A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

This answer speaks to three things: 1. design, 2. glory, and 3. joy.

Design

The two words CHIEF END are just the old way of addressing the question: Why are you here? What is my life all about? For what main purpose did God make you? Not the many reasons we could list; but the main reason. Not the temporary reasons that might make us feel like we’re doing something productive for a season, here or there. But has it any real, driving meaning to it all? Where is it all headed? 

Obviously this question runs not only through our doctrine as Christians, but gets right to the heart of apologetics and our conversations with unbelievers, doesn’t it? And we sense that we want to do more than give the “Sunday school answer.” This first question and answer is not shallow. When we speak of God’s glory and man’s enjoyment of God, we are talking about two ends that seem to be competing ends in our fallen world, but which in God’s world come together as one chief end. And God’s world is the first and lasting world.

Even now, in spite of all of mankind’s sin, God’s world is still the only real world. Man is a broken arrow, and yet God is still the perfect Archer, and so human beings just will all land at one ultimate bulls-eye. 

I said that a chief end is the ultimate end in view. When any actor sets out in any action, an intelligent, personal actor has an end: a design, a motive, a goal, a purpose. And in order to achieve that end, such an actor uses means. These means also happen to be subordinate ends. If you were to take a snapshot of any of them, they might look like “the end.” So if you were to find me at a certain point in my day yesterday, you might take a snapshot of me getting in my car. If you were quite new to the human race you might think that this was my basic goal. If you knew a bit more about these things called cars, you would realize that getting into it to drive somewhere was a more ultimate goal, for which getting in was merely the subordinate end. But then no one drives to nowhere, and so you may also ask where I was headed, to which I reply, “I am going to the store.” But most people go to the store to obtain some product. Surely that is the chief end, right? Not yet. I will be purposeful in my shopping. So the exact products are the chief end? Well—no. The food I obtain for nourishment, the medicine for healing, and the office products for study. And even in these three ends we could keep going.

One of the attributes of God to be considered here is wisdom. Like human actors, the Divine Actor has ends. However, unlike human actors, the Divine Actor has infinite wisdom and so has no unwise ends.

What that means is that all of his ends must be the best ends. And all of the means he uses—all the subordinate ends he uses—to accomplish his chief end must themselves be perfectly wise. 

Now we have a quick question of common sense theology. Before God had made everything that he made, what reason or purpose could God have to make everything? Let us not make this too difficult. I am not yet asking the age-old question of God’s supreme end or about other ends he had. On a simpler level, if God is God, and God creates “on purpose,” then from where must he derive his end in creating? From something outside of himself or inside of himself? At the end of the day, there are really only those two possibilities—and there is nothing yet outside of himself. Therefore, God must be his own chief end. Now we are ready to get a glimpse of the place of God’s glory.

Glory

The Hebrew word kabowd (כָּבוֹד) has a root sense of a heaviness or weight. Bavinck suggests the connection as “the person who is weighty, important.”1 While another word is used for “beauty,” tipharah (תִּפְאָרָה) and “splendor,” hod (הוֹד). The Greek words doxa (δόξα) captures this main idea, although the word for “blessedness,” eulogétos (εὐλογητός) is often used as a closely related concept: the sum of all that God delights in himself. All of this is to say that the glory of a thing is not merely its radiance or splendor, but also the totality of its real value, its excellence. 

Now there is an initial difficulty that comes at this point, and we might as well get it out of the way. Paul gives us this command: 

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

TO the glory of God. There are other ways to state the difficulty. But we use such language because the Bible does. God is “bringing glory” to himself. Would this or that decision in my life “glorify” God? While the Evangelical “Sunday school answer” to everything is “Jesus,” the Reformed can often do no better with “God’s glory.” These are true answers, but they become cliches to the extent that we never reflect upon them. So what is the problem?

We might reason in this way: If God is truly self-sufficient, then what sense does it make to speak of God “being glorified” in any way? Does this radiation toward him—and specifically that this action can occur to greater or lesser degrees—not seem to suggest that God is being added to? That is an understandable impression. But the answer is No. And in order to see why, we make a further distinction. Let us make a distinction between God’s intrinsic glory and God’s extrinsic glory. The first belongs to him property speaking. The second is a manner of speaking about the creature’s reckoning with, or conformity to, that glory which simply is. 

