Being admitted to the mental hospital didn’t feel like God’s mercy to me. It seemed more like a cruelty. I wanted to be “depression-free.” I thought that was a God-honoring goal to strive toward. With a household to run and a family to care for, there seemed no time to be downcast. I was tired of being sidelined by sadness.

But I was worn by conflicts and child-rearing challenges. Though I had tried so hard for so long to “keep calm and carry on,” the continual striving to be emotionally stable seemed futile. I would feel “fine” only for a time. Then I would crash.

Perhaps the worst sensation of all was the perceived absence of the Lord I loved. I couldn’t reconcile my sorrows with his apparent indifference. It seemed as if he had “forgotten to be gracious” to me — as if “in anger” he had “shut up his compassion” (Psalm 77:9). Surely God saw how hard I’d been trying and knew how long I had been crying. So why let me sit in a darkness that I’d been striving for years to stay out of? I felt so ashamed of my struggles. I felt like a God-forsaken failure.

It wasn’t until I was hospitalized that God let me hear how cruel my self-talk had become. I was so determined to be free from depression that the restless pursuit of that goal became my motive for living. In desperation, my hope shifted off of Christ and onto a change I couldn’t produce on my own. So, whenever hurt and heartbreak left me feeling overwhelmed again — whenever I couldn’t “snap out” of my miserable mood — I felt like an embarrassment of a believer. I despaired of life itself.

Unbeknownst to me — yet fully known to God — desperation had driven me away from his grace (Galatians 3:3; 5:4).

Unexpected Rescue

Understandably, what I wanted most in that season of motherhood was deliverance. But unexpectedly, God rescued me instead from my merciless mindset. He already knew I had no righteousness of my own to boast in; I was the one who had trouble accepting that fact. I couldn’t even leave the locked hall I was on, let alone escape the prison of darkness. I viewed my experience of depression as not only undesirable, but unforgivable.

God saw how I condemned myself. I had been treating my Savior’s blood as an incomplete covering for the dark night of the soul, as if I should have been able to suffer my sorrows without difficulty — suffer them perfectly.

That week in the ward, I came to see God’s compassion toward me more clearly, and not because he ordained a miraculous change in my circumstances. Rather, he showed me it wasn’t his voice that was roaring with condemnation. His words were, “Come to me,” not “Get over it”; “Take my rest,” not “Try harder” (Matthew 11:28). He was inviting me to take up a yoke I could manage in my weary condition — a burden far lighter than I had been forcing myself to carry.

Jesus wasn’t the one insisting that I pull myself out of the pit. He was the one calling me to take refuge in him as he walked me through the dark.

God Not Hurried

As I learned after years of fighting against despondency, what we count as God’s slowness or indifference is actually his patience toward us as he works redemptively in our lives (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 1:16). Yes, there are times when a fix-it-fast approach is an appropriate response to the problem at hand. But God’s methods for mending the hearts and reviving the spirits of his people are often less hurried. While the Great Physician can be trusted to do this restorative work according to his promise, he does so at a pace that seems good to him and suits his eternal purposes.

Despite our sense of urgency, there are no emergencies to him who holds our times in his hands (Psalm 31:15).

God’s unhurried pace can be a challenging reality for us to grasp, particularly in depression. When God’s help seems unbearably slow, it can appear as though he’s withholding it altogether. And when we fear he has shut up his compassion and forgotten to be gracious toward us, we may think we must climb out of the pit of despair on our own. Hurt by what seems like a lack of sympathy, we may groan to God as Job in his angst: “You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me” (Job 30:21).

Feeling God-forsaken, we may double down on our efforts to be strong and steady in ourselves. Perhaps we’re even able to feel “fine” or “better” for a period of time. But ultimately, self-reliance proves itself unreliable. We crash and despair of life itself. We need outside help. We need rescue.

We need mercy.

Timely, Tender Mercy

I confess — I felt as if God had turned cruel to me in that sorrowful season of motherhood. But in the hospital, the Spirit helped me to reinterpret God’s dealings with me. Through his word, I was reminded that the Lord is never surprised by his people’s desperation. My Maker knew how helpless I’d feel on dark days before a single one of them came to pass (Psalm 139:16). He foresaw every hardship, conflict, grief, and pain I would endure. He knew every one of the ways I would sin in word, thought, and deed.

