The Delights of Our Incomprehensible God: Reflections on John Piper's "The Pleasures of God"

This book has been out for a while but  I have only recently had the occasion to read it.  John Piper is the focal point of one of those breezes that God blows through His Church throughout the flowing ages. It's how He acts to bring needed correctives or counter-balancing emphases  where things may be drifting the wrong way.  For example, when man starts putting too heavy an emphasis on the fine points of theological speculation apart from doxology, God raises up pietists to remind us of othe importance of religious experience.  On the other hand, when revivalism gets out of hand, someone will start  raising the banner of right knowledge and doctrine.  God guides His church by stirring up the minds and hearts of people to act as a hedge to unhealthy tendencies,  and Piper, to my mind, fulfills a role like that today.

Piper's concern is to remind us that this grace in which we stand in relation to God, is a condition of joy and delight rather than grudging discipline.  As the herald of Christian hedonism he prophetically calls Christians away from the drabness of explicit or implicit practical legalism.  Too many Evangelicals consider discipleship as a general, stoical acceptance of toilsome religious duties and an unhappy scepticism of anything that gives pleasure.  Paraphrasing H. L. Mencken, Piper is fighting against the "suspicion that someone, somewhere is enjoying themselves"  as the prevailing character of Christian life.

I read Desiring God , Piper's most influential work, many years ago and have never forgotten the lessons he taught me in it.  This more recent book really doesn't break any new ground with regard to Piper's passion but it does reinforce the work and add to its dimensions.  Piper eloquently points us away from ourselves and toward God's Person as the sine qua non for true human living.    In this book he undertakes to help us avoid a very real pitfall that causes many Christians to stumble.  He seeks to remind us that it is a very subtle form of self-worship which understands our relation to God as being one where God's ultimate purpose is to make us happy and complete.  Too often Christians are so caught up with the idea that "God has a wonderful plan for our life.." that we can get to thinking that God's whole reason for Being is so that WE can be happy.   Piper does a good job in this book of showing us that our lives and indeed all of creation, is not about US, it is about HIM!  God's Delight is what is of first importance.  Our happiness is a by-product of that Delight when God enables and motivates us to enter into His joy.  It is a very important point and one that is difficult for a consumer oriented generation of Christians to appropriate for themselves or teach others.

Additionally, as I worked my way through The Pleasures... I was struck by the ease with which Piper strengthens his writing by taking on the questions that  can distract us from finding our delight in God's Person and thereby entering into His Joy.  Specifically, in this book, I found his handling of the question of God's electing grace to be wonderfully concise yet remarkably thorough.  It is not easy to connect the dots between God's sovereignty and His delight in that sovereignty and our joy in being the objects of that sovereignty, yet Piper does as good a job as I have ever seen.  For those of us who fell in love with the doctrine years ago, it will not add much in the way of new insights, but  he provides us a very accessible manner of communicating it to others, and that alone makes this book worth reading.

I love Piper's heart in these things.  His passion is on every page.  I will admit that in this book, as in  Desiring God before it, I could never escape the feeling that he is too anthropomorphic in his characterizations of God.  Though he often affirms God's transcendent nature, yet his practical focus tends to keep "bringing God down to our level" rather than lifting us up to His. 

Piper's central purpose in this book is to tell us about God's delight : how He delights in Himself as the Triune God, how He delights in all the things He does, etc.  Piper wants to point us toward God's pleasure as a real and controlling principle for all that we are to understand about Him.  This is right and good.  It is also true that the Scriptures continually remind us of God's pleasure in doing things, and His contentment in His work, and His joy in various people especially His Son.  The problem comes in when Piper implicitly presents God's pleasure as being  essentially like our pleasure.  He does not adequately convey to us that the Scriptural discussion of God's pleasure, joy and delight, reflects God's condescension to us.  It gives us a way to think about God in terms of something that we know and can experience.  It is true that man being created in the image of God is able to draw some analogs between those things he finds in himself and their equivalent aspect in God's character.  But there are decided limits that must be observed.

Man cannot reconcile his own pleasure with his own displeasure.  Man cannot be simultaneously content and agitated with anger.  Man cannot experience the sense of well-being as he is engaged in the outflow of passions.  All this is to say that man is sequential and finite.  God is neither.  God's delight can never be opposed to His "unhappiness" about sin.  God's pleasure is never distinct from His wrath.  God does not move from one mood to another.  We can think of Him in terms that we recognize and seek to worship Him for the knowledge of Himself that He communicates to us in those terms, but we must stop well short of identifying God or His attributes with those things.  God is incomprehensible to us in His Being.  His delight is ultimately incomprehensible also.  He is God and we are not.  The Creator who is outside of all creation can never be understood in His essence through the use of terms which are limited by their correspondence to creation.

