While there are many very practical applications to be drawn from these thoughts in Scripture, I will defer those thoughts to another time and place. We have completed a whole package of thought. Beginning with Psalm 16, we saw that the Psalmist’s confidence was in the fact that he could always see the LORD before him. It was because of that vision that he could not be shaken. The God of the Universe was at his right hand! Not only was this psalm applied to David in his distress, but to the Lord Jesus as well, as quoted of Him in the New Testament.

We saw that this ability to see is critical if one is to remain unshaken as were David and Christ. We showed from Hebrews 11 and other texts that faith is the ability to see God, spiritual things and God’s kingdom. We then saw what it was about God and the eternal pleasures that form His environment that has such a motivating force in the Christian life. We had to conclude that it was His beauty. We traced the essence of God’s beauty to the kind intentions in His heart toward His special people.

We looked at those intentions and saw that God not only lives in an environment of beauty, but He desires beauty for His people. He desires delightful pleasures for us forever. Those pleasures begin now as we gaze into spiritual things that captivate our souls. We come to grasp them more fully when we enter God’s presence and are glorified. We discussed what it means to be glorified—God’s kind intentions in that.

Further we saw that God’s intention is marriage. We traced at some length the theme of love and marriage through some verses in Song of Songs and Psalm 45. The beautiful aroma of that marriage lingers throughout eternity. The King is enthralled by the beauty of the bride, and she is enamoured with the King.

We then came back to the results of this ability to see the beauty of God. It really does produce the motivation to live a holy life. We saw from Psalm 27 that the person who gazes upon the beauty of the Lord is fearless, even in the middle of actual calamity. Every person who completely understands the kind intentions of God is so satisfied with every detail of life, both positive and negative, that it is obvious that his confidence is not derived from his present circumstances, but the kind intentions of God toward him.

A final note before I move on to something else.

I have written these pages and you have read them, warts and all (as Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones would say). I have been astounded by how many times they have been read. As I write, these pages have been read, cumulatively, more than 60 000 times. Eternal Pleasures 44 has been the most popular. But in spite of all of these reads, I have only received one comment, and that was not suitable to post on SemonAudio. If you have been blessed by this series, please drop me a note.