God's Glory: Foundation for Life

Man, I'm posting like crazy lately! I guess God is just stirring things up a lot and teaching me things worth sharing!


This is a selection of excerpts from "Marriage Lived for the Glory of God," a short chapter by John Piper that I read for my premarital counseling homework. You can read the whole chapter here, if you're interested.


“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made through him” (John 1:1, 3, ESV). All things. All that is not God was made by God. So once there was only God.
Therefore God is absolute Reality. We are not. The universe is not. Marriage is not. We are derivative. The universe is of secondary importance, not primary. The human race is not the ultimate reality, nor the ultimate value, nor the ultimate measuring rod of what is good or what is true or what is beautiful. God is. God is the one ultimate absolute in existence. Everything else is from Him and through Him and for Him.

Marriage will be preserved for the glory of God and shaped for the glory of God when the glory of God is more precious to us than marriage.


The glory of God:

• the glory of His eternality that makes the mind want to explode with the infinite thought that God never had a beginning, but simply always was;
• the glory of His knowledge that makes the Library of Congress look like a matchbox and quantum physics like a first grade reader;
• the glory of His wisdom that has never been and can never be counseled by men;
• the glory of His authority over heaven and earth and hell, with- out whose permission no man and no demon can move one inch;
• the glory of His providence without which not one bird falls to the ground or a single hair turns gray;
• the glory of His word that upholds the universe and keeps all the atoms and molecules together;
• the glory of His power to walk on water, cleanse lepers, heal the lame, open the eyes of the blind, cause the deaf to hear, still storms with a word, and raise the dead;
• the glory of His purity never to sin, or to have a two-second bad attitude or evil thought;
• the glory of His trustworthiness never to break His word or let one promise fall to the ground;
• the glory of His justice to render all moral accounts in the uni- verse settled either on the cross or in hell;
• the glory of His patience to endure our dullness for decade after decade;
• the glory of His sovereign, slave-like obedience to embrace the excruciating pain of the cross willingly;
• the glory of His wrath that will one day cause people to call out for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them;
• the glory of His grace that justifies the ungodly; and
• the glory of His love that dies for us even while we were sinners.

WOW.