Last August, as our family visited Manhattan, we had the joy of seeing The Lion King on Broadway. And in that urban, sophisticated, and apparently progressive setting, the play’s climactic moment struck me as especially memorable, and poignant. The crowd went wild at the destruction of Scar.

Among all the educated and psychologically informed members of the audience, I didn’t observe any who expressed concern about the villain’s feelings. No one objected or stood in protest as a self-proclaimed advocate for Scar. None demanded our empathy for the misunderstood scapegoat.

Deep down, we all want the wicked to receive their due. We all have our cries for justice. Even Broadway audiences cheer the destruction of the manifest monster. Without controversy, we consign Hitler to damnation. We know great evil demands cosmic justice.

Yet we have a harder time imagining ourselves, or our beloved friends and family, as the wicked, as those justly deserving what Jesus called hell.

These Overwhelming Doctrines

There, I said it — “the crude monosyllable,” as C.S. Lewis calls it in his essay on “Learning in War-Time.”

To a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention Heaven and hell even in a pulpit. (48)

Now, Lewis’s “these days” were nearly ninety years ago, at the start of World War II. Perhaps hell was permitted to make a brief comeback in polite conversation after such a war, but surely it’s no more socially accepted today than it was in 1939. Lewis continues,

I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tom-foolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them. (48)

Note two unnerving claims here, well-spoken in 1939, and still strikingly relevant. First, Jesus indeed did teach on hell more than anyone else: “These overwhelming doctrines are dominical.” For instance, the Greek gehenna, which we translate hell, occurs twelve times in the New Testament, with eleven on the lips of Jesus. Hell comes from the mouth of our Lord himself — the one man who is also divine, preeminently holy enough to speak to such a subject, and for none who genuinely claim his name to second-guess him. It really would be profound folly to think you could have Jesus and not have, with him, his clear and pronounced teaching on hell.

Second, the paths diverge in Lewis’s double “if” statements: “If we do not believe them [the dominical doctrines], our presence in this church is great tom-foolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.” In other words, Lewis puts the question to us, as Elijah put the question to those limping between Baal and the true God: Will you be faithful to the clear teaching of the one you call Lord, or will you be the liar or lunatic?

Hell Is Supposed to Horrify

However much we might wrestle theologically with “the problem of evil” — and with it, “the problem of hell” — it really is the existential problems of evil and hell that unsettle us the most. College students might express (and even enjoy) theoretical questions in safe, scholastic settings, but these challenges pale in comparison to losing a loved one to cancer, or murder or a freak accident, and pondering whether your beloved might spend eternity apart from Jesus and under the penalties of divine justice.

This existential weight creates crises of faith for some. And the crisis can be exacerbated by assuming that you’re suffering under this weight alone, or that few others are, and that maybe you really shouldn’t feel this angst.

For those in the throes of such existential discomfort, it may genuinely help to learn that you’re not alone, and, to some extent, you actually should feel this way. Hell is supposed to make us uncomfortable. This side of heaven, it is not a sign of spiritual health to be untroubled by the horrors of hell — that humans like us, made in God’s image for fullness of joy, will spend eternity under the righteous frown of his omnipotent justice.

As theologian Wayne Grudem writes, not only is “the doctrine of eternal conscious punishment . . . so foreign to the thought patterns of our culture,” but it also offends “on a deeper level . . . our instinctive and God-given sense of love and desire for redemption for every human being created in God’s image.” So, he acknowledges, “This doctrine is emotionally one of the most difficult doctrines for Christians to affirm today.” And this is fitting in significant measure: “If our hearts are never moved with deep sorrow when we contemplate this doctrine, then there is a serious deficiency in our spiritual and emotional sensibilities” (Systematic Theology, 1152, note 16).

Go Where the Bible Goes

For all of us, and especially those who feel the most discomfort, we do well to turn forward to the book of Revelation — to go where the Bible goes. Two texts in the later part of the book can be especially helpful in addressing our (proper) existential trouble with hell.