That his own glory is God’s chief end is made manifest throughout the Scriptures. Psalm 138:2 says it in one way, “for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.” And then, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens” (Ps. 8:1). This is true of all that God does. He says about redeeming Israel from all their sin: 

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another” (Isa. 48:11). 

So for this same chief end he has made human beings: 

I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made (Isa. 43:6-7). 

God’s chief end is what determines man’s chief end. We don’t get to decide our own chief end. We can “self-identify” all we want. But the Bible calls the human being a God-madebeing, a God-determined being, a God-glorifying being. God will have his glory in the end from every human being. The only questions remaining for those human beings are: Will it be in the glorification of God’s justice or his mercy? Will it be willingly in inconceivable joy, or will one be among those whose knee will bow and whose tongues will confess Christ as Lord under the greatest of all regrets and terrors?5

Joy

God made us as happiness-seeking beings. Even Question 21 of the Children’s Catechism testifies to this: “In what condition did God make Adam and Eve?” Answer: “He made them holy and happy.” Now supposing it is said, “Well, sure, but if we had to choose one or the other?” But why should we choose between holiness and happiness—between God’s glory and man’s joy? God has made them to go together. Someone will say: SIN. “Sin is why we must choose between them; because sin has spoiled our joy and distorted our definition of happiness!” I agree. Sin has done this. 

However, there are two things worth thinking about, which I hope will prevent us from leaving things at that. First, we have to look at God’s design in its objective, ongoing sense. Second, we must look at how what is distorted in sin is being restored, even now, in the gospel. To see the first (the design) let’s return to our discussion about ends. While this may seem obscure, it is actually related to every area of our doctrine and our whole worldview as Christians.

However one may weigh in the balance John Piper’s view of justification in terms of how that positions the role of the affections in evaluating one’s conversion—and I think there are legitimate critiques to be made—we must still insist that the foundational principle of his so-called “Christian Hedonism” is correct. Leave aside the label in thinking through this. It is imperative that we understand God’s chief end of glory through the subordinate end of human happiness. If we resist this, then we are left, logically, with two such ends, the lesser end of the creature, as either 1. created at cross-purposes with God’s glory or else 2. a by-product of creation, 3. a divine afterthought, or 4. something that emerged on its own apart from God. Any of those implications falls short of classical Christian theism. 

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said this about the end of happiness:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.6

In other words, it is psychologically impossible for a conscious, volitional being such as an image of God is to be moved but toward his or her own good. This does not change whether that perceived good is his real highest good or whether he is deceived. The motion toward that end is still the very fabric of motive. And the key is that it makes a difference to those who see such a mover. Some end will be commended—the worth of that end—will be, in a sense, “argued for” in the public movement of that pleasure seeker called man.

Jonathan Edwards reflected on the glory of God and enjoyment of man coming together as one. Here is how he put things: 

God is glorified not only by his glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. God made the world that he might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory . . . both with the mind and the heart. He that testifies his having an idea of God’s glory doesn’t glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation i.e., his heartfelt commendation or praise of it and his delight in it.7

Let us return to that distinction between God’s intrinsic glory (which cannot be added to in God) and his extrinsic glory (which can add or subtract in the world, or outside of God). What Edwards was driving at is that God’s extrinsic glory is at stake most in personal agents that are like God in knowing and delighting in what is known. God designed the image of God to be a lens of God’s greatness, which can be seen more clearly when that image is in intentional, joy-expecting pursuit of more of God, so that between God’s honor and human happiness there is no final contradiction. 

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Ps. 73:25-26).

We have no need to fear that human happiness may be defined, in the end, against God’s glory. I say “in the end,” fully aware that it does so now. Yet even now, there is a renewal of ends in that whole course of the renewal of God’s image. There has to be, lest God should be making for himself a new creation which honors him dispassionately, or merely because we must. We know that God is far too serious about his glory for that. 

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1. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:252.

2. Verses that use this word for “beauty” in the sense of glory include Exodus 28:2; 1 Chronicles 22:5; Psalm 71:8.

3. Verses that use this word for “splendor” in the sense of glory include 1 Chronicles 16:21, 29; Psalm 45:3; Habakkuk 3:3; Zechariah 6:13.

4. cf. Matthew 25:31; Romans 11:36; 1 Corinthians 11:7; Ephesians 3:13, 21; 1 Peter 4:11; Revelation 5:13.

5. Philippians 2:10-11

6. Pascal, Pensées, 425.

7. Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World,