http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14749309/individualism-and-solidarity-in-the-church

Sunday school has marked me since my childhood — literally. I have a scar on the top of my right hand from being burned by the popcorn popper when I was about 3 years old. Sunday school has left much deeper impressions, however, in my heart and soul and in the way I have read and understood the Bible for most of my life — especially in terms of how I have read and understood the Old Testament.

For most of my life, I saw the Old Testament primarily as a series of disconnected stories about people showing how (or how not) to live the life of faith. I knew that the Old Testament spoke of Christ, but in my mind, that was limited to the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.

I did not see that all of the Old Testament prepares us to understand who Jesus is and what he would do. I didn’t understand that from Genesis 3:15 onward, we’re meant to trace the woman’s line to the promised offspring — the descendent of Abraham, the son of David — who would deal with the curse and the serpent for good. I was in my forties when I began to understand that the Bible is one story of God’s redemption through Christ.

When I began to understand that the Old Testament can be understood only in light of Christ, a new world opened. I determined that I needed to go back to kindergarten in terms of understanding the Bible’s story. I bought several books on the topic, including one that revolutionized my Old Testament reading.

Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament

I got no further than the introduction of Christopher Wright’s Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament when I read a passage that blew my mind. Speaking about Jesus’s connection to the Old Testament, he writes,

These are the words he read, the stories he knew. These were the songs he sang. These were the depths of wisdom and revelation and prophecy that shaped his whole view of life, the universe and everything. This is where he found his insights into the mind of his Father God. Above all, this is where he found the shape of his own identity and the goal of his own mission. (11)

This paragraph caused me to think about the humanity of Jesus more deeply. It challenged me to read the Old Testament differently. And it sent me on a mission.

Humanity of Jesus

Though Jesus is fully human and fully God, the deity of Jesus has been easier for me to grasp than his humanity. This passage caused me to stop and give more thought to what it must mean that Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). Jesus grew in his own understanding of who he was, what his life was all about, and even what his death and resurrection would mean from meditating on the Old Testament Scriptures.

Jesus, typical of Jewish boys of his time, learned from hearing the Old Testament scrolls read in the synagogue. One of the only scenes we have of him as a child depicts him staying behind in Jerusalem to sit among the teachers, “listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). He was thinking and putting it all together. He was coming into a recognition that when he was in the temple in Jerusalem, he was in his Father’s house.

“When Jesus read the Old Testament, he saw the suffering he would experience — as well as the glory on the other side.”

We know what he thought when he read the beginning of Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” He read this aloud in his hometown and told the people it was fulfilled in their hearing that day (Luke 4:16–21). What was it like for him to read passages like Psalm 22:14 — “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint”? What did he think as he pondered Isaiah prophesying, “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5), eventually knowing that he would be pierced, that he would be crushed?

When Jesus read the Old Testament, he saw the suffering he would experience — as well as the glory on the other side. That is why he told the two disciples on the road to Emmaus that if they had believed all that the prophets had spoken, they would have understood that it was “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory” (Luke 24:25–26).

Reading the Old Testament

This sentence in Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament also caused me to read the Old Testament differently, asking myself throughout, What might Jesus have pointed to and said, “This is about me”?

Luke writes that there on the road to Emmaus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). To explain to these followers who he was and why he had to die, Jesus evidently did not start with his birth in Bethlehem, or his Sermon on the Mount, or his wrangling with the Pharisees, or the plot against him facilitated by Judas.

Rather, he opened up Genesis and Leviticus and Psalms and Jonah and Hosea and the rest of the Old Testament and said, “This is about me. . . . This is about the curse I came to bear. . . . This is about the mercy I came to lavish on sinners. . . . This is about the sufficiency of my salvation. . . . This is about my deliverance from death. . . . This is about the judgment that was poured out on me at the cross.”

“It is not just individual prophecies or passages that point to Jesus, but the Old Testament as a whole.”

According to Jesus, it is not just individual prophecies or passages that point to him, but the Old Testament as a whole. He said to the religious leaders, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). And a few verses later, he says, “If you believed Moses you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:46). The entirety of the Old Testament is about him — not only in its prophecies, but also in its history, its promises, its people, its law, its ceremony, its song.

On a Bible Mission

I can trace the discovery that flowed out of this passage to the personal mission I’ve been on since then. I am on a mission to infiltrate Bible study in the local church with biblical theology. By biblical theology, I mean an approach to the Bible that recognizes its cohesive story. Even though the Bible is made up of various kinds of literature and was written over centuries by forty human authors, it is really telling one story about what God is doing in the world through Christ.

So, how much has that sentence, and these discoveries about the book that Jesus loved most, changed for me? After going back to kindergarten on the Old Testament, I wrote the One Year Book of Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament and then a series called Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament. Now I teach the Biblical Theology Workshop for Women around the country and internationally.

I have found that when people who love the Bible and love Christ are shown how to see Christ from the beginning to the end of the Bible, their joy explodes. Seeing the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Jesus Christ from every part of the Bible — including from the Old Testament — has the power to truly, deeply, and eternally change our lives.

If you’re a Christian, no doubt you highly value God’s faithfulness, the precious reality “that what God [has] promised, he [is] able to perform” (Romans 4:21 NASB). You believe that Christ upholds the entire cosmos “by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Therefore, all of reality, not to mention your eternal future, literally depends on God being true to his word.

True to your word. That is a concise, clear definition of what it means to be a faithful person. There is consistency between what you say and what you do, between what you believe and how you behave, between what you promise and what you perform.

“A faithful person keeps the faith of those who put their trust in him.”

When we (and the Bible) describe someone as “faithful,” we’re almost never referring to how much faith that person possesses, but to how much faith others can place in that person — how much others can trust him to perform what he promises. A faithful person keeps (cherishes, maintains, guards) the faith of those who put their trust in him.

We all want to think of ourselves as faithful, but we all fail at different times and in different ways. As a character quality, as a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), faithfulness is all too often in short supply. It always has been, which is why this proverb is in the Bible: “Many a man proclaims his own steadfast love, but a faithful man who can find?” (Proverbs 20:6).

So, beginning with ourselves, how might we resolve to become more faithful disciples of Jesus? One way we can do so is by meditating on this crucial verse:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)

Graze on Faithfulness

Psalm 37 was written by David, whom God “took from the sheepfolds . . . to shepherd Jacob his people” (Psalm 78:70–71). David’s experience as a shepherd might explain his choice of the phrase translated “befriend faithfulness,” although the English Standard Version doesn’t convey to us modern readers the full meaning of what the Hebrew words rə‘êh and ’ĕmūnāh meant to David and his original readers. No translation does. Here’s why:

The word rə‘êh, which the ESV translates as “befriend,” can mean “feed, graze; drive out to pasture; shepherd, protect, nourish” (ESV OT RI).
The word ’ĕmūnāh, which the ESV translates as “faithfulness,” can “steadfastness; trustworthiness, faithfulness; firmness, security; honesty” (Ibid.).

This phrase is a translation challenge because David used a nuanced pastoral allusion — an allusion that his original readers would have intuitively understood (given how familiar they were with sheep), but one that is lost on the majority of us today. So, translators work hard to interpret and convey his meaning in a way we understand. Which explains the variety of different attempts (besides “befriend faithfulness”):

“Verily [truly] thou shalt be fed” (King James Version).
“Feed on His faithfulness” (New King James Version).
“Enjoy security” (Revised Standard Version).
“Cultivate faithfulness” (New American Standard Bible).
“Enjoy safe pasture” (New International Version).

Perhaps we’d get closest to what David meant if we could somehow infuse the NASB’s “cultivate” with the NKJV’s “feed,” such that we’d come away with a sense of “diligently cultivate [by grazing on] the virtue of faithfulness” (Keil & Delitzsch, 5:283).

But “cultivate,” “feed on,” and “befriend” all give us some sense of what David wants us to do: devote ourselves to developing faithfulness until it becomes part of us.

How to Grow Your Faithfulness

David’s command fits with how the Bible instructs us to pursue all aspects of godliness. We are called to build ourselves up in our most holy faith (Jude 20). And the way we build ourselves up spiritually is similar to the way we build our capacities for anything: we exercise what we want to grow.

Bodily strength is increased through the exercise of bodily strength. If we want to grow strong in our muscles or our minds, we must exercise them. We must push against internal and external resistance. We must endure the discomfort and persevere with the limitations of our current capacities until the discomfort decreases and our capacities increase. And we must not give in to the part of us that offers all kinds of reasons for why we should give up.

