when He justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5-8). Salvation is union with Christ (Eph 1:1-14)—for Christ is the ‘sphere’ in which every dimension of our redemption takes place. God unites us to Christ, thus the benefits are that His perfect life, death and resurrection now count for re-born sinners.
We have a perfect covering in Christ. God contemplates the believer in Christ. God has provided the following blessings to us through Christ: He is our hiding place, glorification, intercessor, reason for adoption, righteousness, status, standing, acceptance, sealing, inheritance, and glory. God’s cause to extend His glory by redemption of sinners is then my cause. Therefore, the best way to glorify God is to keep believing the gospel. Believers who’ve been redeemed know God personally. His purpose to glorify Himself has become your salvation. The cause of His glory is greater than the galaxies. The cause of His glory is our redemption in Christ.
In John 17 Christ calls us to abandon ourselves to His glory as the most reasonable, rational, realistic thing in the Universe. He extends His glory through redemption. He wants us to glory what He glories in. “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.
“Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. “O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn 17:20-26).
Worldliness is actually the scorning of God’s promises. When believers doubt God’s benevolence, they go to the world instead to be satisfied. Doubting Christians have a view of God not based upon a satisfied God. The satisfaction that Christ accomplished on the cross brings us all the way to God. God has propitiated His own wrath. He has removed all our liabilities in order to love us freely. He is glorified and magnified in Christ’s satisfaction.
God’s burning holiness rightly terrifies the impenitent sinner. The words of the hymn ( ) are: How dread are Thine eternal years. That is the issue: every person dies right with God or horribly wrong with God—and that alignment or lack thereof will never end. God made the cosmos and placed us in it in order to share the stunning wonder and glory of His moral majesty (His holiness).
My God, how wonderful Thou art
Author: Frederick W. Faber
My God, how wonderful Thou art,
Thy majesty, how bright;
How beautiful Thy mercy seat
In depths of burning light!
How dread are Thy eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
How wonderful, how beautiful,
The sight of Thee must be;
Thy endless wisdom, boundless power,
And glorious purity!
O how I fear Thee, living God, With deep and tender fear;
And worship Thee with trembling hope, And penitential tears!
Yet, I may love Thee, too, O Lord,
Almighty as Thou art;
For Thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart!
No earthly father loves like Thee,
No mother, e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as Thou hast done,
With me, Thy sinful child.
Only to sit and think of God,
Oh, what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name,
Earth has no higher bliss.
Father of Jesus, love’s Reward!
What rapture it will be
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze, and gaze on Thee!
To summarize, our Holy God made us for Himself and it is by redemption that we are enabled to ‘come home to God’. Because God is both holiness and love, the only way He could have eternal fellowship with men born in sin is if that sin is put away decisively. Now because God is holy and we are not, His love is often out of reach for us because we are so easily controlled by fear and guilt. When we reason from what we are in ourselves up to God, there is little room for optimism that God wishes to pour out His love and benevolence upon us.
But, when by the gospel we reason down from who God is toward us in Christ, everything changes. We see that God Himself has pierced the sin barrier and brought us into full and free confident access to Himself (Eph 3:12). Our satisfaction in God depends upon us knowing that ‘God is the gospel’ as Piper says. In other words, the gospel gives us what was lost in the fall—the glory of God. To have the glory of God is to have everything. This is one of the most difficult concepts for us to grasp—that is God’s intent to share Himself with us eternally (for our endless bliss) (Ps 16).
In sending Christ to earth, God has done everything necessary to ‘export’ the wealth of the joy of the Godhead into our experience. Knowing this is key to satisfaction in God.
Key Points
- The cause of His glory is our redemption in Christ.
- Worldliness is actually the scorning of God’s promises.
- Doubting Christians have a view of God NOT based upon God’s satisfaction in Himself and the satisfaction He has wrought in Christ.
- The satisfaction that Christ accomplished on the cross brings us ALL the way to God.
- Thus, God has propitiated His own wrath and cleared away the liabilities that would block our enjoyment of Him and His love—He has removed ALL our liabilities in order to love us freely.
- He is glorified and magnified in Christ’s satisfaction.
- The best way to glorify God is to keep believing the gospel.