A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards
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A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781581345636 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2004 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.77(d) |
About the Author
Justin Taylor (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the executive vice president of book publishing and book publisher at Crossway. He has edited and contributed to several books, and he blogs at Between Two Worlds—hosted by the Gospel Coalition.
Stephen J. Nichols (PhD, Westminster Theological Seminary) serves as the president of Reformation Bible College and chief academic officer of Ligonier Ministries. He has written over twenty books and is an editor of the Theologians on the Christian Life series. He also hosts the weekly podcast 5 Minutes in Church History.
Noël Piper (BA, Wheaton College) and her husband, John, ministered at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota for over 30 years. She is the author of Treasuring God in Our Traditions and Faithful Women and Their Extraordinary God.
J. I. Packer (1926–2020) served as the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College. He authored numerous books, including the classic bestseller Knowing God. Packer also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible and as theological editor for the ESV Study Bible.
Donald S. Whitney (PhD, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa) is professor of biblical spirituality and John H. Powell endowed chair of pastoral ministry at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written several books, including Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. Don blogs regularly at BiblicalSpirituality.org.
Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.
Paul Helm (MA, Worcester College) is a teaching fellow at Regent College in Vancouver. He previously taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool and was was the J. I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College. He also publishes online at Helm's Deep. Paul is married to Angela, and they have five children.
Sam Storms (PhD, University of Texas at Dallas) has spent more than four decades in ministry as a pastor, professor, and author. He is the pastor emeritus at Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and was a visiting associate professor of theology at Wheaton College from 2000 to 2004. He is the founder of Enjoying God Ministries and blogs regularly at SamStorms.org.
Mark Talbot (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College and the host of the When the Stars Disappear podcast. He is also the author of the Suffering and the Christian Life series, including When the Stars Disappear and Give Me Understanding That I May Live. He and his wife, Cindy, have one daughter and three grandchildren.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A GOD-ENTRANCED VISION OF ALL THINGS: WHY WE NEED JONATHAN EDWARDS 300 YEARS LATER
John Piper
One of the reasons that the world and the church need Jonathan Edwards 300 years after his birth is that his God-entranced vision of all things is so rare and yet so necessary. Mark Noll wrote about how rare it is:
Edwards' piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world view or his profoundly theological philosophy The disappearance of Edwards' perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.
Evangelicalism today in America is basking in the sunlight of ominously hollow success. Evangelical industries of television and radio and publishing and music recordings, as well as hundreds of growing mega churches and some public figures and political movements, give outward impressions of vitality and strength. But David Wells, Os Guinness, and others have warned of the hollowing out of evangelicalism from within.
The strong timber of the tree of evangelicalism has historically been the great doctrines of the Bible:
• God's glorious perfections
• man's fallen nature
• the wonders of redemptive history
• the magnificent work of redemption in Christ
• the saving and sanctifying work of grace in the soul
• the great mission of the church in conflict with the world, the flesh, and
• the devil
• the greatness of our hope of everlasting joy at God's right hand
These unspeakably magnificent things once defined us and were the strong timber and root supporting the fragile leaves and fruit of our religious affections and moral actions. But this is not the case for many churches and denominations and ministries and movements in Evangelicalism today. And that is why the waving leaves of present evangelical success and the sweet fruit of prosperity are not as promising as we may think. There is a hollowness to this triumph, and the tree is weak even while the leafy branches are waving in the sun.
What is missing is the mind-shaping knowledge and the all-transforming enjoyment of the weight of the glory of God. The glory of God — holy, righteous, all-sovereign, all-wise, all-good — is missing. God rests lightly on the church in America. He is not felt as a weighty concern. Wells puts it starkly: "It is this God, majestic and holy in his being, this God whose love knows no bounds because his holiness knows no limits, who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world." It is an overstatement. But not without warrant.
