The following message was recorded at Antioch Presbyterian Church, an historic and charter congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America ministering to upstate South Carolina since 1843. Come and visit us at the crossroads of Greenville and Spartanburg counties. Experience our past and be a part of our future. For more information, visit AntiochPCF.com. I haven't been here in two or three weeks. I was in Florida and then I was sick. And for those of you who might not remember, we are covering a Christian viewpoint of death and suffering, pain, suffering, and death, okay? We are looking at three. We've just been looking at the reasons for suffering. We've not looked at suffering itself. We will come to that. We've looked at the reasons for suffering. We divide them into three parts. Part one was general reasons why we suffer. We've done that. Part two, we're starting today, which is suffering for God's glory. Okay? Part three, we're gonna start in a couple of weeks, which is Job's wise. Why? Job's wise, God's answer to it. This week, we're taking up suffering for God's glory. Now, we read in the Bible, give unto the Lord the glory due to his name, okay? And not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to your name give glory. Now, we wanna know exactly what glory means and implies. We're going to suffer For God's glory, we should know what it is. I go to my handy Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms. The term glory is defined as exalted, praise, and honor. Glory is an attribute of God. The glory of God is defined as the divine essence of God as absolutely resplendent, And ultimately great, the praise and honoring of God is the Supreme Lord of all. Glorification of God means the praise and worship of God. Glorified with Christ. Now here we come to a different kind of suffering. The promise of sharing in Christ's heavenly glory given to those who share His sufferings on earth. That's Romans 8, 17. Another little dictionary defines glory, a biblical term used in reference to the unapproachable and mighty manifestation of the immediate presence of God. The biblical concept of glory carries with it connotations of inexpressible beauty and majesty. Now these terms, Charles Spurgeon says God's glory is a result of His nature and acts. He is glorious in His character. For there is such a story of everything that is holy and good and lovely in God that He must be glorious. The actions which flow from His character are also glorious. John Piper, last definition, the public display of infinite beauty and worth of God, the radiance of His holiness, the radiance of His manifold, infinitely worthy, valuable perfections. Now, glory is variously defined. Now, we can never add to God's glory, but we can make it shine. Okay? Matthew 5.16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Okay? Now we've mentioned two kinds of holy suffering and we want to be sure to distinguish between them. One, sometimes God permits the suffering of his children for his own glory. Sometimes He allows us to share in the sufferings of Christ, as it's stated. Now, whether you do suffer for God's glory or to share in the suffering of Christ, we bring glory to God by exhibiting patient endurance and trust in Him, okay? We receive many spiritual benefits from it. We're gonna go into those at length later on. Indeed, we're remembering Right now, even the martyred saints are where? Beneath the very throne of God Himself. I want to distinguish between these two though. To share in the sufferings of Christ is to participate or be a participant in active and overt persecution. Okay, like we are doing today. And also to share in ridicule and mockery as we have in the United States today. Our Lord tells us that sharing in the sufferings of Christ and suffering for God's glory is intellectual as well as physical. Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you." Now very importantly, what we are going to see in the next couple of weeks ahead is that God's love is such that His glory and our highest good are always intertwined and mixed up together, such that an increase in one will cause an increase in the other. Now, I also want to emphasize here, people ask quite often about the practical implications of the Reformed faith. I'll say in looking at suffering, pain, and approaching death, The practical implications of the Reformed faith are extraordinarily important. Okay? First, let's be clear. When we say Reformed faith, Reformed faith's not a religion. It's a theology. Okay? What's the difference? Religion and theology. Theology, the subject matter is God. Religion, the subject matter is moral man. When we speak of holding the Reformed faith, we're saying we hold to Reformed theology. And beyond a shadow of a doubt, Reformed theology has, and everybody will admit this, the highest view of God Himself. Now why is this important and why am I emphasizing it? Because your view of God is going to deeply impact everything you think about pain, suffering, and death. It has enormous practical implications in facing pain, suffering, and death. Spurgeon says, your view of God is the central thought that moves every other thought. In areas of suffering and approaching death, it's extraordinarily important to you personally, because it makes a great deal of difference whether God is sovereign or not, whether He controls or reacts to circumstances, whether your debilitating suffering comes from random chance or fate, or from a loving Heavenly Father dedicated to your highest good. And your view of God is going to determine the exact level of your consolation, your solace, and any spiritual joy and peace that you experience while going through suffering or facing approaching death. Your view of God, your theology is an extremely important matter and you should strive to get it right. Now, we are not looking at suffering itself