The End for Which God Created the World

For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. ROMANS 11:36

Everything in Jonathan Edwards begins here, and nothing in him can be understood without it. In the last years of his life, in a crowded house on the Massachusetts frontier, he wrote a dissertation asking a question most people never think to ask. Not how did God make the world, nor when, but why. What was God after? What did He intend to accomplish by there being anything at all?

An answer we find uncomfortable

Edwards answered that God’s ultimate end in creating the world was the glory of God — His own fullness known, communicated, esteemed and enjoyed. That answer has always troubled people, and it troubles modern readers most of all. It sounds like vanity. We do not admire human beings who arrange everything for their own praise, and we instinctively resist a God who appears to do the same. Edwards took the objection seriously, and his reply is one of the most bracing arguments in Christian theology. It runs like this. For any being to value something above what is most valuable would be a falsehood — an error about reality. If God is in fact the highest good, the source and standard of every excellence, then for God to esteem anything else more highly than Himself would not be humility. It would be a lie. It would be God preferring the lesser to the greater, which is precisely what we call sin when we do it. So God’s regard for His own glory is not self-obsession. It is simply God seeing accurately.

I am the Lord: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another. ISAIAH 42:8

Why this is good news and not bad

But Edwards pressed further, and this is where the doctrine turns from intimidating to glorious. Suppose God is the highest good. Then the best possible thing that could happen to a creature is to receive God — to know Him, see Him, love Him and enjoy Him. There is no superior gift available anywhere in the universe, because there is nothing superior to God. Which means that when God acts to display His own glory, He is not competing with our happiness. He is securing it. The two are the same act.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

A God who sought our happiness instead of His glory would have to offer us something less than Himself, and would therefore be offering us something less than the best. Only a God who is thoroughly committed to His own glory can give His creatures what they most need, because what they most need is Him. Edwards described the whole arrangement as an emanation and a returning — the fullness of God flowing out into the creation, and then flowing back to Him in the knowledge, love and joy of creatures who have received it. The universe is not a machine God built. It is an overflow.

Where Scripture puts the accent

He built the case not on philosophy but on the sheer accumulation of biblical statements, and the accumulation is impressive once you begin to look.

Even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him. ISAIAH 43:7

For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it …and I will not give my glory unto another. ISAIAH 48:11

Election is to the praise of the glory of his grace (Ephesians 1:6). Creation is by him, and for him (Colossians 1:16). Redemption issues in a doxology; providence issues in a doxology; the last book of the Bible is one long doxology. Even eating and drinking are brought under the same end: whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31). Edwards’s point was that this is not one theme among many in Scripture. It is the theme under all the others, and once a reader sees it he cannot stop seeing it.

What it does to a life

The practical consequence is a reordering of the whole self, and it is more searching than it first appears.

Most of us, if we are honest, hold a version of Christianity in which God is extremely useful. He forgives, comforts, guides, provides and finally saves. All true — and all of it arranged with ourselves at the centre and God in orbit around our needs. Edwards inverts the diagram. God is not the means to our flourishing; God is our flourishing. Salvation is not primarily rescue from hell but restoration to the one Object for which we were made, and hell is dreadful chiefly because it is exclusion from that Object. This is why he could write, without any sense of strain, that the redeemed person’s happiness and God’s glory are not two competing goods that must be balanced. They are one good, seen from two sides.

If this is true, then the question to put to any activity, any ambition, any Sunday morning, is not did it work? nor even did it help people? but did God appear great in it? That question, asked seriously for a week, will dismantle a good deal.

Two senses of glory

Edwards distinguished carefully between two things the word glory can mean, and the distinction removes most of the difficulty people have with this doctrine. There is God’s internal glory — the fullness of excellence He possesses in Himself, entirely apart from any creature. This never increases. God was not lonely, incomplete or unfulfilled before the world existed, and creation added nothing whatever to Him. The Father, Son and Spirit had loved one another in perfect sufficiency from eternity.

And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. JOHN 17:5

Then there is God’s external or declarative glory — that same fullness shining out, being known, esteemed and enjoyed by creatures who did not exist before. This is what increases, and this is what God is after. The image Edwards reached for was the sun. Light streams out from it in every direction, illuminating everything it touches. The sun loses nothing by shining; the light is simply the sun’s own nature going out. So the creation is not something God needed. It is His fullness overflowing. And then — this is the part he found most beautiful — the light returns. The creatures who receive it know, love and rejoice in the God who gave it, and the stream flows back to its source. Edwards described the whole arrangement as an emanation and a remanation: outward, and home again. This answers the charge of divine vanity more completely than any argument about God’s rights. A vain person needs the admiration of others; his emptiness is filled by their regard. God has no emptiness. When He seeks His glory among creatures He is not obtaining something He lacks — He is giving something they lack, namely Himself, and their giving it back to Him in worship is the completion of the gift rather than a payment for it.

For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? ROMANS 11:34–35

Paul asks those questions immediately before the doxology that heads this chapter, and the sequence is Edwards’s whole argument in miniature. Nobody has given God anything. Therefore of him, and through him, and to him, are all things — and therefore, to him be glory.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask of one ordinary task tomorrow — a meeting, a meal, a piece of work — how it could be done so that God appears great in it. Then do it that way. 2. Examine your praying. What proportion asks God to serve your purposes, and what proportion asks that He be glorified whatever it costs you? 3. Read Ephesians 1 and mark every occurrence of glory and praise. Notice what the whole chapter is driving at. 4. Name one thing you want badly. Ask honestly whether you want it more than you want God, and tell Him the answer. 5. Memorise Psalm 73:25 and use it as a test of the heart when your desires run away with you.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I have made myself the centre of a universe You built for Yourself, and I have called it faith.

Forgive me for wanting Your gifts more than I want You, and for resenting a glory that is the very thing I was made to enjoy.

Teach me that You are not competing with my happiness — that You are my happiness, and that in seeking Your own honour You are giving me the best thing there is.

Let me want what You want. Be glorified in me today, whether or not I find it comfortable. Amen.