We all like the idea of stronger, trimmer bodies, but we all find it hard to work out and eat healthier. We all like the idea of growing more proficient in our skills, but we all find it hard to keep practicing and studying. We all like the idea of building new, healthy, fruitful habits, but we all find it hard to consistently perform the habit until it becomes part of how we function.

“The only way to become more faithful is to practice faithfulness, to cultivate faithfulness, to feed on faithfulness.”

Likewise, we all like the idea of becoming more faithful with our talents and more trustworthy to those we are called to serve and serve with, but we all find it hard to “discipline [ourselves] for the purpose of godliness” in this area (1 Timothy 4:7 NASB). But the only way to become more faithful is to practice faithfulness, to cultivate faithfulness, to feed on faithfulness, to befriend (make a companion of) faithfulness, to devote ourselves to developing faithfulness until it becomes part of us.

Begin with What You’ve Been Given

The wonderful thing is that we don’t need some special faithfulness gym membership to begin growing our capacity for faithfulness. We have everything we need right now, right where we find ourselves. Jesus tells us, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10). And so, if we draw strength from Jesus to be faithful with a little, he will entrust us with much (Matthew 25:23).

The best place for us to start is by identifying the people and responsibilities that Jesus has entrusted to us. And then remember David’s exhortation:

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (Psalm 37:3)

The people and responsibilities in front of us are where God wants us to trust him. This is the “land” where he wants us to dwell, at least for now. These are the people to whom he wants us to do good. This is where he calls us to practice, cultivate, graze on, and befriend faithfulness.

If we are ever going to be men and women who are more consistently true to our word, for whom there is less discontinuity between what we say and what we do, between what we believe and how we behave, between what we promise and what we perform, we will become so here, in the land where God has placed us.

And if we devote ourselves to faithfulness here, someday we will hear our Master say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23).

Audio Transcript

How do we discern false teachers? It’s a hot topic in the inbox. It always has been. Here’s one representative email, sent by a listener to the podcast named Krikor. “Hello, Pastor John! I am a huge fan and love listening to these podcasts. APJ has really helped me grow in my faith and convictions as well as in making me better at helping others in their own struggles.” Amen! Let me just stop there. That’s one reason why this podcast exists: to see that you are being equipped to help the people in your life in their moments of need. It’s so encouraging to read that. Okay, back to Krikor’s question. “My question is this: The Bible gives us a lot of warnings about false teachers, but how can I identify if someone I listen to on the Internet is a false teacher? A number of people have been accused of being false teachers. How would I discern this? What should we be looking for?”

Well, I would start by saying, don’t set the bar so low that you only stop listening to people if they can be properly called false teachers. Lots of people are teachers who are simply misguided and unhelpful in many ways, but might not come under the ban of being called a false teacher. Set your standards high. Listen to people who are truly God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated, Spirit-dependent, who bear the marks in their lives of authenticity.

But since you asked about identifying false teaching and false teachers, let me give you four biblical ways to assess whether someone is a false teacher. I do this just because the Bible agrees with you that we should be alert to the reality of false teachers, and it gives us tests.

1. Fruit Test

First, there’s the test of the fruit of their lives. Jesus says in Matthew 7:15–20,

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, you will recognize them by their fruits.

Now, Paul put a huge premium on this principle of holiness and righteousness in his own life-giving credibility to his gospel. I saw this recently, just because I’m working my way through 1 Thessalonians in Look at the Book. I mean, he made such a huge deal out of it for two chapters.

Here’s what he says in 1 Thessalonians 1:5: “Our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake.” That’s amazing. And then he unpacks that for two chapters: “You know what men we proved to be, so judge us by our lives.”

Now, of course, it’s not always easy to see the behavioral fruit of a teacher, especially Internet teachers, right? Which is why you need to look carefully and take time and belong to a church — a real live, human-being, flesh-and-blood, in-person church with a real live preacher whose life you know. So whether it’s hard or not, Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.”

2. Doctrine Test

Second, there’s the test of sound, central doctrines — for example, the doctrine of the incarnation in 1 John 4:1–3, where John says,

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you will know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

“We need to measure the doctrines that are being taught by the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In other words, if someone denies that Jesus Christ is the God-man, God come in the flesh, he’s a false teacher or a false prophet. John doesn’t mean to say that if you get the incarnation right, there are no other mistakes you can make that are serious. That’s not the point. He was simply dealing with that particular issue in that church, and on that issue, confessing that Christ had come in the flesh meant that you were speaking the truth of God. You got that one right, and that was the issue in that church.

Paul emphasized the same doctrinal importance, the doctrinal test, in 1 Timothy 6:3–4. He says,

If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

In other words, we need to measure the doctrines that are being taught by the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and by their implications for godliness. That’s test number two: doctrine, sound doctrine.

3. Scripture Test

Third, there is the test of submission to Scripture. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14:37–38, “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized.” That’s amazing. The authority of the apostles must be submitted to, or you’re a false teacher; you’re not recognized.

John said it this way in 1 John 4:6: “We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”

“Everybody says true things from time to time — even the devil. But that doesn’t make them reliable teachers.”

In other words, the apostles elevated their teaching to the level of a test of truth. If a person does not submit his thinking and his teaching to the authority of the apostles — to the authorized teachers of Christ who wrote the New Testament — then they’re not going to be reliable teachers. It doesn’t mean they won’t say true things. Everybody says true things from time to time — even the devil. But that doesn’t make them reliable teachers.

4. Gospel Test

Finally, there is the test of the gospel itself. Paul is just red-hot about this one. Galatians 1:8–9:

Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

And the gospel he had in mind when he said that was the gospel laid out in the book of Galatians, and it’s the gospel of justification by faith alone apart from works of the law. And he sums it up like this in Galatians 5:2–3:

Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision [that is, as a step toward getting right with God in justification], Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law.

In other words, if you insist on law-keeping as a way of justification before God, you’ve got to keep it all, and you’ve got to keep it perfectly. And then he ends with this terrible warning: “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace” (Galatians 5:4).

Our Best Protection

So, there are at least four biblical tests for false teaching:

the test of the fruit of behavior
the test of sound doctrine
the test of submission to Scripture
the test of teaching the pure gospel of justification by faith

And I would end by simply reminding us that the best way to protect ourselves from false teachers is to be part of a healthy, Bible-preaching church, and to be prayerfully saturated with the Bible every day.

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?

Audio Transcript

Twenty years ago today, at 8:14 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 was highjacked. And with it began a nightmare no one who lived through it will forget.

I was roofing my house that Tuesday morning, radio on, when national broadcasters broke in to announce that the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City was on fire. The cause was maybe a bomb. Other rumors said it was an accidental plane crash, though doubtful on such a clear day. We now know it was Flight 11. Twenty minutes later, the South Tower was hit by Flight 175, and all doubt was removed. America was under attack.

I remember the FAA grounding all flights immediately. I remember the roll call, as the flight paths of the last twenty commercial jets in the air were anxiously narrated on radio. I remember hearing fighter jets were scrambled to the sky if needed to shoot down hijacked jets. I remember looking up into the atmosphere for confirmation of what was unfolding 1,200 miles away, and finding a clear sky emptied of jets and condensation trails. I remember finding my way to a television in time to watch the towers fall. I remember street-level recordings emerging, the sound of glass raining down on concrete, and the sight of people fleeing from grey clouds of dust and copy paper pouring between buildings. I remember seeing the Pentagon on fire, evidence of a third attack, and unconfirmed rumors of a fourth flight that crashed into a field somewhere. I remember people pulled from rubble piles. I remember footage of jubilation and celebration in foreign places. I remember Air Force One flying the president to the military base sixteen miles from me. The shock of that day remains fresh, even twenty years later.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, as the news broke on Tuesday morning, Pastor John gathered his pastoral team into a conference room. They pulled out a radio and put it in the middle of the table. “We listened and turned it off and prayed and listened and prayed,” recalled Piper. The pastors interceded for about an hour total, mingled with radio updates. They asked God to pour out mercy “for wisdom in the mouths of Christian spokesmen who will be called upon to say something” and “for a widespread awakening from banal pursuits.”

Then the pastors gathered the staff and planned out the week. A 7:00 prayer gathering would be held that evening at Bethlehem Baptist Church. It was announced on local radio stations under the title “A Service of Sorrow, Self-Humbling, and Steady Hope in our Savior and King, Jesus Christ.” It was an evening for mourning and prayer. Two hundred attended.

The following morning, Pastor John was called on to be one of the Christians who would speak into the tragedy — for him, on KTIS, a local radio station. Where was God on 9/11? There, for about forty minutes, he spoke wisdom into the shock and sorrow.

