"The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy God forever."
At hearing John Piper's words, I initially scowled. "God is not that....arrogant" I thought. Certainly God is not some egotistical, pompous jerk that sits in heaven and says "It's all about Me". Surely Piper was taking it too far.
Arrogance is disdained in our culture. Nobody likes the arrogant kid who only cares about themselves (believe me, I know. I get told I'm arrogant all the time, this is not a new concept to me.). Arrogance carries this connotation of disgust and.....wrongness. There's just something in us that cringes at it. I have honestly never seen arrogance accepted and welcomed, only tolerated. And the situations it always seems to be tolerated in are the ones where the person of arrogance is superior to the general populace in a given area at the time. People allow arrogance in an attitude of admittance, recognizing their inferiority, and thus tolerating the ego.
So it kind of blows my mind to think of God his way, because in my mind it's analogous to calling Orlando Bloom hott (I NEVER understood that sentiment).
Ok, bad analogy, that was dumb. Better analogy, rewind. In my mind, it is analogous to calling a parakeet amphibious. It's not even a characteristic that I could feasibly stick onto God, no matter how I twist the facets of Him in my knowledge.
So when I heard this statement this morning, I stiffened and got all defensive in my head. Seriously, I was ready to find John Piper and let Him know what I thought of his little....theory. And then a thought occurred to me...
...a thought that I don't really have time to fully consider and meditate over and tear apart and analyze. Which causes me a lot of irritability and frustration. I wish it was my job to think all day, and school was just extraneous.
SO again, I'm writing a fragment. I keep doing this, and it's annoying and retarded and immature, I'm sure. But I really don't care either, because this is the only way I'm ever going to remember these things. Going back, picking up the pieces, and trying to grasp what is soon to be lost in dehalogenation and oxidation mechanisms for this organic test that is looming tomorrow.
Is it arrogance if it's true? And if it's true, is arrogance wrong or bad? Our offense at someone else's arrogance is generally because we know they are not as superior to us as they are implying. "You aren't any better than me" is what runs through our head. (As a side note that made me crack up when I thought about it, my dad used to tell me, when he thought I was getting too full of myself, "You wipe your butt the same way I do". It never failed to make me laugh at the mental picture it produced. Which, come to think of it, is completely disgusting. I'm sorry I'm not more sophisticated because, if I was, I would've left this part out). But if God is the epitome of everything we are striving towards and falling short of, if it's all about Him, made for Him, to glorify Him, to magnify Him....it can't be arrogance to say that everything He does is about glorifying Himself. It's like you can't say that gravity is mean because it doesn't let little kids who put sheets around their shoulders and jump off couches fly. It isn't really subject to any kind of judgement or label. It just....is.
And if God's chief end is to glorify Himself....where does mans chief end fit in? (Yeah, this last one shouldn't be a question, but in light of how most of us who claim Christianity live, it's probably the most compelling one to ask)
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