I am indebted to a sermon by John Piper for the approach I have taken in this chapter (a member of my congregation gave it to me several years ago—on a cassette tape!). This sermon has stimulated so much of my thinking and subsequent reflection that I can no longer separate my ideas from Piper’s.
In his book “Let the Nations Be Glad!” John Piper writes,
In our worship services God simply doesn’t come through for who he is. He is unwittingly belittled. For those who are stunned by the indescribable magnitude of what God has made, not to mention the infinite greatness of the One who made it, the steady diet on Sunday morning of practical how-to’s, psychological soothing, relational therapy and tactical planning seem dramatically out of touch with Reality—the God of overwhelming greatness.” 1
With this “out of touch”ness in mind, consider the question why God is concerned for the nations. Now you might say, “That’s a no-brainer—isn’t it His love? Have you forgotten John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”?
Yes, certainly love is involved, but is it the “first thing?” As C.S. Lewis argued so well, everything has its proper value. If we put first things first and second things second, we get both the first and second things; but we lose both if we put second things first.2 Let me illustrate with my grandchildren, one of the great sources of joy in my life. One way I express my joy is to take pictures of them. You know what should be first, my love for them. What should be second is my love for photography. As long as I keep first things first, and my love for them remains far more important than photographing them, I continue to have great joy in them and in photographing them. But if my love for photography becomes more important, I will likely get irritated with them when they do not pose for me or they make funny faces, which they do all the time. I could end up getting so frustrated that I lose my joy in them and photographing them. God’s love is crucial, but God’s love is not first (in the C.S. Lewis sense) when it comes to His concern for the lost and poor of the nations. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to find out what is first in the heart of God because, by then putting it first, we will get God’s love, mercy, etc. “right.”
Let’s begin with the familiar Exodus story of God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, which is the dominant Old Testament paradigm of the greater redemption from the tyranny of sin, the salvation and forgiveness in the name of Jesus to be preached to all nations. What was God’s motivation there? We read in Exodus 3:7–8,
The LORD said, ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey….
It seems like love, after all, is forefront in this declaration. Everything seems to point to love as His primary, even sole, motivation.
Five verses later, God says to Moses,
“I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain” (Exodus 3:12).
So right away, we have a clue of something more going on than just freeing some miserable people from slavery and leading them to a land of milk and honey. He states His purpose in delivering them clearly from the start; those who were once enslaved will worship Me.
Then, in Exodus 6:2-3, God further says to Moses, “‘I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself fully known to them,’” implying with what He was about to do through Moses, He was going to reveal yet another dimension of His name. So, underlying the obvious love motive is something bigger, a revelation of a dimension of God not yet known. And in Scripture, whenever people discovered a new name of God (usually revealed by some act of God), they built an altar and worshipped Him.
And then “the gloves come off.” The rest of the story is a head-to-head battle between God and Pharaoh. Here is what He says in Exodus 10:1–2, Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”
Further in Exodus 14:4, 17–18, we read the same phrase three times,
“And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD.” So, the Israelites did this.
This is what it is all about when we dig deeper. Yes, God sees their misery. Yes, He is concerned. Yes, He wants to take them to a land of milk and honey. However, the primary motivation behind all of this is God gaining glory for Himself through this Pharaoh so the delivered Israelites can tell their future generations how great their God was and is.
To make sure we do not miss the point, look at the final definitive word of the New Testament on God’s dealings with Pharaoh in Romans 9:17–18,
For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
This whole Exodus event seemed to begin as an act of love, but it gets hijacked by God’s glory along the way! Human beings do this all the time, even in Christian ministry.
Many a pastor starts out with noble motives to build a ministry, to reach the lost and the poor; then, before we know it, a few years down the line, they are seduced by their success, and their churches become a monument to their own glory. When we see this in humans, we are legitimately and appropriately repelled. This is why for human beings, love must always be the first thing―faith, hope and love, “But the greatest of these is love” [v. 13] and “Love never fails” [v. 8], writes the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. For God, it would seem there is something prior to love, His glory and His fame.
It seems the redeemed Israelites understood this. In Exodus 15, Miriam and Moses lead the people in a song, Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: “I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. . . . Your right hand, Lord, was majestic in power. Your right hand, Lord, shattered the enemy. In the greatness of your majesty you threw down those who opposed you. . . . Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?” (15:1, 6–7, 11).
This was the dominant response to their miraculous deliverance from the might of Pharaoh’s armies. Now contrast their song with many of the songs we sing when it comes to our far greater deliverance from the slavery of sin. The first one coming to my mind is, “Oh, how He loves you and me, Oh, how He loves you and me, He gave His life what more could He give? Oh, how He loves you, oh, how He loves me, Oh, how He loves you and me.”3 True enough.
