What Does God Need for His Glory?
In surveying the blogging world, I came across this today:
thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2011/04/22/god-created-the-world-for-good-friday/
(Please read the post linked to above before reading the following)
I cannot understand why it is okay in the reformed world to see the goodness and aseity of God sacrificed on the altar of His glory.
Piper’s formulation implicitly makes God the author of sin, and worse, in need of sin for the display of His glory (seen most clearly in his point 5).
The tragedy of Piper’s formulation for the necessity of Good Friday is that sin’s necessity is tied back to God’s glory. The ultimate reason for the universe is the revelation of God’s glory, God’s glory is maximally revealed in His grace displayed at the cross, therefore we have the cross. In this formulation God not only needs the universe to be glorified, but He also is in need of sin to display His glory at the cross. God here is not just the author of sin, He is in need of it.
I’m not saying that God is not sovereign and that He does not accomplish good through and in evil events. What I am saying is that if we identify redemption as the ultimate purpose of creation (God creates in order to redeem), sin is necessary in a way that destroys God’s freedom and goodness.
We need to begin to respectfully call a spade a spade and abandon views that eliminate a Christian view of who God is (like “God is good” and “God is free”). To be clear, I don’t think Piper believes what I feel to be the actual implications of his view, however the burden of proof is on him to show us how, in his view, God is both a se and good in a way that correlates to what we know goodness to be; and we need to push adherents of this and similar views to show us.
I have a great deal of respect for Piper, but on this issue particularly, our father is feeding us poison.
Dustin
