One of the things you begin to notice as you read your Bible over time is that God always acts in pursuit of His glory. Today’s passage in Ephesians 1:3–14 is no exception. Everything God has done in saving us is “to the praise of His glory.”
But it would be a mistake to think that makes God selfish. Because we were made to come fully alive in worship, God’s glory and our everlasting joy are, in fact, the same pursuit. We come joyously alive as God—the One we were made for—gives Himself to us; and in joy, we naturally respond in worship to the praise of His glory. That God always pursues His glory is good news for our eternal joy.
C. S. Lewis has helped me tremendously with his thoughts in Reflections on the Psalms:
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
We are loved, more than we know, to the praise of His glory!
