Suffering for the Sake of the Body - Lesson 3 — John Piper

The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www .DesiringGod .org.

Suffering, Inner Renewal, and Eternal Glory

Let me read some verses from 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians is a book just filled with suffering, Paul's suffering especially, and filled with comfort. And it's not a book for young people, probably. Young people think they're invulnerable, and many of them do.

And they're into strength and energy and they're out there in the park and not ready to go work all day, rake, and that's wonderful. But soon they will be apprised that this text is true and we will need to have taught them well.

This is chapter 4, verse 16 of 2 Corinthians. So we do not lose heart. There's a great challenge for the Christian life. Are you losing heart? You just don't want to go on, you'd just rather curl up and die or disappear or take a long, long, long vacation, maybe about 30 years or so.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. And let's just pray, may it be so, may it be so in our church that no matter what kind of outer wastings away as we get older, may our inner nature be renewed every day.

For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

What a rock, what a great solidity comes into your life if you live that way. And whenever something happens to you that makes you feel wasted, you don't look at the things that are seen, you look at the things that are unseen, you rest in the fact that if you were to die this afternoon or experience a long, drawn-out, slow misery in life, every day God would do something on your inner man and make you fit for an eternal weight of glory.

In fact, every day of suffering here, I'll argue later, will increase your weight of glory as you endure it faithfully. I really do hope that you will feel that this material is relevant for you in your situation, no matter how well things are going for you, because it is relevant.

Suffering and Perseverance in Marriage

Recently I've dealt with a couple of marriages that are just tottering on the brink of collapse because one or the other or both partners just can't stand it anymore. Not physical abuse, but just sin and frustration and disappointment and no compliance, no coming the way, staying in sin and not changing.

And one of my approaches to working on that is two of my approaches. I do try real hard to get to the party that seems to be unwilling to budge and by grace and prayer and accountability and truth, get them to budge.

And then from the party that feels like he or she is suffering the most, I ask, why do you make a happy marriage the condition of your staying here? Why should you presume that you're appointed to be happy in this relationship?

Did you not mean your vows when you said, for better or for worse? 20, 30, 40 years of worse. Do you mean that? I almost have resolved in recent weeks to say to couples, I don't do much premarital counseling anymore, I'm not on that cutting edge like I used to be as much, but I feel like forcing couples to sign off on certain scenarios of misery.

Suppose he does begin to drink. Doesn't beat you up, just gets moody, uses bad language. Suppose he does abuse the finances. Suppose he does keep all kinds of crazy hours and doesn't tell you where he is.

Suppose he does lock himself in the room and just look at the computer all night instead of sitting with you. Are you going to leave him? And make him sign off on that at the beginning. And of course all young couples say, oh, he won't do that.

He won't do that. Or she won't do that. Well, don't count on it. Marriage, as God sees it, is not a relationship that is contingent upon your happiness. Most people treat it like that today, but it isn't.

You stay. You stay. In the slow fires of misery, as Abraham Lincoln was described. That was a miserable marriage. Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln was a miserable, horrible marriage. The slow fires of misery refined him and fit him for the fires of the Civil War.

So I only mention marriage, not to discourage any of you young single folks. But primarily to show you that the breadth of suffering is very wide. It applies everywhere. Not just for Sudan or Littleton, Colorado or whatever.

The World’s Pervasive Suffering

I brought along the Christianity today, this morning, just to give you a flavor of what you see. Let me just flip through this. So you get a magazine like this. You can take any magazine, really. Take Time Magazine, Newsweek, U .S. News World Report, any magazine.

Open it up and just start flipping through. Hate Crime, the pistol-whipping death of the gay man in Wyoming, article about that. The closing down of the last leprosarium in America. Only 150 new cases of leprosy in America, but 4 million cases of leprosy.

The feeling goes and so you burn your hand and you can't tell when your fingers are gone. A doing church amid bombs and bullets, Evangelicals in Serbia and the misery they're going through right now. Article about sickle cell anemia and new research is being done to try to help those who are characteristically afflicted with that.

