Sin Is Undermining Christ as the Apple of the Father's Eye

God is love. He does not possess love, but love is essentially externalized from Him. This externalization of love from the Father is the eternal generation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Son of God. The Eternal Son of God is loved by the Father from all eternity. All ad intra and ad extra acts of the Father are loving acts towards the Son. All creation was made for the Son.

I believe it was this state of belovedness—this glory—of the Son that incited Satan's sin. Satan desired the glory of the Eternal Son of God as the apple of the Father's eye for himself. He coveted. He was proud enough to believe that he deserved it.

In man, sin is of a similar nature. Pride is widely regarded as the mother sin and the second table of the Decalogue reducible to the sin of covetousness. When Adam sinned, his disobedience was basically a refusal to have the image of the Eternal Son of God glorified in him. He wanted glory for himself.

The Father's wrath against sin is perhaps analogous to a human father's passionate displeasure towards all affronts to his child. The human father is considered a good father if he safeguards the well-being of his child. Remarkably, the archetypal Father safeguarded the Son's glory—His place of esteem—through the plan of redemption.

While Satan and sinful man were scrambling to get glory for themselves, Christ "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:6-11).

The irony of pouring wrath upon the Son if such wrath is predicated upon dishonoring Him is apparent. However, it is ultimately the glory of the Father in the Son that is at stake, and it is embedded in the incomprehensible love and wisdom of the Father in the Covenant of Redemption to redeem His glory in the Son through the humility of the incarnate Son's atoning work. And this pattern is replicated in every child of God. To glorify the Father in the glorification of His Son though humility is the telos of every human being—in fact, of all creation.

"Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him." (Ps. 2:12)

Get in league with the Boss' Son. Your eternal well-being depends on it.

Dr. Richard W. Daniels on Providence and Spiritual Desertion

Click on link: Hearts in the Hand of the Lord (An Exposition of the Savoy Declaration of Faith, Chapter V: 5-6

A Union with Christ Launch Pad

For those desiring to learn more about the Reformed doctrine of union with Christ, this post by Justin Taylor will prove helpful: Union with Christ: A Crash Course

The links to Richard Gaffin and Sinclar Ferguson's lectures alone make paying the link a visit worthwhile, not to mention the link to Phil Gons' website which contains a wealth of bibliographical information!

Jared Oliphint opines that Dr. Gaffin's upcoming book, By Faith, Not By Sight, will be released in Kindle format and I am certainly looking forward to that. In the meantime, I got myself Marcus Peter Johnson's One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation.

The Analogy of Poor Street Kids

Traversing the pathways and hallways of the metropolis, one cannot help but be confronted with the sad sight of children of various ages, in rags that pass off as clothes, pandering services that range from wiping off otherwise clean windshields of phantom grime, hawking sampaguita buds, to just plain begging for scraps and loose change. When I am thus confronted, I think of my own kids.

I noticed that ever since I became a father, my compassion for children underwent a deepening. I cannot look at them without thinking of my own. My heart is ripped from my chest when I see these street kids, and I think to myself that if not for the providence of God, it could have been Sophia and David sticking their faces on side car windows, wide-eyed, with that trademark sad look plastered on to all the more entice the parting of one's negligibles from oneself.

And then I am reminded of God the Father. Is it not the case that when He looks at those whom He has redeemed, He sees His own Son? He, nonetheless, sees our filth, the odiousness of the sin that we have wrapped ourselves in as with tattered rags, and yet His heart is tugged and pulled, and love and compassion are drawn from Him as He hearkens back to His Son, to His dear Son who obeyed Him at every point for the redemption of these pitiful "street kids" called the elect. What a wonderful analogy of the tenderness of a father's heart the Lord has seen fit to present to us in what would otherwise be an unequivocally tragic scene.

I am a poor street kid, adopted into the family of God because of what Christ the Son did on my behalf. At the present time, the stink and dirt of sin still emanate from me, perceivable by the Father. And yet, even as I cry inside for these impoverished children of the cities, longing for the alleviation of their condition but powerless to do anything about it, the Father, in the grandest of scales, feels the same, sees and thinks of His own Son as He sees me, and in fact will do something about it—when I am freed from this mortal coil and clothed with glorious immortality at the coming of Jesus Christ, my Lord, my Savior, my God, my Brother.

"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are" (1 John 3:1).