"In chapter 1 we focused on the pleasure that God the Father has in his Son. The most important lesson to be learned from that truth is this: God is and always has been an exuberantly happy God. From all eternity, even before there were any human beings to love, God has been overflowingly happy in his love for the Son. He has never been lonely. He has always rejoiced, with overflowing satisfaction, in the glory and the partnership of his Son. The Son of God has always been the landscape of God’s excellencies and the panorama of God’s perfections, so that from all eternity God has beheld, with indescribable satisfaction, the magnificent terrain of his own radiance reflected in the Son. A second lesson to learn from God’s pleasure in the Son is that God is not constrained by any inner deficiency or unhappiness to do anything he does not want to do. If God were unhappy, if he were in some way deficient, then he might indeed be constrained from outside in some way to do what he does not want to do, in order to make up his deficiency and finally to be happy. This is what distinguishes us from God. We have an immense void inside that craves satisfaction from powers and persons and pleasures outside ourselves. Yearning and longing and desire are the very stuff of our nature. We are born deficient and needy and dissatisfied. We come into the world knowing almost nothing, and have to spend years and years going to classes or learning in the school of hard knocks, in order to fill up a little of this void of ignorance. Parents and teachers tell us to do things that we don’t like to do because we need to do them to overcome some weakness in ourselves—to increase our knowledge or strengthen our bodies or refine our manners or sharpen our intellect. But God is not like that. He has been complete and overflowing with satisfaction from all eternity. He needs no education. No one can offer anything to him that doesn’t already come from him."


Piper, John (2012-01-17). The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God (Kindle Locations 900-915). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

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