We want to share the recording with you today on Ask Pastor John, on this twentieth anniversary. The interview covers the importance of grieving and creating space for sorrow, yet a sorrow under God’s all-encompassing sovereignty. Pastor John explains why 9/11 was a call for national humbling, a wake-up call. God was shaking the foundations of America and calling sinners to come to Christ — a global call not just for Americans but also for Palestinians, Saudis, and Afghans.

In the interview, Pastor John goes deep, explaining how God can, “in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world, ordain that something be permitted or caused” — even a “massive sin” like 9/11 — “and yet disapprove of the very thing that he has permitted or ordained.” The cross of Jesus Christ exemplified this truth, because, says Piper, “I don’t think New York — the hijacking, the terrorism — was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God. The killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible, than what we’ve just seen. And yet God planned it” (Acts 4:24–28).

The tragedy of 9/11 foregrounds God’s orchestrating providence, human sin, and the magnitude of the world’s daily suffering. It reminds us Satan is alive and active. And it gives parents an opportunity to explain that, ultimately, God has “billions of purposes,” doing an uncountable number of good things in lives through a tragedy at this scale. The whole interview remains instructive two decades later.

“God was so merciful to me and helped me,” Piper later wrote, reflecting on his studio visit. “I was tired and tense and aching with so many emotions. I think I said what God wanted said. What a kind God — in misery and gladness.”

The forty-minute interview has not, to date, appeared on the website until now. Here’s John Piper, the morning after 9/11, on KTIS, a local FM radio station in Minneapolis, being interviewed by hosts Jon Engen and by Chuck Knapp, whom you will hear first. Here’s the interview.

‘Make Us a Sacrificial People’

Chuck Knapp: Would you bring us before the Lord in prayer and lead us?

John Piper: I’d love to.

Father, make us a sensitive, compassionate, grieving, weeping people. There are so many who are wired not to be able to cry. There are so many, all day long, that if they’d given themselves one opportunity, would have wept like a baby, and they just held it back and held it back. And so, I pray for the capacities to grieve. Christians need to grieve better than we do. So help us to do that, I pray.

And then I pray for a great self-humbling in my heart and the heart of my church. Lord, guard us from anger: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Help us to “be . . . slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). Let us look to ourselves. O God, I pray that I would look to my own sin and my own bitterness, my own unforgiveness, my own disregard for God, my own indifference to your things that should bring judgment upon me. So grant the church and the country to be humbled before you, our great sovereign King.

And then, Lord, I pray for hope to abound, hope in our Savior and King, Jesus Christ. No hope in horses or chariots or the CIA or the government or the military, but hope in you. Some hope in horses, some hope in chariots, but we hope in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). Build that hope into our land. Build that hope into our churches. You’ve gotten our attention. And now, O God, I pray that we would yield to your grace and your power and live for Christ, that we would make you the center of our lives, and not ourselves and not our business and not our vacations.

And then, Lord, make us a sacrificial, serving people, ready to lay down our lives to get the gospel to the unreached peoples around the world. O Lord, set our priorities straight, I pray. In Jesus’s name, amen.

God Has Our Attention

Knapp: We are visiting with Dr. John Piper this morning, and it’s a blessing to have you with us. He is the author of many, many books and pastor for the sheep and the lost. He is a Fuller Seminary graduate. There are so many things we could say. I’m just so thankful that you were here in town and able to come and lead us in a whole healing process that needs to occur.

Piper: Thank you.

Knapp: I saw pictures on television yesterday of young children in Israel in the Arab sections who were cheering. And there were adults there, likewise. And one can’t help but become upset on many levels — anger and frustration — at seeing that image of the world across the television screen. But as I look and as I listened to you talking about humbling ourselves, I think that so much of what the world sees of Americans is anything but humble. And I think that that gives them fuel for what they return to us, that anger that they feel toward us. And so, your message and that part about humbling ourselves really hits me in the heart as I think about that in particular.

Piper: I think one of the missing ingredients — I mean, it’s the main missing ingredient that makes that difficult for people — is that God doesn’t have the place that he needs to have in their lives. I mean, the Bible’s message of humility is not a horizontal message, mainly. It’s not “Humble yourself under terrorists.” It’s “humble yourselves . . . under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6). If God doesn’t look mighty in your life, if he isn’t central and supreme and glorious, then humility is going to be a very artificial thing in your life. And if he’s there in his proper, central, supreme place, humility will come naturally.

Somebody said to me out in the hall that Anne Graham Lotz said, “God’s got our attention now,” or “Sometimes God withholds his protection so that things can happen to wake us up.” And I think that’s very, very true. And if you ask, “Well, what does he want to communicate now that he has our attention?” and we say that Jesus is calling us to repentance, you have to ask then what repentance is about. And repentance is turning away from sin. And what’s sin about? And sin is fundamentally about treason against God. But you can’t even grasp the meaning of sin if God isn’t viewed as worthy of infinite adoration and infinite delight and infinite allegiance and infinite love and infinite valuing — which he isn’t for most people in America. And so, the responses that are appropriate are almost emotionally impossible for people because God is so foreign to their experience.

“You can’t even grasp the meaning of sin if God isn’t viewed as worthy of infinite adoration and infinite allegiance.”

One of the things that troubles me about these calamities is that God comes onto the agenda suddenly in people’s lives, and where he finds himself is in the dock, being accused. It’s funny: Why don’t we have a radio program or a big call-in thing to account for God’s mercy every time the sun comes up on New York? Jesus said that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). This is an inexplicable grace to our land. Why not call God to account for treating wicked people so kindly?

I heard you say this morning, Chuck, when I got up, that you wanted to focus on the cross. And I love that. I love that. And I said, “Oh, good. Good. If we focus on the cross, we’ll be safe today.” But the text that’s most central about the cross in relation to this supremacy of God in all of our calamities is Romans 3:23–25, where it says,

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood. . . . This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Now, if you just think about that for a moment, what he’s saying is this: God said, “I must sacrifice my Son in order to vindicate my righteousness, in view of how leniently I have treated sinners.” Now that’s the gospel. That’s the meaning of the cross that we want to make central here at KTIS. The cross is the moment and the means by which God vindicates his righteousness in the face of how unjust his mercy appears. What American worries about that? What American loses sleep over the injustice of God in the sun rising and people being spared? And when the stock market is climbing and when the interest rates are falling and when the commerce is flourishing, which one of us says, “How can God treat us this way? We’re so bad!” Who says that? But that’s what we ought to say.

Instead, when anybody gets their wills crossed or anybody endures pain — whether it’s cancer or a plane crash — God gets called to account. There’s something wrong here. And what’s wrong is that he’s simply not supreme, and therefore we don’t understand sin, and therefore we don’t understand the cross, and therefore our whole worldview is bent out of shape. So, when others, like I’ve heard in the hallway out here, say, “God’s got our attention,” I think he wants to say, “I am God. I am God. I love people. If they would bow to me, I have put my Son forward to forgive their sins and have them home with me forever and ever. But don’t toy with me.”

Christian Nation?

Knapp: People across the world see that of us: that we, as an American people, are not, for the most part, humble.

Piper: Right. And yet, they call us a Christian nation, and therefore Christianity gets made synonymous with all of America’s music and all of America’s movies. We’re the “Great Satan.” And I just want to, for one, on the air, say, I’m not speaking as an American. I am an alien and an exile on this planet (1 Peter 2:11). My citizenship is in heaven. I await a Savior who will come, who will transform this lowly body into a body like his (Philippians 3:20–21). I’m a foreigner in America. I’m a foreigner in Palestine and Israel and Russia and Indonesia. I speak, I hope, for another King and another allegiance. The Muslim world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, the secular world, they need to hear that Christians are not synonymous with Americans.

Knapp: What a perspective. I hope it causes us to stop and really think. I hope it causes us to assess where we all are, personally and in self-examination.

Jon Engen: This is what I was thinking when you were saying that: Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” And this is what you were just saying: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). We are here as aliens, but we are his representatives.

Rebuilding the Foundation

Piper: Yeah, it’s so hard — I feel for you guys. I said to Neil Staven last night — he dropped over and visited us — “I don’t really look forward to being on the radio because it’s hard to talk theology and do pastoral care in this medium. And yet, these guys have to do it.” You’re stuck with it. You can’t run away like other people can. I said, “I feel for these guys. I want to join them there.” And I just want to encourage you to do that: to be representatives of Jesus Christ.

And what makes it so hard for you and me is that we’re speaking into an audience that doesn’t have in place the worldview to make sense out of things that would fall into place for us. I mean, they’ll ask you some just blunt, painful question about a piece of the tragedy, and you’ve got to take them back to the foundation. You’ve got to go deep. You’ve got to go back to the beginning and say, “Where did sin come from, and what has happened to humanity?”

