No 32: To Enable Us to Live for Christ and not Ourselves

I confess to being a bit baffled by Piper's first three paragraphs - these 'troubling' difficulties seem manufactured and beside the point.  I struggle to get inside his mind here.  I just keep firmly in mind that "in Christ, God is reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19), in other words God Himself was undergoing crucifixion; and all is then clear that it should somehow ultimately be for God's glory.

I'm not sure Piper's right to say that the essence of sin is our failure to glorify God.  That's one of sin's results.  Don't we glimpse the essence back in Eden, in our first parents' doubt and distrust in God's good intentions towards them?  And it has gone on from there: man tends not to believe his best interests coincide with God's; and, as I now think Piper may be getting at, he objects in his heart to God glorifying Himself and he thinks: 'Isn't God being rather Self-centred?'  You do meet reactions like that in many people.

Another truth I keep firmly in mind is that God is love (1 John 4:16).  When you love somebody, you make yourself vulnerable to being hurt by them.  It is, and always has, been the same with God.  Our Lover has constantly searched for His Beloved, and He has grieved for her wretched and lonely state.  Only in a most abstract, primordial way is God Self-sufficient.  Once He created man, in His image, the object of His infinite affections and love, He no longer had only Himself to think about.  His great Self-giving had begun, bringing with it all the disappointment, frustrations and pain which the Scriptures uniquely express.

His love led Him to breach every distance and every barrier which had built up between Him and His beloved children, and to turn Himself into one of us; He "made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!" (Philippians 2:7-8).  I know He retained reserves of heavenly power - "more than twelve legions of angels" (Matthew 26:53) as Jesus put it - but He would not use them.  The glorious outcome He saw was our homecoming into His Kingdom, to be consummated in a perfect union and a marriage.

In marriage, all is shared.  God will no longer be constrained to reserve all His glory for Himself.  This is what Jesus speaks into being, in His prayer before His arrest:  "My prayer is not for them alone.  I pray for all those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.  May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me" (John 17:20-22).