Luke 2:8-14
8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
And what does all that convey? And what does it all entail? What does it involve? Last week we noted how God’s glory is the primary motivation for all that He does. And we come back to that theme today again and focusing on the subject. We begin by noticing again a number of scriptures that convey this concept of God in His gloriousness. Psalm 24, verse 8 through 10. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty. The Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the King of glory. Psalm 96, verse 8. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name. Bring an offering and come into His courts. In 1 Samuel 15, 29, we see God used the name, the glory of Israel, for Himself. The glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for He is not a man that He should have regret. Now, last week we touched on this concept, that in dealing with this issue, we must keep in mind God is not a man. When we think of God as a man, as a human being, though He has many, and Jesus is a man since His incarnation, we understand, but He’s a glorified man at this point because of the resurrection. Nevertheless, there are things about God that do not reflect in us and that we do not have. And if we think of God in human terms, we will miss some of the significance of this concept. The human failure to lose sight of this fact that God is not a man can cause flawed understandings. In other words, if you and I would reject this premise that God’s primary motivation is His glory, then we must have scriptural grounds for doing that and not simply saying, that doesn’t sound right to me, that just doesn’t seem right from a human perspective. You must have the scripture. I have made this point different times. I don’t know if I’ve made it in a Sunday morning service. And this is not meant to diminish you or belittle you in any sense of the word. I am firmly convinced, and I think many of you know and agree with this, that there’s great confusion in our culture about what it is, what being a Christian is, what it means, what it entails, what it involves. And one of the reasons that happens is because we adopted this attitude. And we say things like this. Well, I don’t know where it is in the Bible, but I know it’s in there. Now, I’m not saying you need to know chapter and verse, but if you don’t know chapter and verse, how do you know it’s in there? And I can tell you as a pastor and someone who’s studying all the time, I will think of a scripture that I’m going to bring into my message, and I will go looking for that scripture. And I will put in every combination of words into my computer search engine to find that in the Bible program that I have, and I never find it. And finally, I find it, and guess what? It doesn’t say what I thought it said. And this is what I mean, that sometimes we’re wanting to operate just on the basis of, well, it doesn’t sound that, that just doesn’t sound right to me. We must base our objections and our convictions on what we can find and prove from scripture. And this is a fundamental passage. Now, before we move on, let me add some other passages to those that we highlighted last week that talk about God’s drive to be glorified. For example, Psalm 72, verse 19. May the glorious name be praised. May His glorious name be praised forever. The whole earth is filled with His glory. Habakkuk 2, verse 14. For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord’s glory as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 61, verse 1 through 3. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim, and one called to another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory. In Isaiah 11, verse 9, we read, None will harm or destroy another on my entire holy mountain, for the land will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the sea is filled with water. And when you couple that with Habakkuk, you see that knowledge is knowledge that results in God being glorified and known and celebrated. The earth is filled and will remain filled with the glory of the Lord. The Bible is clear that this was the very purpose of creation. Note these two passages of Scripture put together. Genesis 1-1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And Psalm 19-1, The heavens declare the glory of God. And the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Everything is about God and His glory, His majesty, and it being known in the earth and known among His people particularly. Now listen to this passage from Psalm 8. I want to read the whole chapter to you. Psalm 8, verse 1-9. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! You have set Your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and infants You have established strength because of Your foes to steal the enemy and the avenger. When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of Your hands. You have put all things under His feet, all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heaven, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! Please notice that this text begins with praise, how majestic is Your name, reflects on God’s redemptive purposes in bringing glory to Himself, and then ends with more glory saying, how majestic is Your name. Now verse 3, Out of the mouth of babes and infants you have established strength, is quoted by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew after a demonstration of God’s greatness and His glory. Listen to this passage of Scripture. The blind and the lame came to Him in the temple. This is just after He’s cleansed the temple. He drives out the money changers, and in Matthew’s Gospel, He begins to heal people. The blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things He did, and the children crying out, Hosanna to the Son of David, they were indignant. And they said to Him, Do you hear what these are saying? And Jesus said, Yes, have you never read, Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes you have prepared praise. Now it is important to notice, Jesus is quoting from the Old Testament. In a moment when He is demonstrating the majesty of God through healing and doing miracles, the proper response would be to glorify Him. And the Pharisees, instead of glorifying Him, are rejecting Him and opposing Him. And they said, Wait a minute, these children are praising you. Tell them to shut up. Does your memory kick in? Isn’t that what they said when He rode into Jerusalem? And the crowds are on the triumphal entry. The crowds are crawling out. And the Pharisees said, Tell these people to be quiet. We don’t want you to receive any glory. And Jesus says, If these people stop praising Me, the rocks are going to begin to cry out. Because it is a prophetic moment where God’s glory should be magnified and declared in the earth. It’s all about God’s glory. It’s all about His kingdom. It’s all about what He’s doing and how He’s working. This difference in text that you may have noticed, the King James, or rather the ESV, the Old Testament, says,
Out of the mouth of babes and infants you have established strength. Where here in the New Testament, it says you have prepared praise. And the difference comes from the Greek Old Testament. As we’ve tried to explain to you many times, there was the Hebrew Old Testament translated into Greek. We call it the Septuagint. And most of the New Testament writers quote from the Greek version, not the Hebrew version. And that’s why there’s a difference sometimes in the translation. But this word in the Greek can be rendered ascribed strength. Out of the mouth of babes and infants you have ascribed strength. That is, they are praising Him for who He is and the greatness of His name. And Leon Morris points this out. The praise of God from little children is perfect praise. Because they’re not likely to be interested in flattering God in order to get something from Him.
