GOD'S HEART AND ETERNAL PURPOSE
GOD’S HEART AND ETERNAL PURPOSE
There is a flaw in your idea. God’s great desire is to bless. His Son was ever His delight. No one knew the measure of the distance between God and man, but one Man - the Son of God; and no man ever knew what was in the heart of God for the sinner, but one Man - the Son of God. Adam was made in the image of God. He failed. Man failed after repeated trials. The brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His Person, came in then to do His will, to effect the blessing He desired; so that every family in heaven and earth can be named of the Father.
The Lord Jesus Christ is thus the One to carry out all the blessing in the heart of God; He is the one Object of His delight, and in Him all things are headed [p. 326] up. How otherwise could the blessed God care for the dispersed of Israel? How else could He be the Happy God? His blessed Son needed no glory. He had the same glory as the Father, but then He came forth to fulfil the purpose of the heart of God, of blessing man, and His “delights were with the sons of men” (Proverbs 8: 31). Then He justly called forth the love of the Father, as He did when He went down into death.
God’s object now on the earth where Christ was rejected, is the fulness of Christ, surely for Christ’s glory, but also for the blessing of those chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. God, in His own nature, loved the world, but the Son only could set forth that love. Hence the Son, in His new place, commands and concentrates all the delight and satisfaction of God; and all things will be headed up in a Man, and that Man the Son of the Father; but in the eternal state still a Man, and not the Son with the Father, as He was before the world was. His glory is not greater, but He has carried out the heart of God so fully, that He has the pre-eminence of every creature; and yet the glory He had with the Father before the world was is greater than any conferred or acquired glory, though the latter are testimonies to the perfection with which He has given true and full effect to the heart of God.
We must begin with the heart of God. He delighted to bless, and His Son only could do it effectually. Thus He enters on a new place, and with new glories; and in one of these glories He receives His complement here, to the eternal and inconceivable blessing of those who compose it - the church. His body is His complement, which it is God’s object now to form and maintain here on earth by the Holy Spirit.
I have fellowship with the Father and the Son in Their purposes all round, and it is unspeakable blessing to enter into the Father’s pleasure in the work and ways of His Son. Nothing can exceed His own blessedness.
[p. 327] He delights in His own works. None could exceed them, but I must not lose the sense in my heart that He delights to bless me; that it is not only to make me an appendage to the Son’s glory, though, through grace, I am a member of His body, and thus I am for Him; but I am also there for my own deep, eternal blessing, and God’s heart decreed it for me. Hence Christ “loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2: 20), and He gave eternal life to as many as the Father has given Him. The Father had the electing love; this you leave out, as though He regards us only as a builder would regard stones in a quarry, instead of tracing your blessing to the heart of God. I am set for the church, because it is Christ’s interest, and the Father’s purpose for His Son; but, at the same time, it is for the fullest blessing of His chosen ones. If there had not been in the heart of God a desire to bless, the Father and the Son could have gone on together in the excellent glory without us. But there was that desire in God’s heart. The Son comes forth to carry it out, “the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1: 18). His complement we are. In answer to the love of God we are saved; but in answer to Christ’s heart (for He loved the church) we are given to Him, to be His body and bride, which He will present to Himself, a glorious church, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing. The glory that the Son had with the Father before the world was, we shall see, but not be given, though members of the One who has received it as a Man.