What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

Few realities in human life are as captivating, fulfilling, and elusive as friendship. Most of us have tasted its deep and dynamic potential for good at some point along our journeys, and yet most of us can also testify to having neglected friendship, maybe for years. Maybe for decades. As Drew Hunter observes, “Friendship is, for many of us, one of the most important but least thought about aspects of life” (Made for Friendship, 23). How much time do you spend thinking about your friendships?

Many of us give our friendships less attention than they deserve, and we suffer for it. The absence of good friends slowly starves everything else we do. A husband without good friends will be a worse husband. A mother without good friends will be a worse mother. A pastor, a doctor, a teacher, and an engineer will all be less effective at their callings without the support and camaraderie of friends. And this thread weaves quietly through Scripture. How many saints can you think of who do something worth imitating while friendless?

To be sure, Jesus stormed the grave by himself. It had to be so. And yet even he spent most of his life and ministry with a handful of guys. And as the cross drew near, he said to them, “No longer do I call you servants . . . but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). He may have died alone, but he lived among brothers, because friendship is an essential part of being fully human.

Unnecessary and Vital Love

That being said, friendship is an unusual relationship because it’s not essential to existence. It’s why friendship is so often neglected — and, ironically, why it holds so much power and potential.

C.S. Lewis writes, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival” (Four Loves, 90). We spend tens of hours a week on work because we would die without food and shelter. Friendship isn’t feeding the kids or paying the mortgage. But it can make parenting richer and more bearable, and make a home feel a lot more like home.

We may be able to live — to eat, drink, work, sleep, and survive — without friends, but what kind of life would that be? The truly good life, we all know by experience, is a shared life. Lewis goes on,

Our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels. (98)

“We may be able to eat, drink, work, sleep, and survive without friends, but what kind of life would that be?”

Unnecessary and angelic — this describes the mysterious reality of friendship. It raises, or even removes, the ceiling on all our other experiences. Most of what we love to do, we love to do all the more with friends. Those who find meaningful friendship experience a nearly super-human life. Why? Because they get to see more of God, and because they get so much more done, together.

Personal Windows into God

How does Christian friendship raise us above the unremarkable rhythms of our humanity? First, by intimately introducing us to more of God’s creativity and supremacy. Those who see him together will see more of him. Lewis captures this capacity of friendship when he writes,

Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. . . . The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. (79)

The beauty and worth of God cannot be exhausted by one pair of eyes, by one finite mind and heart. Therefore, two really can see more than one. The more we share of him, the more we have of him. Surely, this is one reason why God plans to redeem people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, right (Revelation 7:9). Because whatever makes each of them unique prepares them to notice and treasure dimensions of Christ that millions of others might miss.

So it is in friendship. As we gaze at God together, over months and years and longer, walking through joys and sorrows, victories and losses, blessings and adversity, we get to see him through each other’s eyes. Worship is communal and contagious. Every human life has the potential to be a unique window into the divine. Because that’s who God is — Father, Son, and Spirit forever adoring and glorifying one another.

Courage in Flesh and Blood

As friendships help us see more of God, though, they also unleash us to live more radically for God. What good have any of us done in the world without the help or encouragement of friends? As you take yourself back through anything you’ve accomplished in life and ministry, and then allow yourself to look around for a minute, what do you see? For many of us, we see faces. The most defining moments of our lives have been most defined not by addresses, degrees, or promotions, but by people — often, by friends.

Hunter highlights the unusual and spiritual productivity of friendship:

One of the greatest gifts we can offer our friends is sheer encouragement. As we listen and light up to their ideas, we stir their souls into action. We lift their hearts and spur them on. Much of what is truly good in the world is the fruit of friendship. (71)

Why did Jesus send the disciples out in twos (Mark 6:7)? Perhaps he was concerned for their safety on the road (a kind of grown-up buddy-system). It seems far more likely to me that he wanted them each to have built-in, by-their-side courage to keep going when ministry got hard. He knew they would do far more good as twelve pairs than they would on twenty-four different paths. He knew they would conquer sin and Satan together in ways they couldn’t alone.

