Now God is the spring. In fact, Jeremiah was so stunned, he said on behalf of God: “Be appalled, O heavens, be shocked, my people have committed two great evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
The great sin of the world is the failure to pursue happiness with enough intelligence and enough passion to forsake the broken cisterns of the fleeting pleasures of the world and move in on God’s fountain and drink from him until we are satisfied.
I know that when I’ve delivered that emphasis in many contexts around the country-namely, that God loves God, God is passionate for God, the glory of God is central to God-does not always sound loving of God because love, we’ve learned, does not seek its own. Love lays down its life for others. So when you make God out to be so self-centered, how can he be a God of love?
What I’m trying to clarify now is that God, being the absolutely unique, infinitely-valuable person in the universe has no choice but to make much of himself if he would be loving because the most loving thing that God can do is to give himself to me for my enjoyment.
And that is very egocentric of God, to think that he is so great that he alone could satisfy my soul. That’s simply the way God has to be because he is the only source of my infinite satisfaction.
God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act he can perform, for if he were to make much of me as the source of my joy, he would hate me. But in making much of himself as the source of my joy, he rescues me from all the other vain desires that I have.