Global death rates may skyrocket. Talking here about sub-Sahara Africa and the reversal of the Malthusian trends that everybody thought would happen. The dropping in Nabibia and Zambia and Swaziland of the expected length of life from 62 to 44 from 1990 until now.

62 to 44, mainly due to AIDS. Article from Wendy Marie Zoba on the exit strategy of a missionary from Honduras and how he drove his car when he got a mayday signal out to one of his churches and then he couldn't get back because during Hurricane Mitch the river had risen and he was there, terrorized with that little group of people trying to find high ground as they saw their homes being swept away.

An article here by James Van Tolen, a young pastor in his 30s of cancer. Read to the last paragraph. I am dying. This is the sermon he preached after being out with chemotherapy for seven months. He comes back to his congregation with maybe a few months left.

He said, I am dying. Maybe it will take longer instead of shorter. Maybe I'll preach for several months and maybe for a bit more, but I am dying. I know it and I hate it and I'm still frightened by it.

But there is hope, unwavering hope. I have hope not in something I've done, not in some purity that I've maintained, some sermon I've written. I hope in God. The God who reaches out for an enemy and saves sinners and dies for the weak.

And then an article on abortion, that it's not a necessary evil and the pain that really does get experienced by babies, especially in the partial birth abortion event. So you don't have to do much. Watch the TV news or read any magazine you want and you'll know that the world is filled with suffering.

God’s Sovereignty Over Suffering

Well, last night the point was plain. I hope that the Bible presents God and Jesus as sovereign over suffering and over Satan's hand in it, which raises many questions for us. And we'll try to take up some of those now this morning.

So my first question after last night is, what's the meaning of suffering in general in the world? Not just why do Christians suffer and what might God be doing through us and for us, which we'll talk about later, but why so much suffering in the whole world?

And I have three steps to present. Number one, it is in part God's judgment on the world for its sinfulness and the portrayal in the physical world, or you could say the mental world as well, of the moral and spiritual horror of God belittling sin.

Let me give you three illustrations of judgment. These come out of the preaching on Romans that I've done in recent months. First, there's God's judgment in the downward spiral of depravity. Romans 1 .18, following,.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So even now, before the final judgment, the wrath of God is being poured out on the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men in measure, not fully, in this world.

And then verse 24 and 26 and 28 highlight one particular kind of wrath. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. Or verse 26,.

For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions, for the women exchanged the natural function for that which was unnatural. Or verse 28, And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper.

So one form of judgment or wrath is that God abandons people to their own depraved thoughts and lusts and desires so that it spirals downward and downward and downward. So sometimes we hear people say, when they look at the state of American culture, we are ripe for judgment or judgment is coming.

Well, that's probably true, but it misses the point that this is judgment. Much of what we're seeing is judgment. What about death? Why so much death? Romans 5 .12 following,. Therefore just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, so death as humans experience it, is consequence of sin entering the world.

And so death spread to all men because all sinned. Now drop to verse 15, By the transgression of the one, that's Adam, the many died. Verse 17, By the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one.

Verse 18, Through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men. Verse 19, For as through the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one, Jesus, the many will be made righteous.

So the point there, this classic text on the doctrine of original sin, is that as sin entered the world, so death entered the world, and as sin spread to all men, so death spread to all men. So one of the meanings of death, which is I suppose the last enemy as the Bible calls it, and the great fear of the human race, though we deny it in many ways, is that it is a testimony to the horrific reality of sin.

So one of the ways to interpret the miseries of dying is to translate it not into God's being a mean God, but sin being a terrible reality. That's the jump we ought to make. Where we see death, we ought to think sin.

Creation’s Futility and Hope

Futility and groaning. Romans 8 .18. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. That's the way Paul coped with his miseries in life.

He just kept comparing them to glory. Comparing them to glory. Comparing them to glory. And as he did it, he was renewed in his inner man, and he reminded himself, this is going to be short compared to eternity.

It may feel long now, but it's short compared to eternity, and it's small in comparison to the weight of glory that is coming. Not worthy to be compared to the glory that is revealed to us. For the anxious longing of creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.

So the whole creation is, as it were on tiptoes, yearning and longing for deliverance. For the creation was subjected to futility. Who did that? This whole world with all of its miseries originated I think here in this subjection to futility.

