I am so jazzed that Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has started to make available the complete works of Jonathan Edwards. If you go to JonathanEdwards.com you can access the most notable works since they are public domain. However, over the past 20 years, Yale has been publishing the previously unpublished works in a huge 20+ volume set that is like $95 a volume. Thus, you would only find it in a theological library. The JEC at Yale has been working on a massive project to make as much of the Works as possible online. They have started Alpha Testing this to those who have shown interest, so I started viewing it yesterday and it is great. I have finally been able to look at the Miscellanies that take up 2 or 3 volumes, and they are pure gold. The one I have included below is, to me, one of his most important:
448. END OF THE CREATION.
God is glorified within himself these two ways: (1) by appearing or being manifested to himself in his own perfect idea, or, in his Son, who is the brightness of his glory; (2) by enjoying and delighting in himself, by flowing forth in infinite love and delight towards himself, or, in his Holy Spirit.
So God glorifies himself towards the creatures also two ways: (1) by appearing to them, being manifested to their understandings; (2) in communicating himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying the manifestations which he makes of himself. They both of them may be called his glory in the more extensive sense of the word, viz. his shining forth, or the going forth of his excellency, beauty and essential glory ad extra. By one way it goes forth towards their understandings; by the other it goes forth towards their wills or hearts. God is glorified not only by his glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in, when those that see it delight in it: God is more glorified than if they only see it; his glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that he might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory, but that it might be received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his having an idea of God’s glory, don’t glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it, and his delight in it. Both these ways of God’s glorifying himself come from the same cause, viz. the overflowing of God’s internal glory, or an inclination in God to cause his internal glory to flow out ad extra. What God has in view in neither of them, neither in his manifesting his glory to the understanding, nor communication to the heart, is not that he may receive, but that he may go forth: the main end of his shining forth, is not that he may have his rays reflected back to himself, but that the rays may go forth.
There are some massive ramifications here about the way we do everything, and it has consummed John Piper (among others) with a life time study to try to work them out. From this Piper has distilled it down to: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him”. This concept is truly epic-making, and has given a meaning and flavor to my life that was untapped until spring of 2000.
