April 26, 2009

• Moderation in pursuing God? An answer from Jonathan Edwards

  In my post Juxtapositions at The Gospel Coalition Conference, I'd written a bit about Tim Keller's talk about idols at the Gospel Coalition Conference. and WLCALUM and I got into a little discussion about idols. This was his initial response to my post:

  "Everything in moderation" (in terms of earthly things)...

  As I was trying to understand his comment I went round and round on that and then ended up commenting:

  Are you saying/also saying that we don't need to hold back or shouldn't be moderate when it comes to heavenly things? Like that, like that very much!

  So now as I've been reflecting on all that a bit more, I realized that what I was talking about is straight out of Jonathan Edwards (via John Piper); it's what Piper refers to as Christian hedonism. (Apart from the Bible, Jonathan Edwards has been the single biggest influence on shaping Piper's theology.)

  Here's something from Piper's talk A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: Why We Need Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later given at the 2003 Desiring God National Conference [1]:

  God is glorified by our being satisfied in him. The chief end of man is not merely to glorify God AND enjoy him forever, but to glorify God BY enjoying him forever. The great divide that I thought existed between God's passion for his glory and my passion for joy turned out to be no divide at all, if my passion for joy is passion for joy in God. God's passion for the glory of God, and my passion for joy in God are one.

  What follows from this, I have found, shocks most Christians, namely, that we should be blood-earnest-deadly serious-about being happy in God. We should pursue our joy with a passion and a vehemence that, if it must, would cut off our hand or gouge out our eye to have it. God being glorified in us hangs on our being satisfied in him. Which makes our being satisfied in him infinitely important. It becomes the animating vocation of our lives. We tremble at the horror of not rejoicing in God. We quake at the fearful lukewarmness of our hearts. We waken to the truth that it is a treacherous sin not to pursue that satisfaction in God with all our hearts. There is one final word for finding delight in the creation more than in the Creator: treason.

  Edwards put it like this: "I do not suppose it can be said of any, that their love to their own happiness . . . can be in too high a degree."9 Of course, a passion for happiness can be misdirected to wrong objects, but it cannot be too strong.10 Edwards argued for this in a sermon that he preached on Song of Solomon 5:1, which says, "Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!" He drew out the following doctrine: "Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites." Rather, he says, they ought to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. . . . Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can't be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. . . . [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement...11There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.12 (boldface, mine)

  Later Piper answers some objections to Edwards including

  Objection #2: Won't this emphasis on pleasure play into the central corruption of our age, the unbounded pursuit of personal ease and comfort and pleasure? Won't this emphasis soften our resistance to sin?

  There are many Christians who think stoicism is a good antidote to sensuality. It isn't. It is hopelessly weak and ineffective. And the reason it fails is that the power of sin comes from its promise of pleasure and is meant to be defeated by the superior promise of pleasure in God, not by the power of the human will. Willpower religion, when it succeeds, gets glory for the will. It produces legalists, not lovers. Edwards saw the powerlessness of this approach and said:

  We come with double forces against the wicked, to persuade them to a godly life. . . The common argument is the profitableness of religion, but alas, the wicked man is not in pursuit of profit; 'tis pleasure he seeks. Now, then, we will fight with them with their own weapons.16

  In other words, Edwards says, the pursuit of pleasure in God is not only not a compromise with the sensual world, but is the only power that can defeat the lusts of the age while producing lovers of God, not legalists who boast in their willpower. If you love holiness, if you weep over the moral collapse of our culture, I pray you will get to know Edwards's God-enthralled vision of all things.

  So there we have it. As we're pursuing God passionately, as we're not being moderate or lukewarm about Him but following hard after Him, it is then and only then that we will be able to fight off our idols. Until He becomes our supreme passion, chief joy and magnificent obsession we will continue to flirt with idols and settle for making mud pies in a slum rather than eagerly anticipating the holiday by the sea.

  What is the state of your heart before Him this morning? Are you lukewarm at best toward Him? Has your spiritual appetite for God become faint? Are you hungering and thirsting after all sorts of things other than God? Are you so delighting in His creation that you have forgotten Your Creator? Are you enjoying the gifts of God more than the Giver of those gifts? Yes, He has given us all things to enjoy but never more than we ought to be enjoying Him and delighting in Him? Has He been showing you your love for Him is so weak? Are you attempting to love Him with a divided heart rather than a single eye?

  Are you grieved that you do not love God as you know He deserves? Will you confess that to Him today and ask Him to put into you a hunger and thirst for Him? Know that He will do this for you. The Father has sent Jesus to die for you so you might have intimate fellowship with Him. Will you not enter boldly into the Holy of Holies, through the veil by the new and living way, through His flesh. As you find God all-satisfying and enjoy Him and commune with Him, He is glorified. Will you not draw near to Him in full assurance of faith? He is waiting for you there, waiting to have fellowship with you!

  O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; 2 To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. 3 Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee. 4 Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name. 5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips: 6 When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. 7 Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. 8 My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
  

  –Psalm 63:1-8, KJV
  

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  Related posts:
  

  • Things To Look for in a Church, 9: "Pearl Freaks" (a.k.a. a Kingdom-Obsessed People)
  • Considering Jesus: (2) Why do we do quiet time anyhow?
  • "...it is a pleasing thing to walk with God." (George Whitefield)

  [1] You can read the entire line of reasoning for yourself here. See also John Piper and Justin Taylor's "A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Crossway: 2004). The book is a "continuation and expansion" of that conference.

  Piper's footnotes:

  9. Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8, ed. by Paul Ramsey, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 255.

  10. It's the same thing C. S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, "If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds or desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who ants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965), 2. [I'd also referenced the mud pies in another comment my previous post.]

  11. Quoted from an unpublished sermon, "Sacrament Sermon on Canticles 5:1" (circa 1729), edited version by Kenneth Minkema in association with The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale University.

  12. Jonathan Edwards, "The Spiritual Blessings of the Gospel Represented by a Feast" in Sermons and Discourses, 1723-1729, ed. Kenneth Minkema (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 286.

  16. Jonathan Edwards, "The Pleasantness of Religion" in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999), 23-24.

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