Things don't work. They break down. There's this law by which things go wrong and they decay and they rot and accidents happen and terrible things come about that frustrate the designs of animals and man.

How did that come about? It was subjected to futility not willingly. It wasn't creation's own choice to be subjected, but because of Him. Now who is this? You can see from the capital letter who the NASB thinks it is.

Who subjected it. And here's the reason I think they're right. In hope. Satan didn't bring about the fall in hope. God, in response to the fall, subjected creation to futility in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

So this glory here that Paul is so eager for in verse 18 is the glory of the children of God and the creation is going to be set free when we are set free. The creation is standing on its tiptoes waiting for the day when there will be the reclamation of the children of God and they are changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet when this perishable shall put on imperishable and this mortal shall put on immortality and death, triumph, and victory will be totally wiped away and the kingdom will be established and then the lion will lie down with the lamb and trees will bear leaves that month in and month out bring healing to the nations and it will be a new world order that we live in.

For we know that the whole creation groans, the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth. There's a good analogy for the meaning. The meaning of a volcano or an earthquake, say the earthquake in Oakland that flattened the freeway.

The meaning of that upheaval was labor pains. The labor pains of the world. Until now, and not only this, but also we ourselves. So don't think that you as a Christian escaped the groaning. We ourselves having the firstfruits of the Spirit.

Yes, you have the Holy Spirit. God has poured His Spirit out into your life. You have that guarantee and that down payment and those firstfruits. Even we, He wants to stress it, lest they say with their mouths hanging open, wait a minute, I thought Jesus died for us and took our place and bore our condemnation.

How come we're included in the death and the futility which is the judgment upon the world? Didn't He bear our judgment? Didn't He bear our condemnation? And He says we, even we, ourselves, ourselves, groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly.

It's not now. We have to wait for it, for our adoption of sons, namely, the redemption of our body. This is a hugely important text for understanding the meaning of sickness in the world, and the meaning of groaning in the world, and the meaning of so much agony that's in the world that Christians too will experience.

Our bodies are wasting away as we groan and wait for the redemption of our bodies. So yes, I believe in answered prayer. I believe we should pray for our bodies to experience measures of advance payment on this inheritance.

That's the way I think when I pray that Lord, Jesus has broken into this age. Yes, it's a fallen, it's a futile, it's a corrupt, it's a frustrating age filled with sickness, filled with death, filled with pain, filled with frustration, but oh Christ, You have broken in in Your Son and You mean for us to have foretastes of glory.

The Holy Spirit has been given to us. What measures of foretaste might we have physically? And then, it's in God's hands. What measures of down payment physically we get now. And we've seen some wonderful down payments.

I got a phone mail yesterday that Michael Boyum is 100 leukemia free. We've walked with him. His brother's blood was 80 right. They gave him a 50 -50 chance to get through this thing. At day, I think he's passed the day 100.

I'm not sure. But there are no more leukemic cells. He has no more of his own blood cells. It's all his brother's cells. His blood marrow is producing 30%. And the family is rejoicing. What would that he would do this for Melissa's kidneys?

Let's have Melissa's kidneys, Lord. Instead of the lupus just taking her further and further down. What about... Well, fill in the blank. Some die and some live. And the way to understand that is in a sovereign God saying, I love my children.

It's a fallen world. Every misery they walk through is a testimony to the ugliness of the fall, the ugliness of sin in the world. I'm not judging them. I'm transforming the death, the misery, and even their struggles with sin into sanctifying impulses that deepen their faith.

And I am glorifying myself through their steadfastness through cancer and I am glorifying myself through the deliverance of another from cancer. And we have to just say, may the Lord do what seems good to Him.

But we sure pray because we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. So those are three instances of the meaning of suffering in the world. There's the judgment in the degeneration of sin. There's judgment in death spreading to all men.

And there's judgment in the groaning and the futility of the creation in all manner of miseries. That's owing to sin. God brings it. But, don't forget this before we get to the conclusion down here. This judgment is remarkably mingled with many mercies and not just on Christians.

Common Grace and God’s Witness in Creation

Romans 2 .4. Do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance, but because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.

