“Isn’t she a doll?” “Have you ever seen a more loveable face?”

 The two hour flight was filled with attempts to persuade me. To these new grandparents, working on the convictions of those around them was an involuntarily part of the job. Loving their grand daughter seemed to include the act of telling others to love her. Their admiration alone was not enough. They find their adored two-year old thoroughly worth the adoration of many. 

 I suspect it is a behavior recognizable to more than proud parents and beaming grandparents. We delight to commend what we enjoy not only because it expresses our enjoyment but because it also seems somehow to complete it. “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,” the song goes. Saying it aloud, bidding others to see what we see, sharing it with friend or stranger, somehow magnifies our delight. Ravi Zacharias tells a story about standing at the southernmost point of Africa where the Indian Ocean thunderously collides with the Atlantic. Not having his wife there to share in the grandeur of the scene, he was overcome with the longing to carve her name on a rock beside him. 

Like any of us who have ever commanded in excitement “Look at that!” the psalmist wants everyone to see what he sees. He not only praises God with his own song, but asks others to join him. “Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth!” (Psalm 47:2-3). In his delight, David calls on others to taste and see the goodness of God. “O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together” (Psalm 34:3). He has found God worthy of praise even beyond his own.   

 Yet to many this call to praise is problematic. Friedrich Nietzsche once stated, “I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.” C.S. Lewis stated a similar difficulty in his own coming to belief in God. He found troubling the thought that God ordained his own praise. He was also irritated by the clamorous demand of believing people to join them in praise of their God.  

 It is true that such invocations to praise are often heard, and heard also in the mouth of God. “The people whom I formed for myself will declare my praise,” God says through the prophet Isaiah. It is a demand at which we would cringe in the mouth of man, woman, or child. If the 2-year-old my traveling grandparents find so loveable suddenly demanded that they continually fawn over her delightfulness, they would likely find her something other than delightful. But what if she approached them with arms extended and the edict on her lips “love me”? The command to love would only further be intertwined with their delight of her. 

 How much more so might this be true of one who is worthy to receive glory, honor, and power?

 The first inquiry of the Westminster Catechism concludes that the chief end of humanity is to love God and enjoy God forever. As praise is the spontaneous by-product of delight, the command to love and the promise to enjoy are paired inseparably. It is this hopeful alliance that C.S. Lewis eventually came to see. Knowledge of God brims forth in us the overwhelming desire to praise God, while God’s worthiness stirs within us a longing for all to join in.  

 Similarly, it is not insignificant that the Father’s love and approval of the Son was a declaration He chose to share with the world. When Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River, the Spirit of God descended like a dove and God declared: “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”(1) The Father shared with the world his love for the Son by the Spirit so that we might take notice and come to delight in him also. Christ’s worthiness is a truth God wanted all to hear and know—and subsequently, to praise along with Him. 

 Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

 (1) Matthew 3:17.