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A Verse
Psalm 16:2
I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have not good thing.”
A Comment
A few weeks ago, I slowly started working through a book by Herman Bavinck. The book's title, at least in English, is The Wonderful Works of God. It has also gone by the title, Our Reasonable Faith. This book is Bavinck’s adaptation of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics. He opens the book with this sentence: “God, and God alone is man’s highest good.”1
When I first read that sentence, I was both captivated and puzzled. What a thought? The highest good that humanity can have is God Himself. Yet, I wondered, “What does it mean for God to be humanity’s highest good?”
As I read his first chapter, it became more and more clear that Bavinck was teaching that humanity lives in emptiness apart from God. As he concludes the chapter with a paraphrase of St. Augustine. “The heart of man was created for God and it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart.”2
We search for all sorts of solutions to the emptiness that we feel in our lives. We look for it in our careers, our possessions, and in the accolades that others give us. We seek it in our own passions and interests. Yet, if we do not ultimately “know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He sent,” then we do not know eternal life. We do not know what we were created to know. We will find no lasting, soul-satisfying good. For, as the Psalmist declares in Psalm 16:2, “apart from the Lord, we have no good thing.”
I wonder how this truth might transform our week. If instead of seeking our highest good in creation, what if we sought our highest good in knowing the Creator of all things? What if our relationship to God’s gifts was gratitude instead of idolatry? What if our hope was found in God Himself and not the things of this world? Maybe we would be able, with the psalmist, to say, “apart from the Lord, I have no good thing.”
A Prayer
Would you join me in praying that we would seek God as our highest Good?
A Blessing
The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26)
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God (Glenside, Pennsylvania: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 1.
Ibid., 6.
Our Highest Good