Amen? Now this idea that Jesus says the infants, the babes and infants, the King James says, those that are suckling at the breast, they haven’t even been weaned yet. And He says, out of the mouth of those babies, you have prepared or ordained praise because of the greatness of who He is. This is why, children, our focus in church must be upon worshiping and magnifying God. And not merely, what can I get? Or what can I get a promise of getting from God today? We wanted to remind you that our communion was moved from the end of the service to the beginning of the service to remind us that it is this sacrifice which makes this possible. We don’t do this so that we’re good enough to do this. We do this. We do this because He has paid the price for our sins already. And that should be on our lips every time we enter the building, the praise and the glory and the majesty of Almighty God. Now, this is so very important. And again, I’ll just point out something that Leon Morris says in his commentary on Matthew. He says, it’s not without interest that they picked on the easiest target they could find.
They had no criticism of the merchants that Jesus just drove out of the temple. If they would have had any kind of criticism of those guys, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. They have no criticism for people violating the temple, but they’re incensed that children would be praising God. And this is something we should be very mindful of in our culture. Now, our premise has been that God’s primary motivation is the glory of His name. Even the sharing of the love which existed and exists between the members of the Trinity. God is sharing the love that existed in the Trinity is a means of making Himself known. His goal in saving people, as we noted last week, was that He would be glorified by those redemptive acts. Now, in the first message, I mentioned two other areas that we would look at. One, suffering, God glorifying Himself in the suffering of His people. We’ll come back to that next week. Today, we said the other one was God glorifying Himself in judgment.
This issue of God’s motivation for all He does could be presented as two sides of the same coin. On one side, love is God’s motivation for all He does. And the other side is glory is the motivation for all He does. And it is true, as I have just mentioned, that God is glorified through His redemptive acts. In regard to the passages above, the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord. And that certainly could include the experiential knowledge we have when we become believers in Christ. And yet, it includes an experience with His redemptive love. Yet, the overarching purpose of that love is His glory.
Now, we can note this. I don’t know what the right word is. We can note the distinction.
But let me just say it like this. We are far less animated in recognizing that God is glorified by His expressions of wrath.
He is glorified by His redemptive acts. Amen. But scripturally, He is also glorified by His expressions of wrath. And if we wish to be truly faithful Christians, we must be willing to engage with those difficult concepts of Scripture. And they are difficult. Here’s a little…I’m going to read a big section. There’s a little book called The Difficult Doctrine of God’s Love by D.A. Carson. He wrote this in the year 2000. And here’s how he starts the section. I’m not going to read, but he says this. On learning the title of this book, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, you might be forgiven for thinking I had lost my senses.
If I had chosen to speak on the difficult doctrine of the Trinity or the difficult doctrine of predestination, at least the title would have seemed coherent. But isn’t the doctrine of the doctrine of the doctrine of the doctrine of God easy compared with those two concepts?
And he goes on. Why is the doctrine of God’s love difficult? And he lists five reasons. I’m only going to give you one of them. He says, If people believe in God at all today,
If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God is a loving being. But that is exactly what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology.
When informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. This is why you’ve heard me say so many times when we say God is love. God loves you. John 3, 16. We have to care. We have to qualify that statement.
To put it another way, we live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved.
I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking. If it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God. If you only focus on God’s love, you have a jaded picture of God. Yes, He is love. Yes, God loved the world. Yes, He is love, according to 1 John 4, 8. But His love is not the only attribute of His existence. The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything that the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all, sentimentalized. In generations when almost, in previous generations, when almost everyone believed in the justice of God, people sometimes found it difficult to believe in the love of God. The preaching of the love of God came as wonderful good news. Nowadays, if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised. Of course, God loves me, because God is love.
