Martin Schlomer

“Over the past years, I’ve come across many devotionals that are worthy of passing on to others. During my time of reading Taste and See, by John Piper, I found the following paragraphs to be  impactful and  worthy of sharing with everyone!”     ~Martin Schlomer

Taste and See

John Piper

The Only Ultimate Love

Do People Go to the Grand Canyon to Enhance Their Self-Esteem?

God’s loving us is a means to our joyfully glorifying him. In that sense, God’s love is penultimate; God’s glory is ultimate. You can see this in Romans 15:8-9. “Christ became a servant...in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy” (emphasis added). God has been merciful to us so that we would delight in glorifying him for his mercy. We see it again in Ephesians 1:4-6, “In love [God] predestined us to adoption...to the praise of the glory of His grace” (emphasis added). The goal of loving us through predestination is that we might have the everlasting joy of praising his grace. We see it again in Psalm 86:12-13, “I will glorify Your name forever. For Your lovingkindness toward me is great” (emphasis added). God’s love is the ground. His glory is the goal.

Why is this important? It’s important because unless we understand this, we will not know what love really is. The love of God is not God’s making much of us, but God’s saving us from self-centered sin so that we can enjoy making much of him forever. And our love to others is not our making much of them, but our helping them to find eternal satisfaction in making much of God. The only ultimate love is a love that aims at satisfying people in the glory of God. Any love that terminates on man is eventually destructive. It does not lead a person to the only lasting joy, namely God. Love must be God-centered or it is not the greatest love; it leaves people without their deepest need and only hope.

Take the cross, for example. The death of Christ is the ultimate expression of divine love: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “In this is love...that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Yet in Romans 3:25 Paul says that the aim of the death of Christ was “to demonstrate [God’s] righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed” (emphasis added). Forgiving sins seems to create a huge problem for the righteousness of God. It makes him look like a judge who lets criminals go free without punishment. In other words, the mercy of God puts the justice of God in jeopardy.

So to vindicate his justice he does the unthinkable – he puts his Son to death as the penalty for our sins. The cross makes it plain to everyone that God does not sweep evil under the rug of the universe. He punishes it in Jesus for those who believe, and in hell for those who don’t.

But notice that this ultimately loving act has at the center of it and at the bottom of it the demonstration and vindication of the glorious righteousness of God. Calvary love is a God-glorifying love. God exalts God at the cross. If he didn’t, he could not rescue man from sin. But it is a mistake to say, “Well, if the aim was to rescue man, then man was the ultimate goal of the cross.” No, man was rescued from sin in order that he might enjoy God’s acts of glorifying God (see the first paragraph). If God values the glory of God so much in the rescuing of man, then the aim of that rescue would be to give man the ability and inclination to value God the way God does (see John 17:26). This is the ultimately loving aim of the cross. Christ did not die to make much of us, but to free us to enjoy, and participate in, God’s making much of God forever.

It is profoundly wrong to turn the cross into a warrant for self-esteem as the root of mental health. If I stand before the love of God and do not feel a healthy, satisfying, freeing joy without turning that love into an echo of my self-esteem, then I am like a man who stands before the Grand Canyon and feels no satisfying wonder until he translates the canyon into a case for his own significance. That is not the presence of health but bondage to self. The only ultimate love is the sacrificial act of God saving me to share God’s passion for the supremacy of God. Nothing glorifies him, or satisfies us, more.

Citation:

Piper, John. Taste and See: Savoring the Supremacy of God In All of Life. Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2005. Pages 44-45.