So, there is patience. His kindness is being shown now. His tolerance is being shown now. His patience is being shown now. Oh, how much worse it could be! And it's meant to lead us to repentance. Or Matthew 5 .44.

I say to you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For He causes His Son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Evil had the sun go up on them in Minnesota this morning. Those who dishonored God all night last night did horrible things sexually and physically and mentally and spiritually. All night last night they did horrible things defaming the name of God.

And the sun came up on them this morning. Breezes blew over them this morning. Their heart was beating this morning. They had no horrific disease this morning. And they're given another day's reprieve this morning.

He sent rain. Yes, we might think we've had enough, but it's making everything green. And when it stops, the crops will grow. Acts 14 .16. In the generations gone by, He permitted all the nations to go their own ways.

And yet, in other words, He passed over most nations as He worked with Israel uniquely. But, He did not leave Himself without a witness in that He did good for them, gave them rains from heaven, fruitful seasons, satisfying their hearts with food and gladness.

The Heinousness of God-Belittling Sin

Now here's my conclusion. A world of horrendous suffering should not cause us to think of God as a horrendous God, but of the magnitude and depth of the ugliness and heinousness of God-belittling pride and unbelief and indifference and scorn.

This is what hell will mean for all eternity. A witness to the heinousness of God-demeaning pride. So, let me pause here and see if you want to raise questions or make comments about this unit of the meaning of global suffering so far.

I have a difficulty knowing how to relate to an unbeliever who is going through intense suffering and what to say to them.

Pastoral Care for Unbelievers in Intense Suffering

No, let's just take that for a moment here. The question is, we have difficulty knowing how to relate to an unbeliever who is experiencing intense suffering. Take an example. I remember we got a phone call a few years ago from the burn unit down in Hennepin County.

That's a unit you just don't want to go to very often. But you need to go to some. And there was a woman there who had been burned. She fell asleep. A cigarette caught her mattress on fire and she was burned over 90 of her body.

And they had her wrapped totally. No hair. Everything was wrapped. Her eyes were just showing. And they didn't know if she'd live. I mean, this is pain. This is pain. And one of our young women visited her on and off for I think almost a year.

And when we get to the unit at the end on how to respond in Littleton, I'll have more specifics. But I think what you do there is you embody the love of Christ. You become the love of Christ doing everything you can physically, everything you can mentally to bless them and minimize their pain.

You want to minimize their pain and help them. You want to show them that their ugliness and the horror of what they're experiencing doesn't drive you away. And your presence becomes the presence of Christ to them.

And then you talk to them about the love of Christ for sinners. You don't even deal head up with the issue of suffering right away. You just deal with the issue of personhood and the love of Christ willing to forgive sin and accept us into His favor and give us eternal glory.

And then if they bring up the issue of why did this happen to me and how can He be a loving God, then you can talk in terms of well, I'm not sure all the details of God's purpose for this in your life, but surely we could say that part of it is He wants very much your attention.

He wants you to know Him. He wants you to love Him. He wants you to experience His forgiveness. And if it took this to get your attention, in all eternity, I think someday you would be thankful for it if you would draw near to God and let Him have your soul and yield to His wooing in your life.

And then you have to... well, are they going to be embittered at that comment? Or are they going to listen? And if they're embittered, you're patient, you listen, you say, I know this must be incredibly difficult for you to understand, and I just want to say to you, right now, God's Word to you is come, come to Me, all you who are burned and heavy laden and weary and hopeless, and I'll give you rest.

Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me and you'll find peace for your soul. I'm meek and lowly. I'll draw near to you. I'll save you. You'll lavish them with the gentle invitations of the Gospel. Because as long as a person lives, that's the warrant of the Gospel.

When a person dies in unbelief, there's no more hope. But as long as they live in unbelief, you hold out to them the hope that they can come. And if they come, God will forgive all their sins. He'll take them into His family.

He'll begin to work for them with His mighty power, turning all their miseries for their good and bring them into everlasting glory and give them a brand new body. I think I'd probably talk about this outer nature is wasting away in the hope of getting a new body.