yet, we are still on the whys of suffering, okay, so just keep that in mind. Now, suffering for God's glory, okay, usually brings up three questions and I see these from time to time. First, isn't God's passion for His own glory a rather self-centered and selfish thing? Second, how can God decree pain and suffering for His children with the stated goal of His being for His own glory and still be a loving and caring Father to them. I would never intentionally inflict short-term, much less long-term pain and suffering on my children, so why would a good, loving, and caring God do it to His children? Lastly, how could a good, caring, and loving God so severely afflict a man like Job man whom God himself has twice just called blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil, just to prove a point to Satan. Now, these are very important questions. And as Christians, trying to explain things to people, bring them to God and stuff, we owe them an honest answer. These are honest questions from their viewpoint. Okay? They deal with the very nature of God's inner core being, what he is really like deep down within himself, what motives he has for all that he does, especially where we as children are concerned. We're gonna try to answer questions one and two, under suffering for God's glory, question three in our next session a couple of weeks out when we look at Job. Two assertions that we've made already up front when we introduced the class. Two assertions we want to keep in mind that we're trying to prove as we go through here. Number one, God is sovereign over all pain and suffering. Okay? We went through that pretty thoroughly. Second, whenever God seeks his own glory, in sending pain and affliction to any of His children, He is at the same time seeking His children's highest good and happiness. Indeed, as we said, God's glory and His children's highest good and happiness are so thoroughly intertwined that an increase in one will always result in an increase in the other. Now, how can this be? How can that be? Well, we have to spend some time looking at the nature and inner core being of God Himself and what He is like, and the nature and inner core being of both natural unregenerate man and regenerate man. We're going to be hopping around a good bit today and much of next week. Hopefully we're going to bring it all together at the end, but this is not just an A, B, C, D, E, F, G question. We have to kind of hop around and do things. Now, I'm going to take a somewhat different approach of assuming that we're having a discussion with a Reformed Christian. Fully understands God's sovereignty in all things, but he's troubled. by the three questions we ask. We call Him Questioner. Okay? So, first, before we get to Questioner's questions, to help you understand how we can scripturally say that in every case of sending pain and suffering to His children, God is also seeking their good and betterment The first step, we need to look at some facts about God Himself. One is that God, even though He is God, has limitations on what He can do. Again, it's important, your view of God and what He is like and what motivates Him is going to determine everything you do, say, or think about pain, suffering, and death. Now, we've never really thought about it in many cases, but even God has limitations on what He can do. And some of these limitations have a very direct bearing on our subject that we're taking up today. One way that God, even though He is God, is limited is that he can never act contrary to or go against the perfections of his inner core being and nature, okay? In other words, God must always act in accord with what he is. It's impossible for him to do otherwise. So what are some things that God can't do? I'll give you six. God cannot die. God cannot lie. Important one, God cannot let sin go unpunished. I get the question from time to time for family members and others, why can't God just say, okay, y'all come on into heaven anyway, everybody come on in, let's go in. The answer is that because He is just, righteous, and holy, He can never just overlook or wink at sin and let us all into heaven at the end. By His very nature, He must react to and punish sin. A penalty must be paid for every sin ever committed. Precisely because He is just, righteous, and holy, He cannot and will not let sin go unpunished. All right? Four, because God is just, He cannot be lenient in punishing sin. Full measure for each sin must be paid and He will punish it. I use the term severely. Is that a fair term? Well, Romans 11, 22, Paul says, Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God, on those who fell, severity, but towards you, goodness. Now Jesus spoke of Himself at the end of the parable on the wicked vinedressers when He said, Then He looked at them and said, What then is this that is written? The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, Whoever falls on that stone will be broken, but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder. Being ground to powder is not a light sentence. Now, God can be merciful to repentant individual sinners, but even in His mercy, their sins are not overlooked or their punishment lessened. the full penalty for their sins paid by Christ on the cross, and the righteousness of Christ has been imputed to their account, such that when God looks at them, He no longer sees their sins, but sees the righteousness of His Son. A fifth thing God cannot do. God cannot perform intrinsic impossibilities. C.S. Lewis wrote, It remains true that all things are possible with God. The intrinsic impossibilities are not things, but non-entities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives, not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk about it about God. So God can perform all possible things, including miracles, but he can't do self-contradictory nonsense. I've had people come up, look