Jesus Christ as Denouement in the Theater of God-(2 Thessalonians 2:14)--5of5 -John Piper

John Piper -Desiring God 2009 National Conference http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/ConferenceMessages/ByConference/44... --or -- http://ggg-123.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Piper
My title is Jesus Christ as Dénouement in the Theater of God: Calvin and the Supremacy of Christ in All Things. The question I am trying to answer is how Jesus Christ relates to the ultimate purpose of God in the theater of God.

You can see that this question contains several sub-questions. What is the ultimate goal of God in the theater of God? How do the historical work and the eternal person of the Son of God relate to the ultimate goal of God in this theater? Is the created universe the theater of God? What difference does it make for us? And, of course, does John Calvin give us any help here?

Dénouement
I had the happy fortune of being a literature major in college, so the word dénouement is in my vocabulary. It may not be in yours. The dictionary says that the dénouement is the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved. Or: the climax of a chain of events, usually when something is decided or made clear. So I am taking it to mean roughly the climactic point where the goal of the drama reaches its decisive, but not necessarily final, expression.

And, of course, you might think it doesnt make sense to call a person the dénouement. The dénouement is an event. But what we are going to find out is that unlike everyone else in the universe, the work and the person of Jesus demand that we think of dénouement in unusual ways. More on that later.
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Calvin writes, [W]e simply interpret justification, as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as if we were righteous; and we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. Institutes, III, 11, 2. He continues, [I]t is proved, that it is entirely by the intervention of Christ's righteousness that we obtain justification before God. This is equivalent to saying that man is not just in himself, but that the righteousness of Christ is communicated to him by imputation, while he is strictly deserving of punishment. Thus vanishes the absurd dogma, that man is justified by faith, inasmuch as it brings him under the influence of the Spirit of God by whom he is rendered righteous. . . . You see that our righteousness is not in ourselves, but in Christ; that the only way in which we become possessed of it is by being made partakers with Christ, since with him we possess all riches. . . . To declare that we are deemed righteous, solely because the obedience of Christ is imputed to us as if it were our own, is just to place our righteousness in the obedience of Christ. Ibid., III, 11, 23.

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