Jesus Christ Is Supreme!

John Piper writes:

Oh, that the risen, living Christ, therefore, would come to us even now by His Spirit and through His Word and reveal to us:

— the supremacy of His deity, equal with God the Father in all His attributes — the radiance of His glory and the exact imprint of His nature, infinite, boundless in all His excellencies;

— the supremacy of His eternality that makes the mind of man explode with the unsearchable thought that Christ never had a beginning, but simply always was; sheer, absolute reality while all the universe is fragile, contingent, like a shadow by comparison to His all-defining, ever-existing substance;

— the supremacy of His never-changing constancy in all His virtues and all His character and all His commitments — the same yesterday, today, and forever;

— the supremacy of His knowledge that makes the Library of Congress look like a matchbox, and all the information on the Internet look like a little 1940’s farmers almanac, and quantum physics — and everything Stephen Hawking ever dreamed — seem like a first-grade reader;

— the supremacy of His wisdom that has never been perplexed by any complication and can never be counseled by the wisest of men;

— the supremacy of His authority over heaven and earth and hell, without whose permission no man and no demon can move one inch, who changes times and seasons, removes kings and sets up kings; does according to His will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; so none can stay His hand or say to Him, "What have you done?"

— the supremacy of His providence without which not a single bird falls to the ground in the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest, or a single hair of any head turns black or white;

— the supremacy of His word that moment by moment upholds the universe and holds in being all the molecules and atoms and subatomic world we have never yet dreamed of;

— the supremacy of His power to walk on water, cleanse lepers and heal the lame, open the eyes of the blind, cause the deaf to hear and storms to cease and the dead to rise, with a single word, or even a thought;

— the supremacy of His purity never to sin, or to have one millisecond of a bad attitude or an evil, lustful thought;

— the supremacy of His trustworthiness never to break His word or let one promise fall to the ground;

— the supremacy of His justice to render in due time all moral accounts in the universe settled either on the cross or in hell;

— the supremacy of His patience to endure our dullness for decade after decade; and to hold back His final judgment on this land and on the world, that many might repent;

— the supremacy of His sovereign, servant obedience to keep His Father's commandments perfectly and then embrace the excruciating pain of the cross willingly;

— the supremacy of His meekness and lowliness and tenderness that will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick;

— the supremacy of His wrath that will one day explode against this world with such fierceness that people will call out for the rocks and the mountains to crush them rather than face the wrath of the Lamb;

— the supremacy of His grace that gives life to spiritually dead rebels and wakens faith in hell-bound haters of God, and justifies the ungodly with His own righteousness;

— the supremacy of His love that willingly dies for us even while we were sinners and frees us for the ever-increasing joy in making much of Him forever;

— the supremacy of His own inexhaustible gladness in the fellowship of the Trinity, the infinite power and energy that gave rise to all the universe and will one day be the inheritance of every struggling saint.

John Piper, "Sex and the Supremacy of Christ: Part Two," in Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, Eds. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005), 38-40.

HT: Tolle Lege