at me like, oh, I got you now. Can God build a rock that's too big for him to pick up? That's nonsense, it's a non-entity. You hear this kind of stuff all the time. And God cannot perform intrinsic impossibilities, all right? Lastly, Strange as it sounds, God cannot have all that He desires. We read in Ezekiel, God does not take pleasure in, He does not desire that the wicked die in their sins and go to hell, but would that they would repent and live. Ezekiel 33, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked would turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways, for why should you die, O house of Israel? Ezekiel 18. Repent then, and turn away from all your transgressions, so that iniquity will not be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. For why should you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of one who dies, says the Lord God. Therefore turn and live." Is he sincere here? Yeah. He's sincere when he tells all men everywhere to repent also. Okay. How can God be all powerful and not have something he desires or wants to see done? Very complex and interrelated question. Someday we'll let Joey answer it for you. God has one will, but he has part of it that's revealed and part of it that's hidden or not revealed. is not only between the members of the Godhead. Okay? In God's unrevealed will, as we've seen in Ezekiel, which would make it not unrevealed anymore, but anyway, God desires all men to be saved. He loves all of His creation and He takes no pleasure in the destruction of any part of it. In His revealed will, expressed in the Bible, he has purposely decreed that some men will be lost and spend eternity in hell. He cannot desire one thing and not have it because of reasons known only to himself, really, I think. Now, what's very important here, this is what we call a rational mystery. a rational mystery. It's not a blatant contradiction. It's not an intrinsic impossibility. In all these six points we've gone through, we see that God cannot go against His own inner core being or nature, but must always act in full accord with it. Why is this important? Why are you spending so much time on this? Because in considering our three questions and concerns, if two of God's inner core characteristics and attributes are love and goodness, then we can know for certain that God never could or would do anything to his children that's not loving or good for them. Right? It's just one avenue we're looking at. Stated earlier, a proper scriptural understanding of God's love and goodness is a hermeneutical key that will unlock our understanding of the coexistence of pain, suffering, and death in a world ruled by a loving, caring, all-powerful God. If two of God's inner core character traits are love and goodness, we can know and fully believe that all of his actions and decrees including those of sending out pain, suffering, and death, must proceed from and be filtered through His inner core attributes of goodness and love, and can therefore work only to the benefit and good of His children that are afflicted by them. Now, listen, readily admitting that truth The truth that God, by His very nature, could never do anything unloving or harmful to His children, no matter how bad things might look to them, does not tell us why we individually and particularly have pain and suffering, and why God uses pain and suffering, but it does tell us for certain that God's motive in sending PAIN AND SUFFERING IS FOR OUR OWN GOOD AND OUR OWN BETTERMENT, AS WELL AS FOR HIS GLORY. Does that make sense? Okay. The questioner says, okay, let's go back to the first question, Bill. Isn't God's passion for His own glory a very self-centered and selfish thing? Fair question. I'd say you're partly right. God's passion for His own glory is a very self-centered thing. I mean, He is God after all. Okay? And He has repeatedly told us that He is a jealous God, and He wants the truth about Him and His glory to be correctly known and understood, and in no way the least part of it attributed to another. But though God's passion for His own glory is a self-centered thing, it is not a selfish thing in the pejorative sense that it would be for anybody else but God. Okay? Indeed, we're going to see again, I'm going to keep this over for you, God's passion for His own glory actually works very much to his children's personal and spiritual benefit, gain, and happiness. And we're going into all of this, okay? I'm not leaving or skipping over stuff. One way to see how God's passion for His own glory is not selfish and cannot be in the pejorative sense is to take a brief look at some of the character traits of God and the attributes of God as revealed in Scripture and see if they describe a God that can be selfish where His children are concerned. What do we want to look at briefly? Goodness, Love, Justice, Omniscience, Omnipotence. The nature of God's love we want to look at especially and compare it with the nature of man's love. Then after we determine what God is like in His inner core nature, okay, We can look at what kind of relationship He must have with His children because of what He is. So, can God's passion for His glory ever be a selfish thing in a pejorative way? In other words, He does it for Himself alone, no other thought or consideration to His children and mine. Just for His glory alone. Okay? What are some known characteristics of God in the Bible? God is good. So he said to him, Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, that is, God. The Bible is very clear on God's goodness. As we mentioned earlier, it is precisely because God is good that we have a problem with pain in the first place. How can He be good and inflict pain and suffering on us? 2. God is love. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Because God is love in His very nature, He is and must be loving in all His actions towards His own redeemed children. C.S. Lewis in his wonderful book, you should all read it, The Problem of Pain, differentiates between man's love which is egoistic, What do we mean? It's driven by his own needs and desires. Okay? And God's love, which is altruistic. What does that mean? Utterly unselfish concern for the welfare of others while seeking no benefit for himself. God's love must be purely altruistic in that God exists in a state of infinitely perfect bliss and needs nothing to make Him happier or better. The point being, there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever that God can derive from a relationship with us. Nothing. There's no attraction or goodness to be found within us, we'll see later, that would attract Him to us. As a matter of fact, at the time He chose to set His love on us, we were His enemies. We were at enmity with Him. We didn't look for Him. His is an actually pure, altruistic love, which will always seek our good. Again, if you want to know the extent of God's love, just look to Calvary, scourged, beaten, crown of painful thorns, spit upon, beard plucked out by the roots, hanging on a cross, ridiculed, subjected to extreme pain and humiliation of crucifixion, and bearing the curse and wrath and an eternity of hell in your place, and then utterly discard any thought that God could ever be uncaring or unloving or show any selfish disregard toward you or any of His children in any way. Third characteristic, God is JUST. Then He said, The God of our fathers has chosen you, that you should know His will, and see the Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth. God is just. What does that mean for us? God will never punish you for any sin you ever committed because all of them have already been paid for by Christ on the cross and God being a just God will not punish you a second time for any sin that is already punished to the full extent on Jesus Christ. And because He's just, and because all of your sins have been atoned for, all of God's actions towards you, including any necessary disciplinary or training actions, can only be beneficial, corrective, and never punitive. Okay? Due to his inner core nature and being, he can only have his children's best interest in mind. Now, that God is good, loving, and just should be sufficient to show by the very inner core nature of his being, he could never do anything uncaring, mean, or against the better interest of his children, just to glorify himself. Okay? Whenever we may think or undergo at any time, God knows what He is doing. And He is always doing what is best for His children's highest good. He never acts selfishly towards us. He would never afflict us just for His glory alone with no thought or care for us at all. Okay? Two other attributes. 1. God's omniscient. He knows all things. Knowing all things, He always acts with a total, complete and infinite knowledge of all events, including even their contingencies. Being omniscient, He knows in every instance what is best for you and the best way to get the results that He desires for you. But this carries a warning for us as well. What does God Himself say? FOR MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, NOR ARE YOUR WAYS MY WAYS, SAYS THE LORD. FOR AS THE HEAVENS ARE HIGHER THAN THE EARTH, SO ARE MY WAYS HIGHER THAN YOUR WAYS, AND MY THOUGHTS THAN YOUR THOUGHTS. We are going to naturally disagree, given the vast disparities in our wisdom and knowledge and God's wisdom and knowledge. His will is going to at times differ from ours. And what we might think is the best way to handle this, I think, Lord, please make me patient. I think you should say, be patient. And that's it. That ain't the way it works. He puts you in situations that make you be patient. My wife would come up to me often and say, have you been praying for patience again with just cause? So, we can always continue to pray for God for any affliction He sends to us, but we should be willing to abide by His decision in the matter and have room for patient endurance based on what? Based on our knowledge of His wisdom, His full knowledge of the situation, the knowledge that He loves us, the knowledge that He is accomplishing something in us for our own personal benefit. Lastly, we want to consider that God's omnipotent. Being omniscient, God knows what's best for us and the best way to accomplish it. Being omnipotent, He can and will accomplish the good that He intends for you in whatever He's doing. There's no arbitrariness, no randomness, no looseness. Everything's under His sovereign control. God is good, loving, just, omniscient, omnipotent, very important to keep in mind, because again, God cannot act against His own inner core being or character, but must at all times act in full accord with it, and therefore God's every act towards His children must be and is filtered through His inner core traits of goodness and love. He must and only can act for your good, even when it requires sinning, pain, and suffering to accomplish it. So, in answer to the question, isn't God's passion for His own glory a very self-centered and selfish thing? We'd say God's passion for His glory is rightfully and righteously self-centered. We'll go into this more later. But especially where His children are concerned, God's passion for His own glory never has been and never could be a selfish thing to His children in a pejorative way. God would never afflict us with pain and suffering solely for His own glory with no thought to us and the effect it's going to have on us at all. Now, the questioner comes back and says, I can start to see that God will always be loving to His children and will never make them suffer for His glory alone. But that doesn't explain to me how He can intentionally send pain and suffering to His children and still be a loving and caring Father to them. Well, there's two questions here. First, one we're