The God who didn’t need you to be happy, the heaven within himself that needed not angels or humans, sacrificed to include us in that happiness. He came for us.
The God who did not need us chose us — and at total cost to himself. The blessedness of God increases the gospel’s voltage. If God had thrown all into the lake of fire, downed Adam and Eve in a flood, and moved on, God would have lost nothing. But the great I Am — rising from his own good pleasure as Giver, for his own great name of Love, growing from the everlasting heart of a Father — authored a story, perilous and splendid, full of darkness and light, to communicate himself more fully, and exalt his Son, and so fill our cup to overflowing.
Ours is not just the gospel of God, but “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11). Rightly do angels longingly gaze after it. When time ripened, the eternal Son came. Begrudgingly? Reluctantly? Indifferently? “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19–20).
Glimpses of eternal rays pierce through at Jesus’s baptism and transfiguration. The Father’s supreme delight shone down upon his Son: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased” (Matthew 12:18; 3:17; 17:5). “Father,” Jesus prayed on the eve of his death, “I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).
The Son’s whole drama — sung to us as good news — plays out in a theater of eternal love: The Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit lifting the elect to dwell in those clouds.
Persecution Live 