What is the depravity that Romans 1 talks about, where God just hands people over to their own depravity?
What is the futility of Romans 8, where it says that God subjected the creation to futility, which means the pain and the suffering in the world? Even “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons” (Romans 8:23). All of it awaits redemption.
What is death, which came into the world through one man? “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

Those massive underpinnings of how we explain everything aren’t in place for your listeners, many of them. And so in order to answer questions at the upper level, we have to go down to the lower level and rebuild some foundations.

“The killing of the Son of God was more horrific than what we’ve just seen — and yet God planned it.”

I just want to encourage you: When you get a tough question, which no doubt you do — we all do — Jesus didn’t automatically just jump in at the level of the questioner. He sometimes just said something that must have made them scratch their head, because he knew they didn’t have the categories for understanding his answer. So we need to rebuild, and we’re doing that right now. That’s part of what we’re doing.

God’s Mysterious Sovereignty

Knapp: I was looking through several excerpts from editorials, and one from Oklahoma that struck me earlier this morning, a part of that article or editorial in the paper, said, “Some will blame God for Tuesday’s events. How could he not protect us from such evil?” So that’s how the world looks at this.

Piper: Right, and the very way that question is crafted is almost unanswerable. Because as soon as you use the word blame, you’ve implied guilt. Blame implies guilt. So they’ve muddied the waters, because they cannot make the theological, biblical distinction of ordaining that something be that you may, in fact, grieve over and disapprove of. See, now there’s a category that is very hard for people to get ahold of. And yet, I find it all over the Bible: that God can, in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world, ordain that something be permitted or caused — he’s involved causally in different ways in different acts — and yet disapprove of the very thing that he has permitted or ordained. People simply can’t get it.

So, the word blame immediately hangs you on the horns of a dilemma you don’t want to be hung on — because when you say, “No, you don’t blame him,” they think, “Oh, you mean he was on a vacation. He’s out there. He had nothing to do with this. He wasn’t watching. He fumbled the ball. He couldn’t manage it.” Or otherwise, you’ve got him as a sinner. I mean, those are your two options with regard to a question like that.

Well, those aren’t the biblical options. God is sovereign. And yet, when he wills and ordains that there be pain and suffering in our lives, he’s not doing it as a sinner or as an evil God. God has ways to ordain things in his mysterious sovereignty that are for our good, in spite of being incredibly painful and — here’s the mystery — in spite of involving massive sin. And the place where that is so vividly clear in the Bible is at the cross.

That’s why I’m so glad you’re staying here at the cross, because I don’t think 9/11 — the hijacking, the terrorism — was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God. I think the killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible than what we’ve just seen — and yet God planned it. It’s so clear. Acts 4:27–28:

Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

All the biblical promises of the coming of the Son — to bear our sorrows and to bear our griefs — were predicted seven hundred years before they happened, and yet there wasn’t a more sinful act in the universe than the nailing of the Son of God to the cross. And therefore, if we’re going to be believers in the love of God for sinners at the cross, we have to believe that he has the capacity to ordain that his Son die, and yet not be a sinner in killing him. If he can do that, then I’m going to stand up on Sunday and say, “Though I don’t have all the answers, my God, and your God, reigned on September 11. And he is not cruel, he is not wicked, and he’s not a sinner. And the glory is that because he reigns, he can comfort every soul, he can answer every prayer, he can heal every disease, he can rescue from every calamity, he can hold back from us every harmful thing that would not be good for us. And if he weren’t sovereign, then I don’t know what hope we could ultimately have for our future. And we would lose our gospel.”

Engen: And let me just mention, I appreciate, dear sir, your heart on providing the answer. It’s not necessarily grabbing a piece of the tragedy, and then trying to define that little piece. You have to define it, first of all, in light of the tragedy as a whole, but also the foundation as a whole as well.

Where Was Satan?

And as God’s people, we are not simply representing this tragedy in the United States; we’re representing the whole of Christ and the offering of God and what sin does to us. And we were born broken, and we’re watching this happen again.

Piper: Yeah, and not just the whole of Christ, but the whole of pain, because what’s so strange and irrational about the human heart is that it takes a pulling together, in one cataclysmic calamity, to awaken us to what’s happening every moment of every day, like in hospitals across the country. There are a lot of people right now whose mom or dad or wife or husband is breathing their last with pulmonary disease and gasping — just like some of those folks are gasping right now under the rubble. That’s not unique.

And so it’s awakening us to feel the magnitude of the world’s misery, which forces an issue that we ought to be dealing with all the time: What is this misery all about? And the biblical answer is this: it’s all about sin. And therefore, it’s all about the God who is moral and holy and just and who defined sin as sin and whether there’s redemption. That’s the message. And so, you’re right. We’re forced back to deal with huge things.

There’s a piece that we haven’t mentioned yet, that we probably should, as far as worldview goes, and that’s Satan. Satan is a massive part of the Christian worldview. And we ought to ask, Where was Satan yesterday? And of course, nobody knows precisely, except to say that the biblical picture is that Satan hates God. He hates his purposes. He wants people to dishonor God, mainly. He tries to squash the faith out of everybody’s life. He demanded, it says in Luke 22:31–32, to “sift [Peter] like wheat.” But Jesus says, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” Now I think that picture means this: just like you’d put wheat in a sieve, shake it, and it would tear at the wheat and rip off the outside to get the kernel, Satan wants to shake Peter, tear off his faith, and just have the natural Peter fall through and live the rest of his life in happiness and peace off in the suburbs somewhere. He’s fine — but without faith. And Jesus said, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.”

And then he says this absolutely sovereign word: “When you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” In other words, “I know you’re going to turn, and I have effectually interceded with my Father on your behalf. You are going to drop three times tonight, but you’re going to stand again, my friend.”

So Satan is involved in all these things, and he’s moving people to do horrific acts. And I don’t doubt that he was stirring and moving in the evils on those planes and in the weeks and years that led up to it. But “he who is in [us] is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). He holds Satan on a leash. He commands the evil spirits, and they do what he bids. So, Satan can never get outside God’s control. That’s the point of the book of Job, I think. He’s got to get permission to mess up this man’s life and take his children and put boils on his face and on his body (Job 1:6–12). And Job stands back and says, when Satan has done all this, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

“Satan is to be hated. Satan is to be fought. Satan is to be resisted. But God reigns over Satan.”

Or when his wife says, “Curse God and die.” What in the world is Job holding fast to his integrity for? Job says, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” And we’re kind of shocked, saying, “Wait a minute, Job. You missed it. Satan did that. It says Satan did that. What do you mean ‘shall we not receive evil as well as good at the hand of the Lord?’” And the writer adds, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips,” as though he knew we were going to misinterpret at that point (Job 2:9–10). What Job was testifying to is that Satan is to be hated. Satan is to be fought. Satan is to be resisted. But God reigns over Satan. He’s not running loose in the world without his leash in the hand of an Almighty, sovereign God. If he were, our hope would be very fragile — and, I think, non-existent.

Our Enemy Within

Engen: That’s the thought I had last evening as I was going to sleep: Satan did his work long ago on this one, on the people who were involved in such an incident. We read yesterday Psalm 36, where it says,

Transgression speaks to the wicked     deep in his heart;there is no fear of God     before his eyes.For he flatters himself in his own eyes     that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated. . . .He plots trouble while on his bed;     he sets himself in a way that is not good;he does not reject evil. (Psalm 36:1–2, 4)

Well, he did their work, and I’m imagining Satan just sat back and watched it happen.

Piper: Yeah, he sat back and watched it happen, or he did what he did to Judas: he “entered into Judas called Iscariot” (Luke 22:3). So, Satan has indirect and direct ways of working, and perhaps Satan entered in that morning; he just did a decisive work. But he also does these preparatory works.

Let’s not be too quick to say, “Oh, Satan did this.” Our flesh is plenty evil to do this sort of thing. The world is plenty evil to set things up so that we do it. Paul called sin a power, an indwelling power within us, that rises up and takes us captive (Romans 6:12; 7:9–10). So, we don’t need to blame Satan for every evil thing that happens, because we’re bad enough to do it without bringing him in as an explanatory factor. This is why I think Jesus didn’t focus on Satan when they brought him the news about the tower in Siloam falling on the eighteen or the mingling of the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices. He simply said, “Repent” — not “Run away from Satan” (Luke 13:1–5).

