For God, Family and Republic

Jonathan Edwards was the great colonial-era New England minister who presided over the Great Awakening. His acclaim was his profound intellectual broadsides against Arminianism. He wasn't always appreciated as his congregation in Northhampton ran him off, because they thought he took church discipline too seriously. He gained notoriety for his firey Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and while he fervently preached the Gospel of faith and repentance, he also spoke affectionately of the sweetness of Christ.

The opening salvos of the Westminster Confession of Faith proclaims, "Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever." Likewise, the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards wrote:

God is glorified within Himself these two ways: 1. By appearing... to Himself in His own perfect idea [of Himself], 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.

The great Congregationalist preacher further proclaimed that God's ultimate end is the manifestation of his glory in the highest happiness of his creatures. Edwards further surmised:

Because [God] infinitely values his own glory, consisting in the knowledge of himself, love to himself, and complacence and joy in himself; he therefore valued the image, communication or participation of these, in the creature. And it is because he values himself, that he delights in the knowledge, and love, and joy of the creature; as being himself the object of this knowledge, love and complacence... [Thus] God's respect to the creature's good, and his respect to himself, is not a divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at, is happiness in union with himself.

Least we forget the promises of God, those of faith should take comfort in the reality that God glorifies himself in our happiness in union with him. We've conquered death and the sting of sin through Christ Jesus.