This does not pose a barrier to anything that Piper desires to do.  God intends for us to think of Him in terms of being angry at sin and wrathful toward those who commit it.  Alternately, when WE think of Him looking down from heaven on the baptism of His Son, it is right and proper that we should think of His Heart overflowing with pride and joy at the event, even as we parents have that experience when we bring our children to be baptized.  It is absolutely proper for us to think that way.  But we must always keep in mind that God is above and beyond that description.  His Heart did not overflow with joy at that particular moment in any way that would make His level of joy greater than it had been before.  In fact , we can't even consider, from God's point of view, that there was a "before" and an "after" since God is beyond time.

Yes, I know that the mind boggles at this point and that practical Christianity cannot constantly abide  in the realm of God's incomprehensibility.  That is why God adopts anthropomorphic terms when He speaks to us and why He allows us to think about Him in those ways.  But, and this is where I think Piper needs to improve His work, we must not go too far down the pathway that these terms open up for us.  We must not ever forget that the wonder of God is most manifested in the way that His incomprehensible fullness was incarnated in a finite body.  The wonder of that cannot be described and it is lost when we identify the finite with that which only infinity can covey.

That being said, I must again affirm that this is a very good book for Christians to use and encourage others to use.  Piper's heart comes through on every page and he has something very important to say.  I pray that the Lord blesses his work even more than He has in the past.

Comments

[Jeff Parker]

Thanks for the review . . . a thought on "God is incomprehensible to us in His Being. His delight is ultimately incomprehensible also." I agree that we, as finite creatures, will never completely understand an infinite God. But, on the other hand, God revealed himself to us in scripture and creation so that we would know him, his love and saving grace. The reason John Piper can write such a reverent work as this book is because God has made himself, in part, comprehensible to us. And I think you would agree that God wants us to be drawn into scripture so that we indeed can come to comprehend him at greater and greater levels.

[Arch Van Devender]

Thanks for the comment. I think we are pretty much in agreement. Perhaps it might help if I expand my thoughts on the topic a bit more.

I think most of the problem in this type of discussion has to do with the definition of "comprehensible". Colloquial use tends towards "having a true idea of" as opposed to "knowing". We even sometimes qualify our use of the word by saying that we do or do not "fully comprehend" something - which, technically, is redundant.

An example of how we may know "true things" about God's delight without being able to "comprehend" it is, I think readily available. Those of us who have loving wives may be able to say that we "know" our wife's love for us by her affirmation of that love and by the manner that she acts in a loving manner toward us. We may then have a further insight into the manner by which her love is experienced in her own being by drawing a parallel with the way that our love for her is experienced in our own being. But we cannot really "comprehend" her affections. We cannot really "know" what she feels unless we feel the exact emotion she feels which means that we would have to be somehow integrated into her.

In a similar fashion we "know" God's delight by analog in our delight. We can say that it is a true analog and that God's delight must register in some manner in Him comparable to how our delight registers in us. But the difference between God and us is far greater than the difference between us and our wives. If we cannot really "know" our wife's affection, how it truly registers in her, how much less can we know that of God. It is incomprehensible to us though we can know true descriptive things about it. Those descriptive things are true only to the extent that the analogous things we experience have something in common with what He "experiences". Since we do not know the degree to which God's Being is represented in us, we can not even make the first qualitative comparison about "how" God's delight compares to our own. We can only speak in metaphors without knowing for certain how far that metaphor is accurate.

[Mike Sweaney]

Thank you for your post, I'm a recent fan of John Piper's. To me he's a modern day Jonathan Edwards, fearless, scriptural, and loving.

I disagree with one of your points however. You stated to the effect that God didn't experience more pleasure when Christ was baptized than any other time, that to parellel our emotions with God's is incorrect. I disagree. Although God is in one sense incomprehensible, I do believe (And not arrogantly), that we do indeed share more similarities with our creator than we may think.

We know good from evil, and I do also believe we share the same emotional life. We CAN be sorrowful, yet joyful, we can love, yet hate, at the same time. It's really incredible, test yourself. God, obviously, is infinite, he hears millions of prayers simultaneously, he can feel sadness for some, joy for others, simultaneously, from millions. We are not infinite, so we can't do that, but we can certainly feel contradictory emotions at once, try it!
God Bless

[Arch Van Devender]

Mike
I am probably more in agreement than you might think - as far as our human capacity goes, and as far as having more things in common with God than we think.

However, the main point I am drawing is how God is distinct from man, thus emphasizing where we are different. We are made in the image or likeness of God, but we are not made "like", or in any sense possessing His attributes. That is why it is so incredible that God became man. It is also why it is so critical that never confuse the Divine and Human natures of Jesus.

God's passions are not "like" ours, they do not ebb and flow in time. That is the main point.

Thanks for the comment.