The Great Good

Have you ever asked why you want God’s forgiveness or eternal life? One article that I read lately points out that it is possible to want forgiveness and eternal life for the wrong reasons. Take forgiveness, for example. You might want God’s forgiveness because you are so miserable with guilt feelings. If you want forgiveness only because of emotional relief, you won’t have God’s forgiveness. In other words, it matters what you are hoping for through forgiveness. It matters why you want it. Why? God does not give it to those who use forgiveness only to get His gifts and not Himself. We are missing the main point of forgiveness. Where is gospel salvation in that? Sin separated us from God, where we have no relationship or fellowship with our heavenly Father. Forgiveness is not some “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Forgiveness is precious for one ultimate reason: it reconciles and enables you and I to enjoy restored fellowship with God. God will not be used as currency for the purchase of idols. 

John 17:3 “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

The same point is true in our desire for eternal life. If I desire to receive eternal life and go to Heaven because Hell is the alternative and eternal punishment is painful, then we are missing the main point of eternal life. In all these aims, one thing is missing – God. The “saving” motive for desiring eternal life is God himself. We simply kid ourselves that we are Christians if we use the glorious gospel of Christ to get what we love more than Christ. The “good news” will not prove “good” to any for whom God is not the chief good.

The late American Theologian Jonathon Edwards preached in 1731 on the “true goodness of forgiveness and life in the Sermon “God Glorified in Man’s Dependence”: The redeemed have all their objective god in God. God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest god, and the sum of all that good which Christ purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints (meaning those who have been sanctified in Christ), he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor and glory. They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world. The Lord God, he is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the “rive of the water of life” that runs, and the tree of life that grows, “in the midst of the paradise of God.” The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or in anything else whatsoever, that will yield them delight and happiness, will be what will be seen of God in them.

John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

The gospel is ultimately about God. He is who and what we lost though our sin. He alone is the author and goal of salvation. The good news of the gospel is that God is the great good and chief end of the gospel. He so loved the world not simply to give us forgiveness or eternal life, but to give us something even greater – Himself. That is the great good.

Blessings