The Glory of God

Excerpt from The Triumph of Grace through Righteousness by John Piper

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This is why the other infinite reality – the one at the beginning of the chapter – is so crucial. Romans 5 begins, "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God."

Here, instead of saying that our hope is eternal life, Paul says that our hope is "the glory of God." "We exult in the hope of the glory of God." This is crucial to see. Because this is the reason that our future life must be eternal and why it cannot be boring. Any amount of time short of eternity would be inadequate for a finite creature to experience the glory of God. It will take forever for us to see all there is to see and admire all there is to admire and enjoy all there is to enjoy of the glory of God. Therefore God ordains that there be eternal life for us.

We need to feel the force of this. The glory of God is all that God is for us in his greatness and his excellence. And God is infinite. So his glory is infinite. It has no boundaries, no limits, no end. Sometimes Paul stresses this with the phrase "riches of his glory." For example, in Romans 9:23 he says God's purpose is "to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory." In Ephesians 1:18 Paul prays that we would know "what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints." In Philippians 4:19 he says, "My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus."

The point of this phrase is that his glory is a God-sized treasure. It is not small and exhaustible. It will not and cannot run out. You can't spend it down. It is God-sized wealth. It is infinite. Therefore it will take us finite creatures an eternity to see it all and taste it all and admire it all and enjoy it all. A finite creature cannot take in all at once infinite glory any more than a thimble can take in the Pacific Ocean all at once. And even if you enlarged the thimble to the size of the Pacific Ocean you would need endless days to dip out the glory of God from the ocean of God's glory, which has no bottom and no shores.

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