I'm just thinking out loud here. You could do the same thing. So maybe, Linda, the reason we tend to feel stuck at first is because we begin to think in terms of the philosophical, theological problems first.

And probably we should put that a little bit farther back in the discussion. Let them raise that. We don't come with a solution to the problem of evil as we walk into the hospital. That's not the way to do pastoral care.

With pastoral care, you care first. You get your arms around people first. That's the first thing I say in regard to Littleton. You get your arms around people. You love people. You embody the tenderness of Christ as you walk through the world meeting suffering people.

Christ didn't first bring a solution to the problem of evil. When the problem was raised, who sinned that this man was born blind? He had an answer ready. But he didn't start with that. He started with touching and loving and offering and giving himself.

And that's where we should start too, I think. Another comment or question before we take point number two under this heading? Okay, let's do point two. It is not only judgment and a symbol. Suffering is not only a symbol of the horrific nature of sin and a judgment on it.

Suffering as a Warning to Repent

It is God's message of warning and awakening that the world should take seriously their desperate moral condition and repent. Revelation 9 .20. We have all these texts in Revelation. I only mention these three because I think they are like a paradigm of the way we should respond to plagues.

The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent as if they should have repented of the works of their hands so as not to worship demons and the idols of gold and silver and of brass and stone and wood which can neither see nor hear nor walk.

And they did not repent of their murders nor their sorceries nor their immoralities nor their thefts. So these plagues here were evidently both judgment and instruments to wake people to repent. And the same thing is said in Revelation 16 .9.

The same thing in 16 .11. And let me just mention here one of the texts that I have in that paper on Littleton. Here you have to be sensitive and careful at what time you do this, but when Jesus was approached with this question, what about the people on whom the tower of Siloam fell and 18 of them were crushed and they weren't doing anything.

They were just walking by and the tower fell upon them. They were crushed. And then they raised another problem. In other words, they're raising the problem of seemingly meaningless evil in the world.

Suffering. They said, what about those who were sacrificing their offerings in the temple and Pilate came with some of his band and he slew them and mingled their blood with the blood of their sacrifices and put it on the altar?

What about that, Jesus? Interpret that to us. And you remember what He said? Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. That's all He said. Which means that one of the meanings of suffering in the world is to awaken people to the fact that that sort of thing can happen.

And may happen to you before you get home and are you ready? That's the big issue in life. The big issue in life is not solving the problem of why the tower fell or why Pilate mingled their blood with their sacrifices.

The big issue is Jesus knows what happens to them when they die. Because that's eternity. This is just a little teeny space of time in which we suffer. And that's eternity. That's the big question. And so Jesus deals with the big question first.

Are you ready? You will all likewise perish. Meaning, I think, you will all meet with some kind of unexpected demise and are you ready to deal with it? My conclusion on the second point is texts like these show that the plagues and catastrophes, even when they are designed for judgment in general, also have in them a call for repentance so that anyone who will wake up to the ugliness of his sin and repent and turn to Christ could be saved.

Satan’s Continued Activity and Christ’s Triumph

Here's number three. Now, this is the one I said last night that we would get to right off the bat this morning, so it was almost off the bat. Why is Satan left? Satan is not obliterated, but permitted to torment the world because it is God's purpose to glorify the power and beauty of sacrificial, sin-forgiving grace through defeating Satan progressively through the death of Christ and through that death's application by the Spirit in Christians' lives.

Long statement. Let me try to unpack it. The devil and his angels are irredeemable. There's no hope for them. Jesus implies this when He says that the eternal fire has been prepared for the devil and his angels.

Matthew 25 .41. So, it's already prepared. He's not waiting to see if he needs to prepare it because they persevere in unbelief, but it is prepared because he knows they're not going to repent. The devil is irredeemable.

He is fixed in his evil and he will never change in all those with him. Jude confirms this truth when he says that the fallen angels are being, quote, kept in eternal bonds under the darkness for the judgment of the great day.

Kept in eternal bondage. Verse 6 of Jude. Therefore, the reason Christ withholds His judgment from them now is not to give them a chance to repent and be saved. That is one of the reasons why He withholds judgment from us now.