Engen: On Sunday morning was our communion Sunday at church. And I preached on Paul’s warning to examine yourselves. Why have you come to this table? What have you brought with you? And of course, all the other things Paul talks about up to 1 Corinthians 11, dealing with divisions and dealing with sin in the church and the astonishment he has that they’re kind of pleased with themselves, that they’re accepting all these things. And then he comes to the table, and says that you must examine yourself if you come to worship. I walked away from the sermon on Sunday just beating myself, asking, “Were we too harsh in saying, ‘You and God have got to get this right’?” And this is exactly what you’ve been saying all morning: You and God have got to get this right. What we saw yesterday lies in the heart of all of us.

Piper: In fact, if you go on and read the rest of that passage, something absolutely stunning is said, that would really make you wonder if you’d been too harsh. Because he says that if you don’t discern the body and you don’t examine yourself carefully, “this is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:30).

Engen: We said that. Somebody said it’s the most dangerous service a church can hold because how you approach it has direct consequences.

Piper: But what makes it so mysterious and amazing and wonderful is that the death there is pictured as a way of not coming into condemnation. We are being judged by the Lord that we might not be condemned by the Lord. Even death — and this is relevant; oh, is this relevant — even death can be a mercy from God.

Hope for Everlasting Peace and Joy

Engen: Well, we’re talking to Pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church. And we so appreciate you coming in and just opening the word and setting our eyes back on Christ. We mentioned this morning Hebrews 12:3, where the writer says, “Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself” — and that’s what we’re doing — “so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.”

Knapp: Well, now at three minutes before eight o’clock, I wonder, Dr. Piper, if you would lead us again in prayer for healing and understanding.

Piper: Father in heaven, our hearts go out to hundreds of thousands of family members who to this moment don’t know what’s become of their loved ones. And I pray that you would turn their hearts to you and that you would cause them to submit their wills and their hearts and their lives to you. And to look to you for help and strength.

“Jesus Christ died for all, so that whoever will believe of any color may have eternal life and escape perishing.”

I pray, O God, that you would bring your unique kind of consolation through Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. I pray that you would pour out the Holy Spirit upon us, O God, as the church of Jesus Christ and upon the world for awakening. I pray that you would assert your glorious, gracious, kind, merciful, powerful, just, holy supremacy into the American life and make Jesus Christ the issue today and make people see him for who he really is and savor him and love him and trust him and treasure him and count him more precious than anything else in all the world.

O God, let this tragedy not happen in vain, but get people’s hearts for yourself, so that they not only have some relief in this world, but everlasting joy, everlasting peace, everlasting life. Lord, we want to see the greatest possible joy come. And that will come for eternity through Jesus Christ alone. So magnify your Son, Lord, in this calamity, I pray, so that people will reap a harvest of righteousness and a harvest of everlasting peace and joy. Through Christ I pray. Amen.

Knapp: Spoken from the heart. Amen. KTIS-FM in the Twin Cities at ten minutes after eight o’clock. We are visiting with Dr. John Piper, who is helping us “overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

God in His Rightful Place

Yesterday I was numb; I was just numbed by all of it. Twenty-four hours ago we were here watching the monitors and saw something go on. We didn’t know what it was. And we thought perhaps it was an accident. Well, then a second plane flies into the other tower. And then within minutes, here we are; we’re in the same shock that I felt as a kid when President Kennedy was assassinated. I felt it again when the shuttle exploded. There’ve been other times in my life as well: when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. These are all things that I, in my twenties, have imprinted now. It just feels like it’s in my DNA, this shock. And then the plane goes into the Pentagon. And you realize this is an awful day.

And so now the shock — I don’t know if it’s wearing off, but now it’s like, How do we make any sense? Where do we start? How do we rebuild? And I know the focus needs to be on the cross because I’ve said that. I’ve been taught that in the last ten years, but that’s difficult too. So you’re helping to shape the perspective and then maybe just sharpen the image.

Piper: Well, I think you said it well — that the order is one moving from the immediate, personal experience of emotion, which the Bible cares a lot about, to the more reflective, quiet coming to terms with truth. We need both. We can’t just jump in with both feet at the theoretical, theological level at the most raw moments of life. There’s a time for silence and a time for speaking (Ecclesiastes 3:7). There’s a time for embracing and a time to refrain from embracing (Ecclesiastes 3:5).

And so, as the time goes by, pastors need to step up to the plate with fiber in their tree and give people a rock to stand on and a trunk for the branches to hang on. And whether we’re quite there or not, we’re forced to be there. And my passion is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. And so, the reason I come back, again and again, to the supremacy of God in these moments is because, I think, if we lose it, we lose the most precious thing in the world. We lose everything.

And one of the texts that’s been on my mind, in recent minutes especially, is the book of Lamentations. Now there’s not a more horrific book in the Old Testament because it’s after the carnage of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And it is so horrible that women are boiling and eating their children (Lamentations 4:10). And out of that setting, Jeremiah writes two things that, I think, if you lose the one you lose the other. The one we all love is basis of the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Right in the middle chapter, he writes,

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness.“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,     “therefore I will hope in him.” (Lamentations 3:22–24)

I mean, how can he say that mercies are new every morning when things like this are happening? Mercies are new every morning. And just a few verses later in the chapter, he says,

The Lord will not     cast off forever,but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion     according to the abundance of his steadfast love;for he does not afflict from his heart     or grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3:31–33)

So there you have, back to back, the Lord causes grief and his mercies are new every morning. So, my gut feeling is this: I want mercy in my life. I want to live by mercy. I want to give mercy. I want to embody mercy for people. And I think I’m going to lose verses 22–24, the mercy verses, if I lose the supremacy verses just a few verses later. Which is why I’m so zealous that God be given his rightful place in these moments and that we not kind of shuttle him to the side and say, “Well, let’s just deal with human misery here,” because my only hope in dealing with human misery is a great, holy, good, gracious, sovereign God who, with all of his mystery, can answer our prayers and can do miracles beyond what all humans can do.

He can restrain sin, like he did with King Abimelech in Genesis 20, when Abraham said, “She’s my sister. Sarah’s my sister.” And so she goes into the harem and could be slept with that night. And Abimelech doesn’t sleep with her. And in the morning, God confronts him, and he apologizes because he didn’t know what was up. And God says, “It was I who kept you from sinning against me” (Genesis 20:6). Now, God can do that. God can keep people from sinning. One puff of his breath, and the plane misses the tower. One slight restraint, and this guy falls down in the plane instead of going into the cockpit. God can do that. And that he can do it creates problems for us in dealing with the calamity, and it creates hope for us in coming out of the calamity into a life where we know he will not let anything befall us but what is good for us (Romans 8:28).

It’s so important to me that, even though it’s painful sometimes to hear in moments of crisis, we give God his rightful place as the sovereign, merciful Lord of the universe, so that we have a gospel for people.

More Than We Imagine

Engen: Well, it’s been quite the morning and, Dr. Piper, we just want to say thank you for sharing your heart with us. I know that it has been a part of the refuge that God has been using to bring some peace to some hearts — maybe raise more questions, I guess, as well. But I pray that they’re questions about the solid rock, the foundation that we’re all standing on as God’s people. When you were speaking about Lamentations, I was thinking of David’s words when he says,

I waited patiently for the Lord;     he inclined to me and heard my cry.He drew me up from the pit of destruction,     out of the miry bog,and set my feet upon a rock,     making my steps secure. (Psalm 40:1–2)

Philosophy can’t do it. Determination can’t do it. Consensus can’t do it. And just a vote at a voting booth can’t do it. It’s God.

Piper: And he goes on and says,

He put a new song in my mouth,     a song of praise to our God.Many will see and fear,     and put their trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40:3)

Which means that the extended time of desolation was the means to a new song, which was the means to people trusting Christ. Those are the kinds of connections our people have just got to see, so that they don’t linger in the desolation without thinking that God has no good designs here.

Engen: Exactly — and that there is a rock, that there is a solid foundation. And as I was speaking to one of our listeners and staff members here on the college campus, he said, I think very vividly, “We’ve watched this house built on sand crumble to the ground. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to build our new house on the rock, the firm foundation of Christ? Or are we going to try the sand thing again? Well, let’s go to the rock.”

Knapp: Does your life look like the World Trade Center coming down? The trigger word for me in all of that is fear. That’s the word: “Many will see and fear” (Psalm 40:3). And I see that word in so many places: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10).

Piper: Right. And I just read in Isaiah when Christ is described. It says, “His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:3). If we find the covert in the cleft of the rock, where we’re safe in Jesus through the cross, the hurricane of God’s might ceases to be threatening and becomes gloriously satisfying. In the eye of the hurricane is a safe place to look at this mighty God. “Our God is a consuming fire,” Hebrews says (Hebrews 10:27). And yet, he doesn’t have to be frightening to the soul that is safe in Jesus.

