Man’s Salvation vs. the Glory of God

With the plethora of radio/TV preachers teaching doctrines that seem to point to our happiness as being God’s purpose for His coming to the earth and then the Cross, I thought it needful to relate some thoughts that my brother Phil was having one day about the subject. This was the result of a comment that a friend of his made to him about salvation. What follows is Phil’s response to his friend’s comment:

I was just musing over something that you quoted Pastor _____ on. “The one strongest theme in the Bible points to this principle: Salvation.”

I’m having some thoughts here. Basically, and with all-do respect to Pastor _____, I disagree with him on this and here’s why. Since the fall of man, man inherently has “self” on the throne of his heart. If God wrote the bible to point to man’s salvation as the main theme, then this would cripple us further into what we already struggle with: self-ness. Upon this type of interpretation, I fear that we would be in danger of perceiving God to be the One who exists for our needs as a default (unwittingly as it were). This is a false pretense. The Holy Spirit quickened me this morning here at work concerning this. He spoke to my heart saying, “The one Theme that I have scribed throughout the Bible is not salvation, but the Glory of God.” One elevates mans needs, the other speaks for itself. In fact, man’s availability to be saved only points to the Glory of God. The fact that God created a way for man to be redeemed points to HIS glory more than our need to be saved. We all know in the back of our head that this statement here is true. But failing to bring it from the back of our mind to the front puts us in danger assuming God to exist for our need, instead of man being created for his glory. Further, we are then redeemed (salvation) for his glory. We know this as cliché, but how often is it on the front of our minds, and therefore our hearts?

I just felt an unction to relate this from God’s heart. If we stop at mere “salvation” then we are in danger of proposing unconsciously that God exists for our needs. This is false. God does not exist for us. We exist for God. The theme of the Bible is God’s glory, not man’s salvation.

Well, I don’t know what to add to this except a hearty “Amen”. I really believe that the state of American christianity is in its deplorable state due to the fact that we have enthroned ’self’. When we exist for ourselves and our likes/dislikes then all that we should be suffers, or rather is left undone. This is the root issue behind every false church movement, be it the “prophetic” movement with it’s counterpart the “apostolic” movement, the emerging church of no absolutes or warnings of hell, the spiritual drunkenness that has swept almost half the charismatic church into fits of insane sounding laughter and other foolishness and many other things that I’ll eventually get around to writting about.

I think a good place to start is getting God and His glory back into the central focus for our entire existence. Then our worship services will not longer be about what we like or don’t like and the preaching will no longer revolve around what we would like to hear, but will be undiluted Truth. This, I believe, is the starting block of every revival that has ever impacted America and we need to get back to this. God help us to also fill in the rest of the blanks….
mark jr.