Not willing that any should perish. 2 Peter 3 .9 Gives time. So why then? If it's not to give them time to repent, why does He give them time to do so much more misery in the world? The key, I think, this is my sense from the New Testament, the key is that Satan is defeated in the New Testament by the death of Jesus.

Paul puts it this way referring to the death of Christ. When he had disarmed the rulers and authorities by the death of Christ, he made a public display of them having triumphed over them through Him, through Christ, or through it, the cross.

It could be translated. So if you ask, well, is He going to defeat this enemy? Is He going to nullify His effects? Is He going to put Him out of existence? The first answer we get is not only is He sovereign over Him, but by dying for sinners, He disarms the rulers and authorities and makes a public display of them triumphing over them through Him.

So evidently, in God's inscrutable wisdom, it is better to get victory over Satan through the death of Jesus than through one strong, authoritative, powerful word let them cease to exist. And they would cease to exist.

So something about God's wisdom inclines Him to defeat the devil in stages and defeat the devil through the death of His Son. Of all ways to conceive of defeating His archenemy. Here Satan, Lucifer, rebels in eternity somewhere.

God casts him and his angels out. And God designs a long warfare and a staged battle plan by which the devil is defeated in stages. And the decisive stage being through the death of the Son of God. Something really profound here about why God would choose to do it that way.

When He has every right and every authority to simply say to Satan, go to hell and leave this world alone from this day forward. And He doesn't do it. Rather, He puts His Son to death as the means by which the triumph will come over Satan.

Let's think further about this. The weapon of soul-destroying sin and guilt is thus taken out of Satan's hand. That's what happened at the cross. The weapon of soul-destroying sin and guilt is taken out of Satan's hand.

He is disarmed of the single weapon that can condemn us. Unforgiven sin. We see this in 1 Corinthians 15 .55. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So what God has done is remove and disarm Satan of the one thing by which he can condemn us. Unforgiven sin. Oh, this is important to get a handle on. Because you know Satan is not out of action right now.

He's tormenting. He's causing sickness. He's killing. He's tempting. He's doing many things. And you might say, well, he doesn't look like a disarmed enemy. But he has been disarmed because the sting of death has been removed.

And the sting of death is sin. You see, there is one way, and only one, that Satan can damn you. And that is, see to it that your sins are not forgiven. That's all. Because there's only one thing that will condemn you and send you to hell, and that is unforgiven sin.

This produces real gutsy people in the face of Satan. One of you were talking with me last night about this. If you know that because of Christ's shed blood and your simple childlike resting in that, in spite of all your imperfections and all your ongoing remaining corruption, you are resting and trusting in that.

If you know that you are reckoned righteous and all your sins are covered by an infinitely valuable blood of Christ, you can look right into the face of the devil, no matter what he's doing to you, and say, you may torment me.

You may keep me awake. You may give me nightmares. You may cause green apparitions to run across my ceiling. You may cause cats to crawl across my bed. You may cause people to hate me. You may bring against me all manner of persecution.

But you cannot damn me. I am safe in God. I think there are many saints who don't lay hold on their inheritance here and think that even though they have to do unbelievable battle with Satan, they are somehow vulnerable to destruction from Satan.

Well, they're not. We are not promised that Satan will not harass us. We are promised triumph over the one thing by which he can condemn us. He cannot have us. Now, without sin and the law to condemn and accuse and oppress us, Satan is a defeated foe.

He is disarmed. Christ has triumphed over him, not by putting him out of existence, but by letting him live and watch while millions of saints find forgiveness for their sins and turn their back on Satan because of the greater glory of the grace of Christ.

Something about that is more attractive to God than obliterating Satan, in spite of all the misery he causes. Something about that is more attractive to God. It was a costly triumph. God's values are not so easily reckoned.

If God had simply terminated Satan, then it would not have been so clear that God is both strong and thus able to terminate Satan, and infinitely more to be desired than Satan. That would not have been so clear.

God wills for His glory to shine forth not only through acts of raw physical power by which He could dispense Satan out of the universe, but also He wills for His glory to shine through acts of moral and spiritual power that display the beauty of His grace with lavish colors like in the death of His Son.