Why shouldn’t He love me? I’m a basically good person. God loves me, because God loves me, because God loves me, and He loves me. He loves me. He loves me. He loves me. He loves me. The transcendent, majestic, awesome God of Luther and Calvin, whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and divine, has undergone a softening of demeanor through the American experience of Protestantism, with few exceptions. Many of our sermons depict a God whose behavior is regular, patterned, and predictable. He is portrayed in terms of the consistency of His behavior and the conformity of His actions to the single rule, love.
And this is what happens when we fail to see that God is determined to glorify His name. And He will do that through redeeming human beings, and He does it through judging human beings. And I must remind you that without the one, the other is diminished. What makes grace amazing is our total unworthiness for that grace. As soon as you bring merit, as soon as you argue that I’m basically good enough, we have eliminated the need for mercy and grace and the death of Christ. And this is something we have lost in the culture today. If we argue, and I know this is why it’s the difficult doctrine of God’s love. If we argue that love is God’s primary motivation for what He does, then where does love fit in regard to the objects of His wrath? Somebody told us that since Christ died, wrath is no longer a problem. It isn’t a problem for those who have put their faith in Christ, but for those who are outside of that blood boundary, if you will. That threat hangs over them still and becomes the motivation for us to take the gospel into the world. Where does love fit in this passage?
I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his hosts and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord. You know the story? And somebody says, Well, wait a minute, Pastor. This is God expressing His love towards the Israelites by vindicating Him and delivering them from Egyptian captivity. Well and good. Amen. But where is the love for the Egyptians? Where is the love for their firstborns that God strikes dead? If we’re going to believe the book, we must believe these things and all of their difficulty. We must remember that it is God who placed them in Egypt with the promise of judging the Egyptians 400 years earlier and God making a covenant with Abraham. He says, Your descendants will abide in this land that isn’t theirs for 400 years and then I will judge those people. Now, if you want to put everything on hold for just a second.
You know why God goes on to say why He’s not going to do it for 400 years?
Because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. It hasn’t reached the point where His wrath will be justly poured out upon them. So there is mercy mingled with this, but it is also a prediction that the situation is not going to improve and man in his sinfulness is going to continue to decline until the point where wrath must be expressed. Now, Paul uses this story to stress God’s glorifying judgment on sinners.
Romans 9, verses 17-23,
The Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. Isn’t that what he just said in Exodus? I’ll get glory by hardening Pharaoh’s heart.
So then, he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. You will say, why does he still find fault? Who can resist his will? But who are you, old man, to answer back to God? Will what molded say to its molder, Why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power that brings him glory, what if he has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory? Notice this. God’s glory is the focal point, and he’s judging sin. But we don’t want to talk about it. We just want to talk about love. All right, let’s talk about love. Love is the vehicle through which you escape the wrath of God, turn to Christ, and run to him today instead of twisting the idea of God’s love to justify any and every imaginable practice in our culture. I was reading, trying to read a book on sin by Mark Jones, who pastors in Vancouver, British Columbia, on sin. And the foreword was by Rosaria Dawson, Rosaria Butterfield. Rosaria Butterfield, who was a lesbian and had gotten delivered from lesbianism. And she mentioned this group, hashtag church too, where the women are being told that if you were engaged in an adulterous relationship, if the man was older than you, then he has coerced you into that relationship and you bear no guilt. In other words, you’re a victim of the men’s,
of the masculine, of toxic masculinity instead of a sinner in need of God. We run to him. We recognize that God is glorified in his wrath.
Now, in a couple of weeks, we will return to our journey through Revelation. And we will continue that up to late November, and then we’re going to turn to the Christmas story. And then we’ll come back to Revelation again at the first of the year and hopefully end it by Easter next year.
But Revelation, the last book of the Bible, the consummation of the story, focuses on two things.
God’s glory is mentioned 17 times, and God’s wrath is mentioned 10 times.
We cannot escape this uncomfortable subject.
We have on our Facebook page a review for a person in our community. We’ve never tried to remove it. She’s had some comments about our sign at different times. But essentially, if you go read that review, it says, we talk about the wrath of God and not the love of God.
