Today’s question comes from an international listener named Waiganjo Kamotho. “Hello Pastor John! My question is over a few lines from your daily devotional, dated August 21, 2016. It all made perfect sense until I got to this line where you write: ‘All the works of God culminate in the praises of his redeemed people.’ And this was even more confusing: ‘The climax of [God’s] happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints.’ Whew. Maybe it’s due to the length of this sentence, I don’t know, but please elaborate what you mean. The rest I understand!”
I am happy to elaborate on that sentence, because it is one of my favorites. Let’s take the second sentence, the one that Waiganjo says is “even more confusing” and break it down to see if I can help make it clearer. I think this is worth doing, because this sentence is one of those incredibly important expressions of what the heart of Christian Hedonism is and, I think, what the heart of biblical truth is.
Let me say this sentence again:
The climax of God’s happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints.
It is true that when you read a sentence like that, if you are not familiar with the thinking and concepts behind it, you will need to slow down, take it phrase-by-phrase, and seriously think about the relationships between those phrases.
I would really encourage you not to give up too quickly when you read a perplexing sentence if there are reasons to believe that the author might have genuine insight and not just be confused himself. There are confusing sentences that are owing not to the complexity of reality, but to the confusion of the author. Yes, there really are. And whether I am that maybe you will know by the end of this podcast. So, let me try to deliver myself and my sentence from confusion by looking at four of the phrases.
1) Let’s start at the end of the sentence: “the praises of the saints.” I have argued in many places that the goal of history, all of creation, all divine activity, is to bring the saints, Christians, believers from every tribe, tongue, and nation into white-hot, heart-felt, joyful praises of God’s infinite value and beauty, the whole panorama of his excellencies. Praise him. Praising God and his excellencies. That is what this phrase signifies: the praises of the saints. That is the great goal of history. And I am picturing the consummation of the ages in the whole assembly of the redeemed from all the centuries and all the ethnicities and all the cultures, praising God with white-hot joy in the excellence of God, joy in God, joy in God and his excellence.
2) Now, the phrase just before that: “the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints.” I am saying that, because our praises are the praises of God’s excellence, when one hears those praises, he hears echoes of God’s excellence. In other words, the praises of God are a reflection or a highlighting or a speaking forth of God’s excellence. I call that the echo. It is an echo of God’s excellence.
When you hear an echo in a canyon, you are hearing a sound that is not identical to the original sound, but a kind of reflection of the sound or a passing along of the sound. In the same way, the praises of God’s excellence are not identical with the excellence itself, but they are caused by the excellence of God like a shout causes an echo. They are responses to the excellence of God. And as they are verbalized, these praises give some expression of the excellence of God. And in that sense, I see them as echoes of God’s very excellence. So, those are the last two phrases.
3) Here is a third phrase to look at: “God delights in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints.” So, I add: God delights in those echoes. And what I am getting at here is that God is not an idolater. That is, He has no god that He values above the true God; namely, Himself. In other words, for God to be righteous and holy, He must value supremely what is supremely valuable. He must admire fully what is fully admirable. He must delight in most intensely what is most intensely delightful.
God Himself is the one who is supremely valuable and fully admirable and most intensely delightful. The reason God created man and destined him for white-hot, joyful praises of God is so that we might share in the very joy that God has in Himself in the fellowship of the Trinity in God’s contemplation of all the glorious perfections that He is. So, when God hears the echoes of His own excellence in the joyful praises of His people, He delights in it. He would be unrighteousness not to delight in the echoes of what is most infinitely delightful.
4) Finally, I say at the front of that sentence that this delight or this joy that God has in the echo of His excellence, in the praises of His people, this delight is “the climax of God’s happiness.” In other words, there is no higher or greater happiness that God is looking forward to beyond the delight that He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the supremely happy praises of the saints. And this, I think, is the heart of the biblical message: God’s purpose in creation and through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ is to bring His redeemed people to full and lasting happiness in Himself, which is also God’s happiness in God, because our happiness in Him is an echo of His excellence.
So, I will say the sentence one more time and hope it is not as confusing as it was at first. The climax of God’s happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises — the white-hot, joyful praises — of the saints.
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John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including A Peculiar Glory.
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