What Edwards saw in God and in the universe because of God, through the lens of Scripture, was breathtaking. To read him, after you catch your breath, is to breathe the uncommon air of the Himalayas of revelation. And the refreshment that you get from this high, clear, God-entranced air does not take out the valleys of suffering in this world, but fits you to spend your life there for the sake of love with invincible and worshipful joy.
In 1735 Edwards preached a sermon on Psalm 46:10, "Be still, and know that I am God." From the text he developed the following doctrine: "Hence, the bare consideration that God is God, may well be sufficient to still all objections and opposition against the divine sovereign dispensations." When Jonathan Edwards became still and contemplated the great truth that God is God, he saw a majestic Being whose sheer, absolute, uncaused, ever-being existence implied infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite holiness. And so he went on to argue like this:
It is most evident by the Works of God, that his understanding and power are infinite. ... Being thus infinite in understanding and power, he must also be perfectly holy; for unholiness always argues some defect, some blindness. Where there is no darkness or delusion, there can be no unholiness. ... God being infinite in power and knowledge, he must be self-sufficient and all-sufficient; therefore it is impossible that he should be under any temptation to do any thing amiss; for he can have no end in doing it. ... So God is essentially holy, and nothing is more impossible than that God should do amiss.
When Jonathan Edwards became still and knew that God is God, the vision before his eyes was of an absolutely sovereign God, self-sufficient in himself and all-sufficient for his creatures, infinite in holiness, and therefore perfectly glorious — that is, infinitely beautiful in all his perfections. God's actions therefore are never motivated by the need to meet his deficiencies (since he has none), but are always motivated by the passion to display his glorious sufficiency (which is infinite). He does everything that he does — absolutely everything — for the sake of displaying his glory.
Our duty and privilege, therefore, is to conform to this divine purpose in creation and history and redemption — namely, to reflect the value of God's glory — to think and feel and do whatever we must to make much of God. Our reason for being, our calling, our joy is to render visible the glory of God. Edwards writes:
All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God's works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God. ... The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God, and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair.
This is the essence of Edwards's God-entranced vision of all things! God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things. Nothing exists without his creating it. Nothing stays in being without his sustaining word. Everything has its reason for existing from him. Therefore nothing can be understood apart from him, and all understandings of all things that leave him out are superficial understandings, since they leave out the most important reality in the universe. We can scarcely begin to feel today how God-ignoring we have become, because it is the very air we breathe.
This is why I say that Edwards's God-entranced vision of all things is not only rare but also necessary. If we do not share this vision, we will not consciously join God in the purpose for which he created the universe. And if we do not join God in advancing his aim for the universe, then we waste our lives and oppose our Creator.
How TO RECOVER EDWARDS'S GODENTRANCED VISION OF ALL THINGS
How then shall we recover this God-entranced vision of all things? Virtually every chapter in this book will contribute to that answer. So I will not try to be sweeping or comprehensive. I will focus on what for me has been the most powerful and most transforming biblical truth that I have learned from Edwards. I think that if the church would grasp and experience this truth, she would awaken to Edwards's God-entranced vision of all things.
No one in church history that I know, with the possible exception of St. Augustine, has shown more clearly and shockingly the infinite — I use the word carefully — importance of joy in the very essence of what it means for God to be God and what it means for us to be God-glorifying. Joy always seemed to me peripheral until I read Jonathan Edwards. He simply transformed my universe by putting joy at the center of what it means for God to be God and what it means for us to be God-glorifying. We will become a God-entranced people if we see joy the way Edwards saw joy.
JOY IS AT THE HEART OF WHAT IT MEANS FOR GOD TO BE GOD-GLORIFYING
Listen as he weaves together God's joy in being God and our joy in his being God:
Because [God] infinitely values his own glory, consisting in the knowledge of himself, love to himself ... joy in himself-, he therefore valued the image, communication or participation of these, in the creature. And it is because he values himself, that he delights in the knowledge, and love, and joy of the creature; as being himself the object of this knowledge, love and complacence. ... [Thus] God's respect to the creature's good, and his respect to himself, is not a divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at, is happiness in union with himself.