going to take up is God's passion for His glory and how it affects His relationships with His children. And second, How can He send pain and suffering to His children with the stated intention of it being only for His own glory and still be a loving and caring Father to them? We'll answer that later. Again, God's passion for His glory in no way contradictory to or at odds with man's highest happiness. God's passion for His glory, man's highest good, So positively interrelated to represent the same end, so much so as we said that an increase in one causes a corresponding increase in the other. Now, not so uncoincidentally, that's the word with our assertion, there's a wonderful book by John Piper called God's Passion for His Glory. which directly deals with the issue of God's passion for His glory and how it relates to His children. The book is based on and contains the full text of Jonathan Edwards' well-known and famous dissertation, THE END FOR WHICH GOD CREATED THE WORLD. Matter of fact, many people, including even non-Christians, consider Jonathan Edwards to have been the greatest mind this country has ever produced. Both Piper's book and Edwards' essay explain how God seeking His own glory is at the same time seeking the highest good and happiness of His children. We'll get a lot more into it next week. Piper states this when he gives us the reading, his reason for republishing Edwards' essay in his book. My personal reason for making the book more accessible is to join God in pursuing the invincible end for which He created the world. That end, Edwards says, is first, that the glory of God might be magnified in the universe, and second, that Christ's ransomed people from all times and all nations would rejoice in God above all things. But the depth and wonder and power of this book is a demonstration that these two ends are one. The rejoicings of all peoples in God and the magnifying of God's glory are one end, not two. Now Edwards, the most famous biographer, follows this up. From the purest principles of reason, as well as from the fountain of revealed truth, Edwards demonstrates that the chief and ultimate end of the Supreme Being in the works of creation and providence was the manifestation of His own glory in the highest happiness of His creatures. Okay? In other words, God created the world for two reasons. One, that He might display the manifestation of His glory to the people. Two, that His emanating glory, which diffuses out from Him, might be received, praised, and enjoyed by the creatures He has made, with their rejoicing and happiness being increased in and by the display of His glory. Again, Piper. Virtually everything I preach and write and do is shaped by the truth that the exhibition of God's glory and the deepest joy of human beings are the same. Now, again, how can that be? And we're going to go into this next week. How can God, in displaying His own glory in creation and in providence, at the same time seek the highest happiness of His children? It can be because we as His loving children, created by Him, have souls that are most satisfied in God, rejoicing God above all else, and derive great pleasure and happiness from beholding God's glories. As Augustine said, Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. It works something like this, point one. One of the reasons God created the world was for the magnification of His glory, of His name. Point two, true human happiness and goodness are found only in God because any happiness and goodness that we might have must have come from God alone and not from within ourselves because there is no goodness to be found within us. God is our good. in every sense of the word. Therefore, any extension or display of God's glory would result in an increase in the Christian's delight and happiness. Because there is a mutual, shared, interlocking, and reciprocal relationship between God seeking His own glory and seeking the highest good and happiness of His people. They both occur at the same time. They are different but joint aspects of the same end, that end being the manifestation of His own glory and the highest happiness of His creatures, according to Edwards. Point three, this is a reciprocal relationship. What do we mean? God is glorified in the display of His own handiwork both in the universe and in us. As His glory emanates, flows out, diffuses outward, okay? It's received, praised, and enjoyed by His creatures. who derive great happiness and rejoicing from it. And most wonderfully, God receives back delight and happiness from his creatures, happiness and rejoicing in him and in his handiwork. Now we haven't covered the question why pain or how can God send pain and still be loving and caring? Okay, but we're setting the background for it. In order to understand how this, we're gonna next week have to establish two firm biblical truths, which are one, there is no true happiness and good for man outside of God. Number two, the Christian's personal relationship with God must be and is an extraordinarily deep relationship. And we'll look at that too. nature of natural unregenerate man we're gonna look at, and the origin nature, and extent of the Christian's personal relationship with God. Again, we haven't gotten to suffering itself. We're all still on the wise of suffering. We're looking at suffering for God's glory, okay? We can suffer for God's glory. Nobody denies that. The only thing I'm saying is that whenever God sends us pain and suffering, He does it not for His own selfish purpose, but He does it for His own glory and for our good and betterment. Somebody's got to have a question. I can think I either did a good job or I did a bad job. You never know which. Okay, Joey, would you close us in prayer? Thank you for listening to this message from Antioch Presbyterian Church. For more information about Antioch, visit us at our website at antiochpca.com.