But if God has no wrath, we can’t be in any kind of danger of being judged by God. If God is all love, then he loves me as much as he loves anybody else, and I cannot be held accountable for anything I’ve done. If we turn God only into love, there’s no basis for saying, this behavior is wrong and must be turned to. And Jesus says the same in John. I always like to put people, put John 3.16 in a proper context. God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son. Amen. But John 3.3 says, you must be born again or you will not see the kingdom of God. And John 3.36, it ends with, whoever does not believe in Him, the wrath of God abides on that person. We cannot turn away from this, and when we read the Scriptures like this one, God is glorifying His name through His judgment on sin and rebellion and sinners. Now, no Bible book is more explicit about God’s redemptive love than the book of Isaiah. It is in Isaiah where we read the Scripture, the prophecy that He will be born of a virgin. It is in Isaiah chapter 9 that we read He’s the Prince of Peace, the everlasting Father, the mighty God, the wonderful Counselor. It is in Isaiah 53 where we read He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, and He died for our sins. The most beautiful passages of a redemptive nature are in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah, and yet the book of Isaiah is full with God’s announcements of wrath on sin. I want you to notice this. I’m going to read three big sections, and you can black this out however you do that now, Weston.
These are too big to put on slides, but the last chapter of the book of Isaiah is one of the most complex and challenging portraits in all the Bible.
One of the most challenging portraits in all the Bible. It sets God’s redemptive acts side by side with those of His wrath. Sorry, guys. I don’t know how to do it with this. You all know I’m technologically challenged, right? The book of Isaiah sets God’s redemptive acts side by side with those of His wrath. And there’s some complexity you may not pick up on because I’m not reading the whole chapter. But listen to these kinds of statements from the last chapter of the biggest book in the Bible, 66 chapters in Isaiah.
Thus says the Lord, Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. What is the house that you would build for me? And what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made and so all these things came to be, declares the Lord. In other words, don’t try to do anything to earn it.
David in one of the Psalms says, What will I render to the Lord for all His benefits? Because everything you have came from Him. We strut around sometimes and act like we’ve really done a lot for God. But everything we have originated with Him. Your physical ability, your intellectual ability, your ability to make money and save and finagle and everything else. Your physical health to come into the house of God. All of it comes from God. And so what do we do? David says, What can I do? And he says, I know I will take the cup of salvation. I will receive the gift that He has offered me in Christ. And the same is here true. He says, Who? Who? All these things my hand has made and so all these things came to be, declares the Lord. But this is the one, and Scott used this last week. This is the one to whom I will look.
He who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. Verse 10, Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her. All you who love her, rejoice with her in joy. All you who mourn over her, that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast, that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious abundance. For thus says the Lord, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream. And you shall nurse. You shall be carried upon her hip and bounced upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you. You shall be comforted in Jerusalem. You shall see and your hearts shall rejoice. Your bones shall flourish like the grass and the hand of the Lord shall be made known to his servants. There’s that glory aspect again. And he shall show indignation against his enemies. For behold, the Lord will come in fire and his chariots like the whirlwind to render his anger and fury and his rebuke with flames of fire. Paul quotes that in 1 Thessalonians. For by fire will the Lord enter into judgment and by his sword with all flesh and the slain of the Lord shall be many. judgment bringing him as much glory as redemption because his primary goal is his glory. His primary motivation rather. Listen to Isaiah 66, 19 through 24. I will set a sign among them that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations. And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the Lord to my holy mountain Jerusalem. For as the new heavens and the new earth that I shall make remain before me says the Lord so shall your offspring and your name remain. From new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath all flesh shall come to worship before me declares the Lord. And what do we do when we worship? We give God glory.
And they shall go out. And look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worms shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh. Jesus quotes that passage, the worm and the fire in Mark chapter 9 I believe. Isn’t this an odd isn’t this an odd conjoining in one breath great glory and majesty and redemptive love and in the next horrible concepts of judgment. Why? Because God’s because love is not God’s only motivation for what He is doing in the earth. And this is important. Now let me close with this and I know I hopefully have given you lots of food for thought. It really doesn’t take any courage to tell people God loves them. They already believe that.
It takes a great deal of courage to declare the horrors of the wrath to come if we do not turn to Christ. go out and tell somebody God loves them you’ll probably not get any unless they’re absolute atheists and think you’re an idiot for believing in God you’re not going to get much kickback. But if you tell them we must repent of our sins if we tell them that the unborn must be protected if you tell them that the destructiveness of the homosexual lifestyle must be turned from then you will as you know in this culture encounter anything but a return of love.
God’s primary motivation is the glory of His name to glorify His work. He does this through redemption and He does it through His expressions of wrath because God has to judge sin. He cannot ignore sin. He must judge it. People say I want to believe in the justice of God. No you don’t. Because if you tried to believe in the justice of God we would all be cowering under the tables. We have all sinned. We have all committed sin this week and any sin is enough to separate us from God except for one thing we are in Christ and in Him we are safe. Amen? Let us pray.