And you mentioned to me on the phone yesterday, Chuck, about children and struggling. In fact, I heard on some station people talking about that this morning. I was just trying to find you this morning quick before I came over, and they were talking about children. And I just want to stress to parents that we expect too little of our children. They are capable of discerning and grasping some pretty weighty things about God, and they are probably willing to embrace them more quickly than many adults. When we tell them the story of the flood, we ought to tell them it’s about the judgment of God on humanity, and everybody drowned because of how horrible sin is.

“When you say, ‘What’s the purpose of God in these kinds of things?’ one answer is ‘Billions of purposes.’”

And when we tell them the story of the feeding of the five thousand, we shouldn’t tell them this is just about the sharing of a lunch. This is about a mighty Christ who takes five little loaves of your life and feeds five thousand people. He can do wonders with your little life. Give yourself to him. We need to get our kids into a big vision of God. And I’ve got a little 5-year-old girl. She’s sitting right outside that window there. This is a homeschool outing for her to see how radio works. And she said this morning, “Now a plane was stolen and hit a building?” And I said, “Do you know what happened? God allowed something very terrible to happen, so that he might bring about great good. Let’s pray that millions upon millions of divine, gracious, merciful purposes would happen in people’s lives. For example, Talitha, we’re praying right now. We’re praying. We wouldn’t have been praying like this before.”

I mean, when you say, “What’s the purpose of God in these kinds of things?” one answer is “Billions of purposes.” God is doing things that we can’t even imagine. And we just need to put our hands over our mouths, submit to him, and go back to the cross.

Greatest Thing in the World

I see the clock coming to an end there, and I need to go and you need to go, and I’m so glad Michael Smith is coming. But let me just end on the gospel. Can I?

Knapp: Yes, please.

Piper: I’ve been reveling in Romans for three years at Bethlehem and preached last Sunday: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And I want the listeners to hear this and know it with all their hearts: the fact that there can be no condemnation is rooted not in our goodness, but in Christ’s sufficiency on the cross. The Son of God died for sinners. Everyone who comes to him can have absolute, total pardon and forgiveness. They can be clothed in a righteousness not their own (Philippians 3:9). When they’re faced with the last judgment or the accusations of Satan, they can say “No, there is over me no condemnation because I am in Christ Jesus.”

But here’s the note I think we need to strike this moment: That message goes out to every nation, every people group, every color, every ethnic group in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan. And that same gospel saves every kind of person. So, I just plead with the church of Jesus Christ not to fall into the trap of starting to stereotype Arab people or Palestinian people or people of a certain color as having a certain bent. That is the essence of racism. It’s the essence of prejudice: lumping a group together, taking one lousy apple and making the whole barrel rotten. Oh, that the church would say, “Jesus Christ died for all, so that whoever will believe of any color may have eternal life and escape perishing.”

Whether they go down in a plane, whether they go up in smoke, Christians have a message in the midst of tragedy — they have a message at funerals, a message at weddings. And it is a glorious thing to be a Christian. I buried an old man when I came to the church 21 years ago, who looked up from the bed to me, and he smiled as he was dying. He said, “Pastor John, the greatest thing in the world is to be saved.” And we can offer that to every single person.

So bless you, brothers, as you keep offering the good news on this station. It was an honor to be here with you.

September 11, 2001, was the day before my twenty-first birthday. I was leaving my first collegiate Classical Greek class when I heard someone say a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. He didn’t sound shocked; just intrigued. I assumed it must have been a small plane, surely an accident, perhaps even no fatalities. I walked back to the dorms, enjoying a few more minutes of peace.

That peace ended on my hall. Doors were open, televisions on. Shock and horror were plain. Now another plane — passenger jets? — had hit the other tower. This was coordinated terrorism, and the nation seemed under attack. We waited to learn whether more planes had been highjacked, whether more assaults would come.

As we come to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, I suspect many readers have those first horrific moments emblazoned in their memory — where you were, how you heard, what you did for the next several hours. Most, like me, were tucked safely away from America’s largest cities. I can only imagine the experience of those hours, and days, in New York and DC.

Doubtless we remember the day far more than the ensuing weeks, but much was changing in those days. News was changing. Air travel was changing. New and deeper fears were stirring. And many of the changes are still felt and seen today, two decades later. As others pay tribute, and tell of those who died, of how it profoundly affected a nation, and the world, and the ripple effects that followed, my particular interest is theological. What mark did 9/11 leave on our faith?

God Without Christ

In those days, many Christians, churches, and ministries asked fresh questions with deeper interest — about the sovereignty of God, and the problem of evil, and the reality of Islam, the world’s second largest religion. But at the ministry of Desiring God specifically, the enduring theological legacy of 9/11 has been a deeper and more deliberate Christ-centeredness.

“The enduring theological legacy of 9/11 for us has been a deeper and more deliberate Christ-centeredness.”

A year and a half after the attacks, I was in my final month of college when I read a copy of Don’t Waste Your Life, which released that year. I can still picture the top of page 38, the words now emblazoned in my mind like images from 9/11.

I was familiar with John Piper’s own story in chapters 1 and 2 of becoming a “Christian Hedonist” and discovering the life-transforming truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Now what I found on page 38 was new — at least new clarity, new precision, new explicitness. I had not heard Piper zero in so particularly before, at least in this way, with a seriousness about Christ-centeredness. Writing a little over a year after 9/11, he said,

Since September 11, 2001, I have seen more clearly than ever how essential it is to exult explicitly in the excellence of Christ crucified for sinners and risen from the dead. Christ must be explicit in all our God-talk. It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about the glory of God in vague ways. God without Christ is no God. And a no-God cannot save or satisfy the soul. Following a no-God — whatever his name or whatever his religion — will be a wasted life. God-in-Christ is the only true God and the only path to joy. Everything I have said so far must now be related to Christ.

As Christians living in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we often took “God” for granted as the Christian God — the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Even in cities like Minneapolis, and all the more in rural areas, God was assumed to be the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But 9/11 struck us right between the eyes — with terror inflicted by professing monotheists. To many of us, Islam had seemed so distant. Now, all of a sudden, it felt so close, and threatening. And theologically, the question that churches and ministries and Christian publications wrestled with in those days was, Is the God of Islam the Father of Jesus?

Bracing clarity awaited us. The New Testament was not birthed in the presumptions of increasingly post-Christian times. Rather, the early church was at the margins. The first-century world was flagrantly pluralistic. Now, in the harsh wake of the attacks, we began to see explicit, even shocking, Christ-centeredness from the Gospels to Revelation — and its profound relevance to the pluralism of our days.

The One Who Rejects Me

Jesus himself made it stark: “The one who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (John 5:23). To reject Jesus on his own terms, as Islam does, is to reject the one, true God. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

“To reject Jesus on his own terms, as Islam does, is to reject the one, true God.”

Again and again, the events of Acts turn not on mere monotheism, or the name of Yahweh, but on the name of Jesus. We also were awakened, Desiring God included, to the striking Christ-centeredness we often overlooked in the Epistles. Amazingly, not only did “God the Father” now appear alongside “our Lord Jesus Christ” (more than fifteen times), but he was defined as “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 15:6; 2 Corinthians 1:3; 11:31; Ephesians 1:3, 17; Colossians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3).

Paul’s letter to the Colossians is particularly explicit about Christ, and his supremacy, in its God-talk. In perhaps the most stunningly Christ-centered six consecutive verses in all the Bible, Paul celebrates Jesus as “the image of the invisible God,” and the one in whom, and through whom, and for whom, all things were made and exist — “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15–17). And not just this exhaustively in creation, but also in redemption — all salvation is in him, and through him, and for him (Colossians 1:18–20).

Later, Paul goes as far as to say, sweepingly, “Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11), and the apostle takes the all-encompassing charge of “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) and makes it explicitly Christ-centered: “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

Litmus Test for All

It was not just Colossians that we turned to afresh in those post-9/11 days. It was the magisterial opening verses of Hebrews (1:1–4) and the Gospel of John (1:1–18), as well as John’s final apocalyptic vision at the end — with Christ, the Lamb, lighting the celestial city in the glory of God as its singular lamp (Revelation 21:23).

The implications were freshly clear for us: “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23). “Everyone who . . . does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God” (2 John 9). So, as Piper went on to say,

Jesus is the litmus test of reality for all persons and all religions. . . . People and religions who reject Christ reject God. Do other religions know the true God? Here is the test: Do they reject Jesus as the only Savior for sinners who was crucified and raised by God from the dead? If they do, they do not know God in a saving way. . . . There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives.

