One of my favorite verses is Ephesians 2:7 —
so that in the ages to come, He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
God’s mercy, love, and grace that result in the salvation of sinners is for the purpose of demonstrating the magnitude of God’s grace toward His people (note that the great demonstration of His grace is demonstrated not to the mass of all humanity, but in particular to redeemed humanity — those who trust in Christ).
Believers in Christ understand that God is great — infinite, marvelous, glorious and worth glorifying, omniscient, omnipotent, just, righteous, and kind. But nothing (I use that word intentionally) demonstrates the depth of God’s grace as does His work of redeeming sinful man. No where will you see love like you will when you see God loving (loving!) men who are His enemies and who reciprocate His love with hatred! Yet not only does He love these, and not only does He adopt them into His family, and not only does He dispense saving and daily grace to them, but He will forever dispense that grace to perpetually save and redeem them as a demonstration of His kindness.
This verse thus affirms two correspondingly glorious truths — it will take an eternity for God to dispense all His grace on His people. And because it will take that long for Him to give that grace, it will likewise take an eternity for us to understand and comprehend the wonder and extent of God’s grace. For all of eternity (day after day and each day, for all eternity, if you will), He will continue dispensing grace to His people; and for all eternity we will thus have unfolded to us new truth about the reality of His grace. What joy shall thus eternally fill our hearts!
John Piper, who has stimulated more thinking on this topic for me than any other writer, summarizes this idea when he writes (quoting, in part, Jonathan Edwards):
the implication is that our union with God, in the all-satisfying experience of his glory, can never be complete, but must be increasing with intimacy and intensity forever and ever. The perfection of heaven is not static. Nor do we see at once all there is to see—for the finite cannot take in all of the infinite. Our destiny is not to become God. Therefore, there will always be more for a finite creature to know and enjoy of God.…
Moreover, he [Edwards] says our eternal rising into more and more of God will be a
rising higher and higher through that infinite duration, and . . . not with constantly diminishing (but perhaps an increasing) [velocity] . . . [to an] infinite height; though there never will be any particular time when it can be said already to have come to such a height (The End for Which God Created the World, ¶ 279), in God’s Passion for His Glory, [Wheaton: Crossway, 1998]).
It will take an infinite number of ages for God to be done glorifying the wealth of his grace to us – which is to say he will never be done. And our joy will increase forever and ever. Boredom is absolutely excluded in the presence of an infinitely glorious God.
Words of Grace 