Oct
12
2009
Illustration for Children: Why Faith Glorifies God
John Piper, from a sermon in 1999:
Your daddy is standing in a swimming pool out a little bit from the edge. You are, let’s say, three years old and standing on the edge of the pool. Daddy holds out his arms to you and says, “Jump, I’ll catch you. I promise.” Now, how do you make your daddy look good at that moment? Answer: trust him and jump. Have faith in him and jump. That makes him look strong and wise and loving. But if you won’t jump, if you shake your head and run away from the edge, you make your daddy look bad. It looks like you are saying, “he can’t catch me” or “he won’t catch me” or “it’s not a good idea to do what he tells me to do.” And all three of those make your dad look bad.
But you don’t want to make God look bad. So you trust him. Then you make him look good–which he really is. And that is what we mean when we say, “Faith glorifies God” or “Faith gives God glory.” It makes him look as good as he really is. So trusting God is really important.
And the harder it seems for him to fulfill his promise, the better he looks when you trust him. Suppose that you are at the deep end of a pool by the diving board. You are four years old and can’t swim, and your daddy is at the other end of the pool. Suddenly a big, mean dog crawls under the fence and shows his teeth and growls at you and starts coming toward you to bite you. You crawl up on the diving board and walk toward the end to get away from him. The dog puts his front paws up on the diving board. Just then, your daddy sees what’s happening and calls out, “Johnny, jump in the water. I’ll get you.”
Now, you have never jumped from one meter high and you can’t swim and your daddy is not underneath you and this water is way over your head. How do you make your daddy look good in that moment? You jump. And almost as soon as you hit the water, you feel his hands under your arms and he treads water holding you safely while someone chases the dog away. Then he takes you to the side of the pool.
We give glory to God when we trust him to do what he has promised to do–especially when all human possibilities are exhausted. Faith glorifies God. That is why God planned for faith to be the way we are justified.
17 Comments
Amen. When there is no way we could have done something out of our strength or planning, that’s when God is glorified, when people look at us and glorify God.
Trust is so important. And trust is not having a plan b, and a plan c, and even a D, and then God somewhere on the side. Trust is blindly giving our all to Him.
Great quote! I enjoy your tidbits!
Thanks for posting that. It’s a great reminder for this “big person”.
[...] leave a comment » Justin Taylor gives us a good illustration from John Piper about the God-glorifying nature of faith. [...]
Only thing I don’t understand is the “for children” part of your title. ;-)
As a very dear friend always reminds me, that we often hear of the God of Abraham, the God of John Piper, the God of Ravi Zacharias,the God of Major Ian Thomas, all these great men of God that have witnessed God’s grace, mercy, and faithfulness in their lives. But when I trust Him the way these men have trusted Him, then people will hear and know about the God of _________ (insert your name) and glorify Him!
[...] Illustration for Children: Why Faith Glorifies God John Piper, from a sermon in 1999: [...]
This is a good illustration for motivating faith. However, I am curious. If a Calvinist perspective is to be believed, God would also be glorified if the kid hardened his heart and was eaten by the dog. God gives the gift of faith to whom he will and those kids jump to dad and are rescued from the dog, and he also hardens little Tommy Pharoah on the diving board so he does not jump to dad and is thus eaten for all eternity by Cerberus; both glorify God and are his divine prerogative. That is, if I have properly understood Calvinist theology. Maybe I have misunderstood it.
I am not sure that the “way of salvation” or “how do I ‘realy’ get saved” applies in this illustration. The kid in the story is ALREADY a child. He is jumping to HIS father. This illustration may have some “saving faith” value, but I gained more “growing in faith” value. Then again, I could be the one reading the illustration wrong. God is never happy when one of His children acts in unbelief, so this illustration encourages me to act in faith. Just my two cents.