If we would see and savor the glory of God, we must see and savor Christ. For Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). To put it another way, if we would embrace the glory of God, we must embrace the gospel of Christ. The reason for this is not only because we are sinners and need a Savior to die for us, but also because this Savior is himself the fullest and most beautiful manifestation of the glory of God. He purchases our undeserved and everlasting pleasure, and he becomes for us our all-deserving, everlasting Treasure. (38–39)

‘Through Jesus Christ’

In the months that followed 9/11, we realized at Desiring God, and at Bethlehem Baptist Church, that our beloved mission statement needed at least three more precious and clarifying words:

We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples, through Jesus Christ.

To be sure, Christ is not just the means. We not only do all we do as Christians through him but also, as Colossians 1:15–20 makes plain, in him and for him. He is not just the way, but also the life. He is not just the means, but knowing and enjoying him is also the great end. As Piper had said, It will not do, in this day of pluralism, to talk about God in vague ways. Everything must now relate to Christ.

Blazing Center of the Glory

For Christians desiring God — and the ministry called Desiring God — this has been a great legacy of 9/11.

We don’t say that lightly. We don’t say that without acknowledging the pain, and profound terror, experienced by many in those hours, or the casualties and their friends and family. As Christians, however, neither do we minimize the preciousness of fresh explicitness, and awareness, and appreciation, and worship of Jesus Christ crucified and risen for sinners like us. Perhaps you were among the number newly awakened to the treasure of Christ in the darkness of 9/11. Or maybe here twenty years later, at its remembrance, God would be pleased to stir you to the explicit glories of his Son that set the Christian faith apart from Islam, secularism, and every other confession on earth.

With that, perhaps Piper should have the last word:

Ever since the incarnate, redeeming work of Jesus, God is gladly glorified by sinners only through the glorification of the risen God-man, Jesus Christ. His bloody death is the blazing center of the glory of God. There is no way to the glory of the Father but through the Son. All the promises of joy in God’s presence, and pleasures at his right hand, come to us only through faith in Jesus Christ. (38)

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14744655/how-does-christ-fill-all-things

Audio Transcript

#blessed — It’s a social media tag for when someone feels blessed and who has, or is getting, everything they’ve dreamed of getting. It can range from getting a new girlfriend, a new job, or a pay raise, to finding a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk or getting surprisingly good news. But what does it mean to truly be blessed according to Scripture? Now that’s a different discussion, one initiated by a discerning listener to the podcast named Jordan.

“Pastor John, hello! Of late I have been having discussions with my friends around what it means to be blessed. The term blessed is thrown around in our culture today, and it’s all over our Bibles too. To me, it seems like the way God uses blessed or blessings in the Bible is very different from how it’s used now. I see the term blessed associated with material possessions or family or health. These can all be good things, but I think you could also argue that if these blessings lead us further away from God, they are not truly blessings at all.

“On the other hand, Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ (Matthew 5:3). And he said, ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake’ (Matthew 5:10). And he said, ‘Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account’ (Matthew 5:11). Rarely, if ever, do I see people posting about how blessed they are as ‘poor in spirit’ or ‘persecuted’ like we read about in the Beatitudes. With that in mind, what is a biblical definition of what it means to be truly blessed?”

Jordan puts his finger on the nub of the issue, I think, by referring to the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. And I’m going to circle back and probably end there and affirm what he sees and show why it is such a great answer to his own question.

Showcase of God’s Blessing

But first, let me lay down a principle that has helped me grasp why there is such a preponderance of earthly blessings promised in the Old Testament — like the inheritance of land (Psalm 37:22), deliverance from our enemies (Psalm 41:1), fruitfulness in our families and in our fields (Genesis 17:20; 48:3–4) — while in the New Testament, there are very few earthly blessings promised, but rather afflictions are promised, with the material, physical blessings largely postponed until the resurrection.

Here’s the principle: in God’s wisdom, the Jewish religion of the Old Testament was largely a “come and see” religion. Israel was the showcase of God’s blessings among the nations.

Now when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions. . . . And when the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and his burnt offerings that he offered at the house of the Lord, there was no more breath in her. (1 Kings 10:1, 4–5)

I call that the showcasing of the blessing of God on the people of God in the Old Testament.

Into All the World

There’s nothing like that in the New Testament. In God’s wisdom, the church of Jesus Christ is not an ethnic or geographic or political or national entity. It cuts across all ethnicities, all geographies, all politics, nationalities.

There is no geographic center for Christianity.
There’s no great temple-like edifice in Christianity.
There are no places to do pilgrimages in Christianity.
There are no priests or saints through whom we have to go to God, but only Jesus Christ.

“Put all the billionaires together. They are paupers compared to the lowliest Christian.”

And instead of telling the world to come to us — “Come see how I bless my people”; God never says that — he says, “Go — go to the world. And if it costs you your life, lay it down.” Jesus says very plainly, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). “Put it at the disposal of me and my mission.” That’s the kind of radical life we’re called to live in the New Testament.

So there’s the principle. And the failure to recognize this distinction between God’s plan for Israel in the Old Testament and God’s plan for the church in the New Testament has caused a lot of people to put way too much emphasis on earthly blessings today.

Eternal Happiness

And I think one of the most illumining texts about how we are blessed as Christians — which we are; I would say we are infinitely blessed — is 1 Corinthians 3:21–23.

Let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.

Let that sink in. What a verse! I love it. To belong to Christ is to belong to God as our Father and to be heirs of all that God owns — that is, everything. Paul says, “The world is yours. All things are yours.” Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). You cannot be richer than a Christian. Put all the billionaires together. They are paupers — I mean, poverty-stricken paupers — compared to the lowliest Christian.

But notice that in the list of things that belong to us is death. That’s in the list: “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death.” Death is yours. This means that you do not get all your blessings in this life, but that death itself belongs to you as a gift, as a doorway to infinite, eternal, immeasurable blessing. Death becomes your servant because of Christ’s triumph over death. The apostle John heard a voice from heaven saying, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Revelation 14:13). Why is that? Paul answers in Ephesians 1:3: God “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” — every blessing that heaven can conceive for the eternal happiness of God’s people will be ours.

“In God’s wisdom, the church of Jesus Christ is not an ethnic or geographic or political or national entity.”

But Jesus taught us explicitly not to expect them now. For example, in Luke 14:13–14, he said, “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” I love Jesus’s logic: “You will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” That’s the orientation of Jesus Christ the king. That’s the New Testament pattern: sacrificial generosity and service now; spectacular blessing later at the resurrection. Or here’s the way James puts it: “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).

First the trial, then the blessing, the crown.

Our Great Reward

Let’s circle back now to Jordan’s reference to the Beatitudes. I think the Beatitudes, taken together, provide a beautiful summary of the blessings promised to the followers of Christ: six immeasurable blessings are sandwiched between the summary promise “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3, 10).

These six blessings summarize what it means to live forever under the kingdom, the heavenly rule of God:

We will see God: “They shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). The pure shall see God.
We will be shown mercy: “They shall receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7).
We will be part of God’s family: “They shall be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:9).
We will experience God’s comfort: “They shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
We will be co-owners of the whole world: “They shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).
We will be satisfied with personal and universal righteousness: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6).

So in summary, (1) the presence of God seen and enjoyed in the face of Christ, (2) covering us with mercy because of all our sins, (3) calling us his children, (4) comforting us for all pain and loss in this world, (5) bequeathing to us the universe for a familiar homeland, and (6) everything set right in our souls and in the social order of the new world — this is our great reward. This is what it means to be truly blessed.

Where are we in missions to the Muslim world on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11? If we look only at surface realities, we may easily lose hope.

Just recently, of course, Afghanistan was completely overrun by the Taliban. Missionaries fled the country — if they could. America’s poorly considered and poorly executed departure resulted (and will result) in untold numbers brutalized at the hands of the Taliban. These tragedies mark an ironic and sad anniversary to 9/11, especially for Afghani Christians. Afghanistan alone seems to give reason to lose hope for missions in the Muslim world.

But Afghanistan is hardly alone. The Muslim world is known for head fakes of hope: the Arab Spring promised to move the Muslim world into a free society; the seeming openness of Saudi Arabia gave hope for a less medieval country; street protests in Iran offered light against the cruel and oppressive government. Yet all of these movements were crushed or discredited or snuffed out.

The list goes on: economic ruin in Lebanon, dystopian landscapes in Iraq, sectarian conflict in Egypt, refugee horrors in Syria, oppression of Christians in Turkey and Indonesia, ever-more-brutal sectarian conflict in Africa.