He knew I would need help, rescue, mercy.

Then the Spirit testified to God’s nature — that he loves to comfort (not condemn) the downcast (2 Corinthians 7:6). That he has pity on his weak and needy children (Psalm 72:13). That for the sake of his holy name, the Father of mercies sent his Son to suffer my sorrows perfectly. According to his “tender mercy” (Luke 1:78), the Lord stepped into my darkness to do what I could not.

“For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). At the perfect time, Jesus saved me from experiencing eternal darkness (Romans 5:6). He patiently worked himself to death to deliver me from perpetual sorrow. To see Jesus at the apex of his anguish is to perceive his mercy more clearly in my own.

Better Motive

According to God’s merciful plan, Jesus was raised to life from the deepest darkness of all. That meant underneath my pit of despair were the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27). And those strong and steady arms held forth the hands that knit me together — hands that were not embarrassed to be engraved with my name (Isaiah 49:16). These palms were pierced for me so I could have hope in my miserable-yet-momentary affliction (2 Corinthians 4:17). What more work was there for me to do but rest myself in them?

I still had the gospel to share and Christ’s love to give. There was no better motive to keep carrying on when the darkness wouldn’t lift.

The week I’d spent in the mental hospital didn’t feel like mercy to me at the time, but the kindness God gave me there led my heart to peace and repentance (Romans 2:4). I didn’t have to be depression-free before I could live for the glory of God; Christ’s sinless life and sacrifice freed me from the unbearable burden to be perfect in myself. Since Jesus obeyed God’s will unto death, I could die to my desire for quick relief and live for walking by faith, one small step at a time.

I couldn’t feel better fast, but I could entrust myself “to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). I could learn to rest in Christ as long as the darkness lasts.

I loved Dan Fuller. I still do, the way one does when the beloved slips from you by degrees until he dies at 97. And yet lives. Dan died in the wee hours of June 21, 2023.

He was the most influential teacher I ever had. It was the kind of influence that pierces to bone and marrow. The kind that changes the mental and emotional DNA. The kind that touches everything, forever. My eternity will be different because of Dan Fuller.

Grand Permission and Obligation

He was professor of hermeneutics at Fuller Seminary during my three years there, 1968 to 1971. I took every course he offered, starting with the required freshman hermeneutics class — call it a door to a new world, like a wardrobe opening to Narnia. Call it a jarring reveille wakening me from a 22-year sleep of inobservance. Call it the grand Permission and Obligation: you may and you must pursue joy. Call it the gift of a skill — to wring from texts their lifeblood, with a method called “arcing.” Call it a future, a life.

“Daniel Fuller was the most influential teacher I ever had.”

Something else happened in that class of a different kind. A single sentence was spoken that went deep into my fragile self-understanding. I entered seminary uncertain of my abilities. I was a B student at Wheaton College. This did not inspire confidence that I could excel in seminary or go on for doctoral studies.

One assignment in the hermeneutics class was to write a review essay of James Smart’s The Interpretation of Scripture. As Dr. Fuller was handing back the papers, we were clustered around his desk. He did not know me by name. It was a huge class. He looked at the paper, and said, “John Piper.” As I took the paper from his hand, he looked at me and said, “You’ve got ability.” Someone who mattered had just built into me, “You can do this.”

Hermeneutics for Eggheads

Then came 22 hours of electives — Bible, Bible, Bible. Not “introductions.” Not “overviews.” Not “surveys.” Not “Forschungsgeschichte.” But put your nose in these propositions, and don’t come up till you smell the reality — not just the words, not just the ideas, but the reality. Class after class, Bible book after Bible book, forming for a lifetime the habit of discontent until a text yields, and gives up its riches.

There was one exception — a course not focused on the Bible. Dr. Fuller announced it on the bulletin board outside his office: “Hermeneutics for Eggheads.” Six of us signed up.

We met at his house once a week until our heads hurt, as we Adlerized Fuchs, Ebling, Robinson, Gadamer, and Hirsch. “Adlerized” — as in Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book. No talking back to a book until you can state the author’s view to his satisfaction. Then sic ’em. Flag every factual mistake, every inattention to relevant facts, every non sequitur. Who would have thought that the first book to be mastered in graduate school is a book that should be mastered in high school — Adler. Fuller knew his plebes.