David,
You are right in saying that God is glorified, ultimately, whether the kid is saved or not. I think of it this way: faith glorifies God, but God is glorified in dealing with unfaithfulness. Whether the person takes the dive or not, God is glorified, but in different ways. Faith glorifies God in a direct way – as Piper has illustrated here. The flip side of the coin is that God would be glorified even when people do not trust Him – and that glory is in His righteous wrath poured out in punishment – so that God is glorified in an indirect way. How that glorifies God is because the punishment ought to befit the crime, and an offense against an infinitely valuable God deserves God-sized wrath – so His wrath magnifies how worthy and faithful and true He is.
The way that God desires to be glorified is through people trusting Him and putting their hope in Him, not in people rejecting Him. God may be glorified in our weakness, doubt, or lack of faith, but that does not mean those things are any less sinful. The way we ought to desire to glorify God is not in those things, but through faith that trusts and obeys Him. Both ways end up resulting to glorify God, but one is immeasurably better for the person.
Liang Zhang,
Thank you for the response and I agree with what you have stated. But my question about Calvinism (if I have understood it rightly) is whether the “hardening” of the heart (decisive unbelief by the person) with regard to salvation is a predestined, pre-existent (with regard to the person) decision of God’s that he has sovereignly ordained to certainly happen unconditionally because in his sovereign plan this brings glory to himself. Do Calvinists believe that God is glorified in people rejecting him? Is God the prime causal agent (pre-creation) who certainly guarantees that a person (as secondary cause only) will harden their heart, or is the hardening a consequence of the person’s own rebellion initiated by their own evil heart which refuses to yield to any and all offers of grace?
David,
It’s hard to make a statement about what Calvinists believe, but this is what I believe the Bible has to say on your questions, that many who historically have been called “Calvinists” probably would agree with.
The hardening of hearts is not left up to chance. Romans 3 makes it clear that “there is no one who does good, no one who seeks God.” The chance that a natural human heart is already in grace-rejecting, God-ignoring unbelief is 100%. Was it a consequence of the person’s own rebellion? Yes, James 1:13-15 tells us God cannot be blamed. Was it pre-ordained by God? I think based on God’s sovereign rule over everything in the Bible, from natural disasters to the hearts of people – “yes” is accurate here – but cautiously “yes.”
Cautiously, because humans, in our limited minds can’t conceive of the two fitting together easily – if God decreed that people be hardened against Him – why are they held responsible? We do sin, including unbelief against God, because our natural self loves to sin (sin being anything not from faith, or failing to honor God as He deserves). Nobody ever had to teach a little kid to be self-seeking rather than God-seeking. On the flip side of the coin, God has not left the Great Commission nor any part of this universe up to chance (Isaiah 46:10-11). He does bring about sin – indirectly – you might say, “permits sin by design” or “pre-creation, as a secondary cause”- including the most horrific sin in the history of history – the killing of Jesus (Acts 4:28, Isaiah 53).
As for whether God is glorified when people reject Him: He will be glorified when people who reject Him will bow the knee and confess with the tongue that Jesus is Lord – one day (Phil. 2:10-11). He will be glorified when He displays the worth of the Trinity through pouring out His wrath forever as just punishment on unbelievers. His desire is not to damn, but His infinite value demands that He rightly damn all people, who have all offended Him, yet in His mercy He has damned His Son on the cross to pay the penalty for some sinner and raised Him to life to justify them. This is how God has chosen to design the history of the world in order to bring Himself glory.
There is a serious tension between God’s sovereignty over unbelief (or any sin) and the person’s responsibility for the sin because of his own evilness. Both are taught by the Bible, though it is very difficult (some say near impossible) to grasp.
[...] article can be found here Your daddy is standing in a swimming pool out a little bit from the edge. You are, let’s say, [...]
I think you have ably represented what I have understood to be a Calvinist position, and I have not read anything from Calvinists that is different. I am not persuaded of all the points. I believe in the sovereignty of God, but the question is what kind of sovereignty does God sovereignly choose to enact. I do not believe that the sin of people is pre-ordained in the sense that God is the first causal agent and the sinner is only a secondary cause who then bears responsibility and the first causal agent bears none. I think that James 1:13-15 makes it clear that God is not a causal agent in the chain of causes for sin. If he was, he would be responsible, just as Charles Manson, for example, was tainted with murder in the Tate-LaBianca murders even though he himself killed no one.