Even the most progressive and open countries of the Muslim world foster such unimaginable violations of human rights that most Westerners scarcely have a category to understand them or even believe them to be true. These realities make missionary-minded people feel like grasshoppers before giants.

Gardening One Fateful Day

I know such feelings well. I remember a day that threatened to crush my hope for missions in the Muslim world. What a day it was: clear skies and perfect temperature — just right for working in the yard. But my yard work wasn’t merely yard work; it was part of a vision for the Middle East.

We desired to do something not done before: develop student ministry on the new universities in the Arabian Peninsula. So a year before, after much research, we had set our course for Dubai, a gleaming modern city springing up out of the desert of the United Arab Emirates. We recruited a team of like-minded couples. They were skilled, gospel-centered, committed. We shared a long and deep friendship developed over the years in ministry together. We garnered financial support. We set up a business. We saw God’s favor all around us. I’m still astonished with how everything fell into place.

The last step before buying our plane tickets was to sell our house. “Let’s put it on the market mid-September,” I said. “How about the 12th?” my wife said. Done.

Thus, I was sprucing up the yard on 9/11 before hammering in a for-sale sign.

Falling from Buildings

That same clear-blue day, planes fell from the sky, ramming home death and destruction on unsuspecting victims going about their work.

I remember not quite believing the reports. I remember the rush to the TV and seeing the unbelievable. I remember the copper taste in my mouth as the world changed before our eyes. Not that we had any understanding of the implications, but we sensed it. The events made regular life feel small and insignificant — much like the discovery of a serious illness, or the sudden death of a close friend.

As I prayed with my young sons at bedtime that night, my oldest, fourteen at the time, said, “Daddy, I close my eyes, but I keep seeing people falling from buildings.” I so wished he hadn’t seen that. Yet it marked the horror of the day, and as I closed my eyes that night, I saw them too. I still do.

Following Jesus’s Words

As the story of 9/11 unfolded, it became apparent that this was a premeditated Islamic attack, carried out by men mostly from the United Arab Emirates. So we faced some questions. Chief among them was this one: “Since the terrorists came from the very place we intend to live, should we go at all?”

I felt the temptation to give in to fear and lose hope. And there were deeper questions.

Do we believe that Jesus has “all authority on heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18)?
Do we believe that, in the same breath he spoke of his power, he said, “Go” (Matthew 28:19)?
And most of all, do we cling to his promise to be with us always (Matthew 28:20)?

Yes, yes, and yes. The house sold on 9/13.

Later that year, we went to make our life in the Middle East, where we would live for the next twenty years through fears, war, threats, death, and great joy. We lived first in the Arabian Peninsula, and then later in Iraq.

It could not have been a better time to go. Going when circumstances looked so dark made a statement to our new neighbors: we weren’t afraid because we knew Jesus went with us. It also bore testimony that we loved the people of the Arabian Peninsula, and that we had something important to share with them.

And unquestionably, it has been the greatest privilege of our lives.

‘Give Me Nineteen Men’

We never expected to see the kind of fruit God granted.

On the plane to Dubai in 2001 (which was completely empty except for our family), I prayed, “O God, if you would allow me to see nineteen young men come to you, and have a heart for you, and be a part of more change than those nineteen young men who flew planes into buildings, I would be ever so grateful.”

“O you of little faith.” We will not know the number God provided this side of heaven, but it surpasses nineteen. Students came to faith — a trickle at first, then many, and then entire fellowships of believers, formed on campus. We discipled and evangelized and recruited more workers to join us. Many of those who came to faith on campus came on our staff team to be campus ministers themselves.

The staff and students were tightly integrated into churches that were rapidly being revitalized. We didn’t do all the work of church planting and revitalization, but our team helped see it happen. God was pleased to grant fruit that may grow until Christ’s return.

Reasons for Hope

So how about today? Where are we in Muslim missions as we mark the twentieth anniversary of 9/11?

To talk of the “Muslim world,” of course, is a bit misleading. Muslims do speak of an Ummah, much like Christians speak of the body of Christ or the church universal. But in reality, the Muslim world is an incredibly diverse global community that is often at odds. So, we can speak of the “Muslim world” only in the broadest of terms. With that said, a survey of this diverse world offers reasons for hope.

Indigenous Christians

First, many deeply committed indigenous Christians live all over the Muslim world. They give great hope for the future, and we have much to learn from them. Some come from historic Christian communities. Others have converted. Still others are members of evangelical churches. But for all, the boot of Islam rests on their necks. They need love and support from believers around the world.

Conversions

Perhaps the greatest myth held by Christians in the West is that Muslims don’t come to Jesus.

People in the Muslim world are much more willing to talk about spiritual life than those in the West. They are more willing to read the Bible with a Christian than unbelievers in the West are. They feel drawn to genuine Christian community.

“Perhaps the greatest myth held by Christians in the West is that Muslims don’t come to Jesus.”

Furthermore, the harsh application of Islam does not help its cause. Thoughtful Muslims see the brutality of ISIS and Boko Haram and the Taliban, and they want nothing to do with this form of traditional Islam — but where do they turn? In my experience, many Muslims who hear of the love of Christ find faith in Jesus compelling.

Many people from Muslim backgrounds come to faith in Christ. Their stories are not trumpeted on social media: the death penalty for conversion in some Muslim communities is real (as prescribed by the Quran). But those who think about missions in the Muslim world need to remember that God will call to himself those he wills as we are faithful to proclaim the gospel.

Cross

Finally, remember the way of the cross.

The Christian faith shines bright to a world in despair. We have much to say to people who are brutalized by wicked religious men, because Jesus was brutalized by wicked religious men. Who would have foreseen that the Roman gibbet — an instrument of torture and death — would be the very tool God would use to offer peace and love and forgiveness to an evil world? What men intended as supreme evil, God used for supreme good.

In the same way, the horror of 9/11 was an evil event, coordinated by evil actors perpetrated on unsuspecting people who did not deserve to die at the hands of such a wicked plan. Yet it too has been and will be used by God for his higher purposes.

Ways Forward

Over my twenty years in the Muslim world, I’ve also learned several lessons, lessons to know and remember when we think about missions in the Muslim world today.

Workers

There are more Christian workers in the Muslim world than ever before. Some are tentmakers, others are full-time workers with churches or agencies, some are on short terms, and many are with aid and relief NGOs. But the need is for even more Christian workers of all stripes in the Muslim world — and for all of us to be bold and clear about our commitment to Jesus and the gospel.

Do we have any choice but to obey the Great Commission? God does not rescind Matthew 28:18–20 in hard times. He never promises to spare us from difficulties. Actually, he promises difficulties. At the same time, he promises his presence.

“God promises difficulties. At the same time, he promises his presence.”

The fact is, if we wait to obey Christ’s commission until circumstances in the Muslim world are safe or calm, no one will ever go or speak. But we need to go and speak. We want to alleviate suffering, and even more importantly, we want to warn of the eternal suffering to follow death without Christ.

Endurance

The Muslim world needs mature believers, who have years of ministry experience, to come and stay for decades, not months. The great need is for missionaries to focus less on technique or the latest missiological trend, and rely more on the ability to adapt and grow and share our faith while overcoming obstacles in a cross-cultural environment. This comes only from experience and maturity.

Our team left for the Middle East when I was 45 years old. Our combined ministry experience totaled forty years. We were at the top of our game in ministry. Our combined insights on ministry and missions proved invaluable for the work.

Churches

Though many may come to faith in Christ, if they do not become part of a healthy church, we might as well throw them to the wolves. Yet indigenous healthy churches are a rarity in the Muslim world. So, planting healthy churches is a first priority.

Surprisingly to many in the West, the Quran actually prescribes that Christians be allowed to establish churches as “people of the book.” (Anyone who is in a position to do so should press this truth home with Muslim friends or Muslim government officials.)

By healthy church, I mean a cross-focused, gospel-proclaiming, Bible-drenched church of baptized believers, covenanted together to care for each other in gospel love as a display of God’s glory under the leadership and teaching of the elders, who studiously practice the commands of the Bible for the church.

Their Only Hope — and Ours

So, are these dark days for missions in the Muslim world?

Nothing could be further from the truth. There have never been more opportunities for the faithful to follow the Great Commission in the Muslim world. Does doing so involve sacrifice and risk? Of course — what important pursuit doesn’t? But is it worth it? Unquestionably.

The hope of the Muslim world is not economic development, or military might, or political will, or better education. The hope of the Muslim world is Jesus. He is the only one who can transform a world locked in darkness into a place of marvelous light.