Embracing God for His Gifts or for Himself?

So what does make the difference whether self-love embraces God or embraces money? Or more radically: what makes the difference whether self-love embraces God for his gifts or for himself?

Edwards answer is regeneration, new birth - a supernatural work of the Spirit of God in the soul, giving it a new capacity to see spiritual beauty and to savor the glory of God as something real and pleasurable in itself.

The first effect of the power of God in the heart in REGENERATION, is to give the heart a Divine taste or sense; to cause it to have a relish of the loveliness and sweetness of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature.

Self-love cannot give itself this taste or sense of divine beauty. That is why self-love cannot be the bottom or the final foundation of true virtue. "Something else," Edwards says, "entirely distinct from self-love [must] be the cause of this, viz. a change made in the views of his mind, and relish of his heart whereby he apprehends a beauty, glory, and supreme good, in God's nature, as it is in itself." Very simply, a capacity to taste a thing must precede our desire for its sweetness. That is, regeneration (or new birth) must precede the pursuit of happiness in God.

The Foundation of True Virtue

And therefore, regeneration is the foundation of true virtue. There is no public virtue without it. True virtue not only embraces God as its highest goal - and thus escapes the curse of infinite parochialism - it also confesses that God is the root and foundation of its origin. Here's the way the apostle Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 4:6, "It is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." God touched the blind eyes of self-love and gave it an irresistible view of his own glory in the face of Christ. He did not kill self-love; he transformed it into a spiritual hunger for the glory of God.

So Edwards says, "The change that takes place in a man, when he is converted and sanctified, is not that his love for happiness is diminished, but only that it is regulated." Self-love now has a new spiritual, supernatural taste for what will truly satisfy. Self-love now says to God, "Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fullness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore" (Psalm 16:11).

The message of Jonathan Edwards to modern evangelicals concerning our public life is not mainly a message about what social cause to trumpet, or even what unreached people to adopt and evangelize, as utterly crucial as these are. His main message is that, if we would not be infinitely parochial, and failing in true virtue, our private life, our public life, and our global life must be driven not by a narrow, constricted, merely natural self-love, but by passion for the supremacy of God in all things - a passion born in supernatural new birth by the Holy Spirit, giving us a new spiritual taste for the glory of God; a passion sustained by the ongoing, sanctifying influences of the Word of God. And a passion bent on spreading itself through all of culture and all the nations until the kingdom comes.

"For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen" (Romans 11:36).

© Desiring God. Used with permission. Website: desiringGod.org.