Question, have you ever wondered why Miriam and Moses did not sing, “Oh, how He loved us slaves in Egypt! Oh, how He loved us slaves in Egypt! How wonderful—He delivered us from Pharaoh! What more could He do? Oh, how He loved us slaves in Egypt”? It would be accurate, but must we not pause to reflect on why they instead chose to sing about God’s greatness, uniqueness, and majesty? This leads to a question, how do we harmonize the obvious motive of God’s love with the deeper and more foundational motive of promoting and exhibiting His own glory. Here is Piper’s helpful insight in my paraphrase from memory: God’s love for us is demonstrated not by His making much of us but by enabling us to make much of Him.
Granted, you say, but surely this changes when we come to the New Testament! After all, we have not yet grappled with John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Where does it say anything about God being concerned for His glory in our salvation? Love seems to be the sole and sufficient motivation for the coming of Jesus into the world to save us. Maybe everything about God’s glory being “the first thing” was an Old Testament emphasis, but in the New Testament, and forever after, isn’t God’s love the main thing?
Let us dig a bit deeper. John 3:16 says we who believe in Jesus will “have eternal life.” Add to this John 17:3–5, where Jesus tells us what eternal life is, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.”
In this “high priestly” prayer, in the shadow of the cross (which is what John 3:16 is all about), Jesus’ complete preoccupation is not with how much He loves you and me, but with His glory and His Father’s glory.
This same preoccupation occurs again later in Jesus’ prayer, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).
His huge overriding concern was not with the Father’s love for the world but the Father’s eternal love for Jesus and His desire for the world to see His glory. So, with this in mind, if we take the familiar John 3:16 and add it to the not-so-familiar John 17:3, here’s what we get, “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but increasingly get to know God and Jesus in all their glory and make that glory known to others.”
So (to paraphrase Piper again), God’s love for His people, both in Exodus and in the gospels, is shown not in how He makes much of them but in how He works in their lives so they can learn to see His glory, love His glory, and desire others to do the same.
Let’s approach this from another angle. We know Jesus died to save us from the penalty of sin (justification), the power of sin (sanctification), and the very presence of sin (glorification). So, He came to deal comprehensively with the problem of sin. What, then, is the essence of sin? According to the Bible, all sin is basically an attack on the glory of God. Soon after their deliverance from Pharaoh’s armies, the Hebrew slaves committed idolatry by making and revelling before the golden calf. The Old Testament prophets referred to this (literal) idolatry as the sin of exchanged glory (Jeremiah 2:11).
Nothing changes when we get to the New. Paul writes in Romans 1:21–23,
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. . . . Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Then in Romans 3:23, Paul says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Put this all together, and the heart of all sin is revealed as despising or discounting the glory of God by substituting some created thing as the object we trust to give what we long for. This is why, when Jesus dealt with sin so effectively through His death on the cross, His preoccupation was restoring God’s glory to its rightful place. Every step Jesus took upon Golgotha, suffering under the brutal prodding of the soldiers eager to get this gruesome task over with, the heavy wooden cross grating in His lacerated back, every step, as one author put it, proclaimed the glory of God is worth it. He must have repeated a hundred times on the Via Dolorosa, “… What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!” (John 12:27–28).
Jesus’ overarching passion in all His suffering was the glory of God.
Many wonderful hymns and modern songs have been written to help us express our gratitude to and adoration of, our Saviour for His saving, sanctifying and glorifying sacrifice. Yet sometimes, even the best of them seem to lose sight of this matter of the primacy of God’s glory. For example, the beloved and inspiring worship song “Above All”4 ends with “He took the fall and thought of me above all.” Did He think of us on the cross? Yes! Did He think of us above all? No. As we have seen in our reflections so far, above all, He was thinking about the glory of God. And so, whether we consider the Exodus redemption from Egyptian slavery or that grander, universal, cross-cultural, cross-temporal redemption of sinners, the “first thing” (in the sense that C.S. Lewis spoke of) is God’s glory, not love.
Where then does God’s love fit in? It is impossible to read the gospels and not be continually amazed and deeply touched by the compassion, mercy, kindness, and gentleness, in a word, grace, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Little children are drawn to Him, women were honourably treated and dignified by Him, and the ordinary people heard Him gladly. So, we have to answer the question, where does God’s love, demonstrated supremely in Jesus’ death for us, fit in with this primacy of God’s glory? Let’s see what Scripture tells us about Jesus’ acts of mercy.
For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth, so that the promises made to the patriarchs might be confirmed and, moreover, that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written: “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles; I will sing the praises of your name.” Again, it says, “Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people.” And again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles; Let all the peoples extol him” (Romans 15:8–11).
According to these verses, Christ’s acts of love and mercy had as their primary motivation the vindication of God’s truth and faithfulness in keeping the promises He made to Abraham to bless the nations so the Gentiles would then glorify Him for His mercy.