In other words, for God to be the holy and righteous God that he is, he must delight infinitely in what is infinitely delightful. He must enjoy with unbounded joy what is most boundlessly enjoyable; he must take infinite pleasure in what is infinitely pleasant; he must love with infinite intensity what is infinitely lovely; he must be infinitely satisfied with what is infinitely satisfying. If he were not, he would be fraudulent. Claiming to be wise, he would be a fool, exchanging the glory of God for images. God's joy in God is part of what it means for God to be God.
Press a little further in with me. Edwards makes this plain as he sums up his spectacular vision of the inner life of the Trinity — that is, the inner life of what it is for God to be one God in three Persons:
The Father is the deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence. The Son is the deity [eternally] generated by God's understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting in that idea. The Holy Ghost is the deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in Himself. And ... the whole Divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the Divine idea and Divine love, and that each of them are properly distinct persons.
You cannot elevate joy higher in the universe than this. Nothing greater can be said about joy than to say that one of the Persons of the Godhead subsists in the act of God's delight in God — that ultimate and infinite joy is the Person of the Holy Spirit. When we speak of the place of joy in our lives and in the life of God, we are not playing games. We are not dealing with peripherals. We are dealing with infinitely important reality.
JOY IS AT THE HEART OF WHAT IT MEANS FOR US TO BE GOD-GLORIFYING
So joy is at the heart of what it means for God to be God. And now let us see how it is at the heart of what it means for us to be God-glorifying. This follows directly from the nature of the Trinity. God is Father knowing himself in his divine Son, and God is Father delighting in himself by his divine Spirit. Now Edwards makes the connection with how God's joy in being God is at the heart of how we glorify God. What you are about to read has been for me the most influential paragraph in all the writings of Edwards:
God is glorified within himself these two ways: (1) by appearing ... to himself in his own perfect idea [of himself], or in his Son, who is the brightness of his glory. (2) by enjoying and delighting in himself, by flowing forth in infinite ... delight towards himself, or in his holy Spirit. ... So God glorifies himself towards the creatures also [in] two ways: (1) by appearing to ... their understanding. (2) in communicating himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which he makes of himself. ... God is glorified not only by his glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. [W]hen those that see it delight in it: God is more glorified than if they only see it; his glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that he might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it.
The implications of this paragraph for all of life are immeasurable. One of those implications is that the end and goal of creation hangs on knowing God with our minds and enjoying God with our hearts. The very purpose of the universe — reflecting and displaying the glory of God — hangs not only on true knowledge of God, but also on authentic joy in God. "God is glorified," Edwards says, "not only by his glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in."
Here is the great discovery that changes everything. God is glorified by our being satisfied in him. The chief end of man is not merely to glorify God and enjoy him forever, but to glorify God by enjoying him forever. The great divide that I thought existed between God's passion for his glory and my passion for joy turned out to be no divide at all, if my passion for joy is passion for joy in God. God's passion for the glory of God and my passion for joy in God are one.
What follows from this, I have found, shocks most Christians, namely, that we should be blood-earnest — deadly serious — about being happy in God. We should pursue our joy with such a passion and a vehemence that, if we must, we would cut off our hand or gouge out our eye to have it. God being glorified in us hangs on our being satisfied in him. Which makes our being satisfied in him infinitely important. It becomes the animating vocation of our lives. We tremble at the horror of not rejoicing in God. We quake at the fearful lukewarmness of our hearts. We waken to the truth that it is a treacherous sin not to pursue that satisfaction in God with all our hearts. There is one final word for finding delight in the creation more than in the Creator: treason.
Edwards put it like this: "I do not suppose it can be said of any, that their love to their own happiness ... can be in too high a degree." Of course, a passion for happiness can be misdirected to wrong objects, but it cannot be too strong. Edwards argued for this in a sermon that he preached on Song of Solomon 5:1, which says, "Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!" He drew out the following doctrine: "Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites." Rather, he says, they ought
to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. ... Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can't be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. ... [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. ... There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.