Friendship Isn’t About Friendship

These two insights about friendship — that friends helps us see more of God and that they free us to do more for his glory — explain what makes friendship precious. And what makes it possible. Good friendships, after all, aren’t about friendship, which means we won’t experience them by focusing on them. Again, Lewis, wisely observes,

Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly every about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some interest. (78)

“Good friendships aren’t about friendship, which means we won’t experience them by focusing on them.”

Lovers often find one another looking for love. Friends find one another while chasing something else. They providentially collide while striving after God, while studying his word, while loving their families, while meeting needs in the church, while discipling younger believers, while pursuing the lost. “The very condition of having Friends,” Lewis continues, “is that we should want something else besides Friends. . . . Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers” (85).

If you want to experience real friendship, go hard after God, take bigger risks to glorify him with your life, and then look around to see who’s running with you.

Audio Transcript

Today we find our way back to a familiar theme on the podcast, popular in emails that you send to us. It’s a topic that’s generated probably more questions to us than any other topic that I can think of — questions about Satan. You have sent in over three thousand emails now asking about him. Is he real? How and why did he first sin? Why is he not snuffed out but instead allowed to roam around? There are questions about his chief strategies for killing our joy and making us want to give up on life. And can a Christian get handed over to Satan? Can the devil devour us? And there are questions about why Satan has so much authority in this world. Questions like these have been addressed in the past in several different episodes that I’ve attempted to draw together in one place so that you can see the ground we’ve covered. I did that in the new APJ book on pages 331–353.

Today, a listener named Taylor writes in with a specific question for you, Pastor John. He asks this: “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for your ministry! I know that Satan and demons have tremendous physical power and influence over the world, the material world. My question is about his power over the spiritual world. Why did God give Satan such immense power to blind people to the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4) and to snatch from hearts the very saving gospel so that people are left without any hope of salvation (Luke 8:12)? Why was he given such immense spiritual power to abort the gospel in the lives of sinners?”

When the Bible opens, it doesn’t even pause for a moment to give an account for why Satan is there. Later on, there are hints that he’s a fallen angel and that there was rebellion in heaven. But that’s not a full explanation for where he comes from, because it’s very difficult to explain why a personal, rational being — an angel — who is created perfect, would ever find a motive to rebel in a perfect universe. That’s not easy to explain. I don’t think we have a sufficient explanation for that. That’s one of those things that’s cloaked in mystery for now, I think.

Why the Long Leash?

Nevertheless, even though we may not be able to fully explain why Satan came into being, we know he does exist, and he was there from the beginning of mankind, because he tempts Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis. We also know that Jesus commanded “the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27). That’s an amazing statement. He said to Satan in the wilderness, “Be gone!” and he was gone (Matthew 4:10). And we know at the end of history, God will throw Satan into the lake of fire so that he can’t influence God’s people anymore or harm us anymore (Revelation 20:10).

So, from all this, we know God could have bound Satan completely the moment he fell or at any point in history in between. We know he doesn’t, because in the end the whole New Testament is telling the story of Satan’s activity in this world and how he deceives, how he tempts, how we need to do warfare against the principalities and powers.

“Seeing and savoring the superior beauty of Christ is the way we defeat the evil one.”

And Taylor, who’s asking us this question, points out that he’s blinding people. He’s blinding people. And he wants to know what is God’s reason — for God does all things in wisdom and for reasons; he doesn’t act whimsically — for not destroying Satan until the end and giving him such a long leash, especially, Taylor says, with regard to his free hand in blinding people, it seems, to the glory of Christ, and stealing the word, snatching it like a bird taking seed off a path.