Then came the climactic, required (desired!) integrating course, “Unity of the Bible.” This was not a course in mixing paints and knowing brushes and learning line and form and perspective. This was the completion of the canvas, the panorama. The effort to say the unsayable: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

This was the end for which God created the world. This was seven-point Calvinism without the name. This was Jonathan Edwards marinated in the whole Bible. “The beams of glory come from God, and are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and God is the beginning, middle and end in this affair” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 8:531).The climactic course was the merging of theology into doxology. Knowing into enjoying.

Prayers, Promises, and Warnings

One of the earliest signs in seminary that great changes were happening was the effect of Fuller’s teaching on our prayers. Noël and I were newly married (December 1968). Right away we put in place the practice of praying together every night (a practice still in place 55 years later). Then came the discoveries:

The goal of God in everything he does is the glorification of God. It was God himself who told us to pray for his name to be hallowed. So we did.
The goal of the human soul in all we do is to be satisfied in God above all things. It was God himself who demanded that we serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2). God himself told us to pray, “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love” (Psalm 90:14). So we did.
The goal of persevering faith is reached by a proper fear of unbelief. This was God’s word: “They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear” (Romans 11:20). So we prayed for the fear of unbelief.

Dr. Fuller taught these realties. He pointed to them in actual biblical texts. Look at these words, these phrases, these propositions, these arguments. Then he would look at us, with utter seriousness and affection, and say, “We will go to hell if we ignore these things.” All the glories, all the promises, all the threatenings are there to help us fight the fight of faith. They are there to prevent the shipwreck of faith. They are there to get us home. It is suicide to ignore the promises and threatenings of Scripture.

After Class Ended

It was the urgency of the classes that gave them their weight. The skills, the truths, the realities were all kindling. But the fire was the urgency — the blood-earnestness. There was absolutely no academic gamesmanship. This was life and death. If you didn’t feel this, you shouldn’t be in the ministry. Because real ministry is an aroma from death to death and life to life (2 Corinthians 2:15–16).

“There was absolutely no academic gamesmanship. This was life and death.”

He loved us. I felt it in class. And even more, I felt it after class. These were the best of times. The two-hour give-and-take of the Galatians class was over. And four or five of us would not move. The others left the room. Dan sat down, and for another hour he would respond to our questions. What made these times powerful was not that he had all the answers, but that he was as eager as we were to ask the right questions and together find what the text actually meant. He was vulnerable. He was actually excited to learn things from our interaction. This was electric for neophytes.

Not everyone loved Dan Fuller the way some of us did. There were a handful of students in that first hermeneutics class who sat at the back and rolled their eyes at his stammering voice and his radical commitment to rationality. Once one of them complained out loud in class that Fuller was too rational. Dan’s response was a life-changer for me. He said,

Why can’t we be like Jonathan Edwards, who could be writing a treatise that would challenge the most philosophical minds, and then break into a paragraph of devotion that would warm your grandmother’s heart?

I knew almost nothing of Jonathan Edwards then. But that one sentence sent me running to the library to find that signature mixture of reason and emotion. And until June 21, 2023, I would have said that Edwards was my most influential dead theologian.

Great Logic of Heaven

Now the fight is over. It was a good fight. For decades he taught us and showed us how to fight it. Near the end, as the outer man wasted away, others fought for him, reciting into his almost deaf ears the promises of God. The precious promises of God. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). This is the great reason why Daniel Fuller loved logic. This is the great logic of heaven. This is the most glorious a fortiori.

Because God did the hardest thing — give his Son — he will most certainly do the easier — give us all things. Everything good for us. Faith-sustaining grace for 97 years, and now face to face with the Son of God.

Life as usual, many will come to realize, was never life as usual.

When Christ returns, many will discover too late that they lived within a dream. Years came and years went. Spring turned to autumn, autumn to winter. They grew and grew old but never awoke. “Normal life” lied to them. So, Jesus foretells,

As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37–39)

The world-ending return of Jesus will be as the world-ending days of Noah. Of what did Noah’s days consist? Busy people unaware — eating, drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, going about life “as usual.” The very morning of the flood, people simply concerned themselves with whatever laid before them. The immediate seemed most urgent, most real. Planning meals, changing diapers, preparing weddings, working, buying, and selling — these seemed to them the greatest verities of life. Until the rain began to fall.