This led Edwards to say of his own preaching and the great goals of his own ministry:
I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with."
White-hot affections for God set on fire by clear, compelling, biblical truth was Edwards's goal in preaching and life, because it is the goal of God in the universe. This is the heart of Edwards's God-entranced vision of all things.
Perhaps the best way to unfold the implications of this vision is to let Edwards answer several objections that are raised.
Objections to Edwards
Objection #1: Doesn't this make me too central in salvation? Doesn't it put me at the bottom of my joy and make me the focus of the universe?
Edwards answers with a very penetrating distinction between the joy of the hypocrite and the joy of the true Christian. It is a devastating distinction for modern Christians because it exposes the error of defining God's love as "making much of us."
This is ... the difference between the joy of the hypocrite, and the joy of the true saint. The [hypocrite] rejoices in himself; self is the first foundation of his joy: the [true saint] rejoices in God. ... True saints have their minds, in the first place, inexpressibly pleased and delighted with the sweet ideas of the glorious and amiable nature of the things of God. And this is the spring of all their delights, and the cream of all their pleasures. ... But the dependence of the affections of hypocrites is in a contrary order: they first rejoice ... that they are made so much of by God; and then on that ground, he seems in a sort, lovely to them.
The answer to the objection above is "no." Edwards's call for a God-enthralled heart does not make the enthralled one central. It makes God central. Indeed it exposes every joy as idolatrous that is not, ultimately, joy in God. As St. Augustine prayed, "He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for thy sake."
Objection #2: Won't this emphasis on pleasure play into the central corruption of our age, the unbounded pursuit of personal ease and comfort and pleasure? Won't this emphasis soften our resistance to sin?
Many Christians think stoicism is a good antidote to sensuality. It isn't. It is hopelessly weak and ineffective. And the reason it fails is that the power of sin comes from its promise of pleasure and is meant to be defeated by the superior promise of pleasure in God, not by the power of the human will. Willpower religion, when it succeeds, gets glory for the will. It produces legalists, not lovers. Edwards saw the powerlessness of this approach and said:
We come with double forces against the wicked, to persuade them to a godly life. ... The common argument is the profitableness of religion, but alas, the wicked man is not in pursuit of profit; 'tis pleasure he seeks. Now, then, we will fight with them with their own weapons.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A God Entranced Vision of All Things"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Desiring God Foundation and Justin Taylor.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contributors,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction Justin Taylor,
PART ONE THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF EDWARDS,
1 A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: Why We Need Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later John Piper,
2 Jonathan Edwards: His Life and Legacy Stephen J. Nichols,
3 Sarah Edwards: Jonathan's Home and Haven Noël Piper,
PART TWO LESSONS FROM EDWARDS'S LIFE AND THOUGHT,
4 The Glory of God and the Reviving of Religion: A Study in the Mind of Jonathan Edwards J. I. Packer,
5 Pursuing a Passion for God Through Spiritual Disciplines: Learning from Jonathan Edwards Donald S. Whitney,
6 How Jonathan Edwards Got Fired, and Why It's Important for Us Today Mark Dever,
7 Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner Sherard Bums,
PART THREE EXPOSITIONS OF EDWARDS'S MAJOR THEOLOGICAL WORKS,
8 The Great Christian Doctrine (Original Sin) Paul Helm,
9 The Will: Fettered Yet Free (Freedom of the Will) Sam Storms,
10 Godly Emotions (Religious Affections) Mark R. Talbot,
Appendix 1: A Divine and Supernatural Light ... — An Edwardsean Sermon John Piper,
Appendix 2: Reading Jonathan Edwards: Objections and Recommendations Justin Taylor,
A Note on Resources: Desiring God Ministries,
Scripture Index,
Person Index,
Subject Index,