So, he’s referring to 2 Corinthians 4:4: “In their case [the case of unbelievers] the god of this world [Satan] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” And he’s referring to Luke 8:12, the parable of the four soils, where that first soil is the seed along the path, representing those to whom Satan comes along and snatches the word right out of their hearts so that they don’t believe and are saved.

Taylor wants to know, Why does God allow that blinding, that word-stealing power?

Double Blindness

I think the key lies in the fact that if God had eliminated Satan so that the only enemy to be defeated is our own human depravity, part of the glory of the triumph of salvation would be missing. I’m going to deal with only one aspect of that glory. We could make three or four episodes on this, one with each aspect of glory. I’m only going to deal with one. I’m not going to talk about the glory of the cross in this (Colossians 2:15), or the glory of our ongoing warfare with the principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:11–12). I’m only going to focus for the next couple of minutes on the glory of God’s victory in the moment of conversion itself. What happens at that moment of unblinding?

If there were no Satan to deceive us, we would still be blind to the glory of God in Christ. We would not see Christ as more beautiful, more desirable than anything else. We wouldn’t. Why? Because we are deeply depraved people. Paul describes us like this in Ephesians 4:17–18: “The Gentiles,” which is us before Christ, live “in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”

So, not a word about Satan — not a word. He’s not our main problem; we are our main problem. At root, the blindness is our hardness of heart against God, producing ignorance, producing alienation, producing darkness of understanding. We don’t need Satan to be blind. We are blind by our own depraved nature.

Then the question is this: Why speak of Satan as blinding unbelievers the way 2 Corinthians 4:4 does? Because God is showing us the double prison we are in. We are doubly dark: the darkness of our own shackles around our wrists and ankles, and the darkness of Satan’s locked doors — like Peter in prison, who had to have the hands freed, then he had to have the gates freed and the doors freed. There are layers of bondage: the darkness of our own delusions about God — that’s one level of bondage and blindness — and then the added darkness of Satan’s lies and deceptions all around us.

Double Glory

Therefore, when Christ converts us by the power of the Spirit, he gets double glory because of this double blindness. He conquers Satan’s deceptions, and he conquers human depravity. And here’s the key that I believe is so crucial for why he saves us like this rather than obliterating Satan earlier. If he obliterated Satan earlier, his power would be glorified. But if Satan remains, and we are able to defeat his deceptions by seeing the superior beauties of Christ, then not only is the superior power of Christ glorified, but also the superior beauty of Christ is glorified.

“Let’s take up arms and be glad in the Son of God. Gladness in Christ over sin, over Satan, is the victory.”

We can see this more clearly — if that doesn’t make full sense, let me try to say it again — if we realize that the nature of the blindness of our depravity is that we find other things besides Christ more desirable than Christ, more attractive than Christ, more to be preferred than Christ himself. That’s the essence of our blindness. We are so corrupt, we cannot see that Christ is a superior beauty, a superior worth, a superior greatness, and therefore a superior satisfaction over everything else. In our depravity, we are blind to all of that.

But that’s exactly the same way that Satan blinds us with his deceptions. He’s a liar, and the essence of his lie is that the pleasures of sin that he offers are more to be desired than Christ. Therefore, to be saved, to be converted, to experience the victory, the glorious victory of Christ and the Spirit in our lives, is to have both these blindnesses removed. And that’s described in 2 Corinthians 4:6.

And the way they are removed is that we are granted to see, in one great miracle, both the delusions of depravity and the deceptions of Satan, because they’re the same. We are granted to see Christ, the glory of Christ, as superior to everything that our rebellious hearts ever dreamed of and superior to everything Satan ever offered. That double glorification of Christ triumphing over both of those blindnesses would not have happened if Satan had been snuffed out at the beginning.

So, one huge implication — I close with this — of this for us right now, today, is that seeing and savoring, desiring, preferring the superior beauty of Christ is the way we defeat the evil one. So, I’ve said more than once, let’s take up arms and be glad. Let’s take up arms and be glad in the Son of God. Gladness in Christ over sin, over Satan, is the victory.