GOD’S WORD FOR JUNE 12~ ~ Isaiah 53:10 ~ ~ “The Lord was pleased to bruise Him, He has put Him to grief….”

More excerpts from “The Pleasures of God” by John Piper, chapter 6, “The Pleasure of God in Bruising His Son.”

Something troubling has emerged in these chapters. We have seen that Gd has pleasure in His son: He delights in the glory of His own perfections reflected back to Him in the countenance of Christ. We have seen that God delights in His sovereign freedom; the Lord is in heaven and does all that He pleases. We have seen that He rejoices over the work of His hands; day by day they declare His glory.

We have seen that god has pleasure in His fame: He aims to make a name for Himself in all the world and win a reputation for the glory of His grace from every people and tribe and language and nation. To that end, He has called out for Himself an unlikely people who will make their boast only in the Lord.

Clearly God has a great passion to promote His glory. But the troubling thing that emerges is that God has chosen sinners. He is honoring, blessing and exalting a people who are sinners. The essence of sin is the belittling of God’s glory. Something is askew here.

A God infinitely committed to promote the worth of His name and the greatness of His glory is engaging all His powers to bring the enemies of His name into everlasting joy and honor!!!

Make no mistake, sin is diametrically opposed to the glory of God. Romans 3:23 says that sin is a “falling short” of God’s glory. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” all have fallen short of PRIZING the glory of God. We have exchanged the glory of God for something else: for images of glory, like a new home or car or a new phone, or vacation days, or impressive resumes or whatever makes our ticker tick more than the wonder of God’s glory.

That’s what sin is. That’s what all the people are like that God chosen to save. Even after he makes them his own they often bring disgrace upon his name by their inconsistency and half-hearted response to Jesus’ command to love God with their whole heart.

So the troubling thing is that God is so enthusiastic about adopting and exalting people whose sinfulness is a blight on his name. It seems schizophrenic. The Bible makes God out to love his name and his glory with omnipotent energy and unbounded joy, then it pictures him choosing God-belittling sinners for his court, and rejoicing over the very people who have despised his glory and cheapened his name.

I really don’t believe it’s possible to grasp the central drama of the bible until we begin to feel this tension. Until the coming of Jesus Christ, the Bible is like a pi9ece of music whose dissonance begs for some final resolution into harmony. Redemptive history is like a symphony with two great themes; the theme of God’s passion to promote his glory and the theme of God’s inscrutable love for sinners who have scorned that very glory. These two themes interweave and we know that our awesome composer is at work here. But for centuries we don’t hear the resolution. The harmony always escapes us and we have to wait.

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