You and I, as Christ-followers, are asked to show mercy, to give a cup of water in Jesus’ name. However, we are not just told to give a cup of water, but to give it in Jesus’ name, so He gets the glory. Meaning every act of mercy has behind it the glory of God.
Take another look at the song the Israelites sang to celebrate their deliverance. There is one verse that refers to God’s love, “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed; you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode” (Exodus 15:13, ESV). 5
God’s love is a leading and guiding love, and where is it taking the freshly redeemed people? His holy place. And what will they do when they arrive there? Worship Him. And so, here is how God’s love fits in. God’s love woos His people and leads them gently to a place where they will worship Him and ascribe to Him the glory due His name. Thus, love, mercy and glory do not compete in God as they might and often do in us, fallen humans. But we have to keep first things first, or we risk missing everything.
And yes, all this is of immense practical significance (lest anyone think we are just splitting theological hairs). When we look at the world’s vast suffering (both in extent and depth), what really gives us hope people will receive mercy? Only God’s zeal for His glory allows us to be confident of this because we read in Romans 15 that the Gentiles will glorify God for His mercy, and He is committed to the pursuit of His glory. If we insist on making God’s compassion prior to God’s glory, we undercut the basis of confidence in our hope. We can lay hold of God in prayer and plead with Him to be merciful to the nations, above all because He is zealous for His glory. If we let this sink in, it will revolutionize the way we think about the impossible task before us of global mission, especially when it comes to the enduring motivation to stay engaged.
Most appeals to get ordinary Christ-followers involved, and stay involved, over the long haul in global missions fail because they are based on loving the lost. I recall hearing a speaker some time ago say, “Millions of people are lost without Christ; we need to love lost people and to go tell them about Jesus. Can you hear the thud of a million feet heading into a Christ-less eternity?” All these exhortations are based on truth, but for several years I tried in vain to drum up genuine love in my heart for lost people. So, it was with great freedom I read John Dawson’s observations in Taking Our Cities for God. He writes,
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term that we use as part of our Christian jargon. . . . Many believers search their hearts in condemnation (c’est moi!), looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that would propel them into bold missions. It will never happen. It is impossible to love “the lost.” You can’t feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as “all lost people.” . . . It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is, first of all, a love for God. . . . Humanity does not deserve the love of God any more than you or I do. We should never be Christian humanists, taking Jesus to poor sinful people, reducing Jesus to some kind of product that will better their lot. People deserved to be damned, but Jesus, the suffering Lamb of God, deserves the reward of His suffering, which would be that none perish, but that all are reconciled to the Father.6
This is the only enduring motivation for sustained effort and involvement in the various aspects of our global mission; Jesus, the suffering Lamb of God, deserves the reward of His suffering.
Let me draw this chapter to a close by illustrating how this applies to preaching, the central labour of my life for 36 years in one local church and over five years since my “retirement.” John Piper puts it this way,
When the glory of God Himself saturates our preaching and teaching and conversation and writings, and when He predominates above our talk of methods and strategies and psychological buzzwords and cultural trends, then the people might begin to feel that He is the central reality of their lives and that the spread of His glory is more important than all their possessions and all their plans.7
The history of revival would bear out Piper’s assertion. Many of the great missionary organizations and Christian relief agencies we are familiar with had their birth in the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Do you know why? Because what happens first in revival is not a passion for the “lost” or the “unreached,” but a deep conviction of our sin, followed by a fresh vision of Jesus our Redeemer and a new wave of gratitude and love for Him.
This realization results in a deepening conviction of how He indeed deserves the reward of His suffering in saving the global lost. The conviction sustains our involvement in the cause.
No wonder Moses, leading a ragtag group of people through the wilderness, prayed, “Now, show me Your glory!” (Exodus 33:18). Very few of us have a personal relationship with members of a specific unreached people group. But Christ-followers claim to have a personal relationship with God through Jesus. Let us then attempt to maintain our relationship, especially in prayer and sung worship, continually asking Him to “show us His glory.” Also, because His passion for His glory is infinitely greater than mine and His love for me is shown in His enabling me to make much of Him, I can dare to hope my prayer will indeed be answered, and I will be increasingly motivated to keep playing my part in the drama of global redemption.
This is an excerpt from the book, On Mission Volume 5. Download your free copy today.
- John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! Third ed. (Baker Academic, 2010), 36-37.
- C.S.Lewis, God In The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 280.
- Kurt Kaiser. Oh, How He Loves You and Me, copyright 1975. Word Music.
- Paul Baloche and Lenny LeBlanc, Above All (song), © 1999. CCLI #2672885.
- The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
- John Dawson, Taking Our Cities for God (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 1989, 2001), 164-165.
- John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! 60, 61.