Texture of Days

Like many today, the people of Noah’s day abstracted the meaning of life from the texture of their average days.

“Life as usual, many will come to realize, was never life as usual.”

They touched Wednesday and it felt like every other Wednesday. They began work and finished work. They ate, ate again, and finished their work to eat. They played with kids on the floor. Busied with homework and house projects. They talked and listened, laughed and yawned, rose from sleep and slept — nothing extraordinary. Each day didn’t feel like it held eternal significance. Nothing otherworldly felt at stake. Today didn’t feel like anything but today.

God, demons, souls, eternity didn’t grow before their eyes like grass that needs mowing. They did not stir to consider the unseen. And when they did, the unreality of it seemed as implausible as rain drowning a dry land days away from sea. They intuited what is ultimate about life from the ordinary experiences of life. A fatal mistake. And as the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Man and His Boat

While they considered their daily planners, anxious about what they considered the real contents of Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays, Noah worked with his sons on the unlikely, the unthinkable. While the world ate and drank, he labored. While they went on with things as usual, he and his sons prepared a stadium-sized boat to shelter the family. “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household” (Hebrews 11:7).

Imagine the scene. Decade after decade, children were born, diapers were changed, houses were built, adults looked out their window and saw what they had seen since childhood: Noah and his sons laboring on the ship. And Noah spoke a message as strange as the boat he was building: he warned of divine judgment. Perhaps some listened the first week. But eventually, the listeners needed to get back to real life.

Noah’s real life was different. Even though he too ate and drank and arranged marriages for his three sons (Genesis 7:13), he did these with an ear bent to hear God’s voice, a hammer in his hand for God’s work, and eyes returning to the skies waiting for God’s promise. His feasting was not forgetful. His drinking was not distracting. His giving in marriage did not deter his mission. Unlike the citizens of this world, he lived ready, he lived prepared. He believed God that the waters would come.

As decades multiplied, Noah kept working, kept proclaiming, kept resisting the temptation to stop and return to life as usual.

Change in the Weather

As it will be at Jesus’s second coming, an unexpected day arrived.

The day began like any other. Wrinkled faces and weathered eyes gazed out worn windows to still find that odd man — now herding skunk, geese, and deer into his finished ship. They could still hear his spent voice saying, “Turn from your sins, repent and cry to God. He is willing to spare you from this impending judgment. This ship stretches long enough for all who would come.”

Perhaps they felt sorry for the old fool. Windows closed, and the day’s cares consumed their thoughts. But that day, Noah and his family entered the ark not to be seen again. “The Lord shut him in” (Genesis 7:16), and the windows of heaven opened.

So, what’s the point? The point is that normal days, then and now, may not be what we think. “Normal days,” unconcerned with eternity, unconcerned with God, sin, and with the second coming of Christ, are fatal fictions.

Lie of Normal Days

What most experience as normal Wednesdays, normal dinner times, normal weekends, arrive as waves carrying judgment and eternity ever closer. The important thing about these “last days” is that they precede the return of the King. But experience will, should we let it, cause us to eat, host, drink, tell stories, laugh, watch the game, go on dates, marry and give in marriage unmindful and unprepared.

Such were the days of Noah. They did not realize that the great thing, the true thing, the most relevant thing dwelt above their experience. A world exists elsewhere; a place where Ultimate Reality lives. And even now his hand grips the doorknob. Consider, what is more real to you, this week’s to-do list or the promise of Christ’s return?

Reality Approaches

When he comes, all plans for next week will die. Books will go unread. Weddings will be canceled. Dinner plans, erased. In a moment, the unbelieving will hear the ark door shut. Life will cast off its common cloak as the wall between worlds collapses.

“When Christ comes, all plans for next week will die. . . . In a moment, most of humanity will hear the ark door shut.”

Jesus calls the world to prepare for him: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44).

To prepare is not to build a boat in the backyard, but to eat and drink, speak and marry all while looking and waiting for Christ’s promised coming. We live mindful of eternal souls. We live expecting rain. We live in reverent fear of God. What does the world see you building? Is there anything in your life that can only be explained by Christ and his return?

Do not be deceived by the texture of the weeks and years as they pass. In each, eternity is at stake. In each, he approaches. Ultimate Reality will not linger out of sight much longer. Forever happiness and forever horror lay just beyond the clouds. Are you ready for his return?