I see God as sovereignly allowing us to rebel but not pre-ordaining us causally and certainly to rebel. God is sovereign enough to be able to create creatures who can initiate rebellion that God allows to happen but does not pre-determine as first causal agent. This is where the mystery lies not in how does God pre-determine all things and yet remain not responsible for sin.
The case of Jesus is a unique case, and yet it also does not require God pre-determining the individuals involved to certainly sin, but instead God knew that inevitably if Jesus in his righteousness were to live amongst a freely-choosing-evil people some would initiate actions to murder him by direct action and the rest would affirm it by their refusal to repent and yield to the offered grace. God’s foreknowledge is a mystery and yet he does not pre-determine sin, which I think James makes absoltutely clear.
Though we may disagree at these points, you have certainly shown a gracious and informative reply and I do appreciate your tone and clarity of communication.
Blessings,
David
“God is sovereign enough to be able to create creatures who can initiate rebellion that God allows to happen but does not pre-determine as first causal agent.”
I totally agree with this and I think Bible does too. I also believe that mankind would have never known what sin is if it wasn’t for Satan. The Bible is not very clear on the following (is it?) but I do believe that he is the first creature of God to ever rebel against Him. Ever since he’s done that, his only target is to exploit the freewill of mankind for his evil purpose(s).
I also believe that The Parable of the Weeds (Mathew 13:24-34) clearly teaches us that the mankind falls within two categories: “the good seed” and “the weed”. The latter, the parable says, was sowed by “the enemy” of “the kingdom of heaven”. I believe that this parable teaches us that:
1) the weeds are the people who will never get saved
2) the weeds are not the work of God, thus, at the right moment, He will forever separate the weeds from His presence just because they were not His work and they were never meant for heaven i.e. eternal unification with Him/His presence.
3) no one but God knows who’s weed and who’s not (i.e. if a certain person will ever get saved or not), i.e. (my reckoning) Satan doesn’t know in advance whether a person is weed or wheat until the end of that person’s journey on Earth – and this should be very true since God is the only one in the whole Universe possessing this attribute of foreknowledge.
I for sure might be wrong but this is whatever I was thought/understood from the Bible until now. What do you think?
Thanks for adding to the discussion.
I don’t think I agree with your statement “that mankind would have never known what sin is if it wasn’t for Satan”. I believe Satan was a free creature who rebelled against God, and Adam and Eve were free creatures who had the capacity to rebel against God also whether or not a Satanic temptation was the circumstantial initiative. It so happens that Satan was involved but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they would never have rebelled if not for him.
I am hesitant in interpreting the Wheat and Weeds parable as comprehensively as you suggest. I don’t think that the parable can be rightly pressed as teaching an eternal pre-destination of some individuals as “sons of the kingdom” and an eternal pre-destination of some individuals as “sons of the evil one” (or, as you put it “never meant for heaven”). The parable does teach two separate categories of people “sons of the kingdom” and “sons of the evil one” but the doesn’t reveal how God makes one a “son of the kingdom” or a “son of the evil one”. You seem to be suggesting that it is a pre-determination of God and a pre-determination of the devil. God has some; the devil has some. The problem is that the devil cannot create people; all are created by God. Also, there was a point in time prior to conversion where even all those presently saved could legitimately been called “sons of the evil one” because of our sin and unbelief. We have all been in rebellion against God and “children of our father, the devil”. By God’s salvation of grace through faith in Christ, some of these devil children have been transferred and transformed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.
The parable teaches regarding the two categories of people and the ultimate evaluation of each category of persons but does not explicate here in the parable how one gets from one to the other. That is taught elsewhere.
Thanks for the interaction and Blessings,
David
[...] Piper. Not sure I like it at all. It’s an illustration directed at kids in a 1999 sermon, recently quoted by Justin Taylor. Your daddy is standing in a swimming pool out a little bit from the edge. You are, let’s say, [...]