First is Revelation 15:1–4, where John sees “another sign in heaven,” which he calls “great and amazing”: seven angels with seven plagues, and “with them the wrath of God is finished” (verse 1). There John also sees “those who had conquered the beast . . . with harps of God in their hands” (verse 2). And how do these saints in heaven respond to God’s poured-out wrath? They sing. Without any stated reservations, they praise their Lord not despite his “righteous acts” and “just ways,” but precisely because of them. With his perfect, divine justice squarely in view, they sing, “Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty!” (verse 3).

Then in Revelation 19:1–4, following the fall of Babylon, with the wicked justly laid waste in a single hour (18:10, 17, 19), John hears the response of “a great multitude in heaven” (19:1). Again, they are not wailing; nor are they silent. Rather, with loud praise, they cry, four times, “Hallelujah!” (verses 1, 3, 4, and 6). God’s people declare, in worship, that his “judgments are true and just” (verse 2). He “has avenged on [the great prostitute] the blood of his servants” (verse 2). And this, not just as a momentary act of judgment but eternally:

Hallelujah! The smoke from her goes up forever and ever. (verse 3)

Songs of Final Justice

On this stunning future vision, which we find so hard to fathom in the present, theologian John Frame comments, “When we are gathered around the throne, singing God’s praises in the eternal state, we will not be raising objections to God’s justice, but we will be praising it without reservation” (Salvation Belongs to the Lord, 299).

God’s justice, in principle and power, exercised against his enemies — who also are the enemies of his people — elicits the praises of heaven. This is what the saints had cried out for as early as Revelation 6:10: that God would “judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth.” And this is the summons to the saints from those who observed Babylon’s destruction from afar:

Rejoice over her, O heaven,and you saints and apostles and prophets,for God has given judgment for you against her! (Revelation 18:20)

God vindicates his people, not only himself, in the fires of hell. When final justice has come for the martyrs, and all the worshipers of heaven, the redeemed people of the Lamb will sing that his acts of justice are “great and amazing” (Revelation 15:1, 3). And for us today, with our discomforts, we observe that these prophetic glimpses are (at least in significant measure) future and have not yet come to their fullness in our lives in the present.

Resolution Will Come

The songs of Revelation offer a balm for our existential trouble now, even if almost paradoxically. We do not yet have full relief from this emotional dilemma, but we do have, at the end of Scripture, a prophetic promise: God will one day bring history to its culmination in such a way as to give us such relief. For now, we do not have full resolution, but we have the promise that, as surely as God is God, we will have such peace when his justice comes in full, and forever.

For now, the thought of hell is supposed to make us uncomfortable. But one day soon, all the masks will be off. We will see all evil for what it is, and the wicked for who they are as enemies of God, and foes of his people. And with the saints in the heaven, we will exult and thrill in praise and unspeakable joy, and even our most earthly beloved in hell will not ruin the glory of heaven.

Now we see through a glass dimly, but then we will see the Lamb face to face and glory in the exercise of his perfect justice and power, even as we marvel at his mercy to us. Then both God’s kindness and his severity will be seen to extend far beyond our previous comprehension. And the justice of hell, in the end, will be a component of our everlasting joy, not a detriment to it. We will see, without question, that the Judge of all the earth has done right (Genesis 18:25). He will wipe away every tear — and there will be no “mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4).

“You are living the best days of your life.”

The comment caught my wife off guard. She was carting our two young boys toward the grocery-store checkout when an older woman ventured the prophecy. The woman spoke from experience, as a mother whose own cart had once held little ones. Perhaps she saw in my wife a past version of herself. Perhaps our boys brought back dear memories. Either way, she felt stirred to speak from hindsight: “You are living the best days of your life.”

My wife and I feel the truth of her words. Even amid the chaos of these little years, we often catch glimpses of what life will be like when our home no longer hears the patter of little feet or the laughter of little voices. We won’t be surprised if we look back on these years — these wild, exhausting, wonderful years — as the sweetest of our lives. We also won’t be surprised if they leave sooner than we’d like.

Moments like this one in the grocery store have left me wondering how to live through precious days you know will pass away. How, as Christians, should we watch children grow, tables empty, friendships fade, faces wrinkle?

Every Good Season Will End

In a world of change and decay, good gifts are fleeting by nature. Kids get big and hair turns gray. Honeymoons pass and anniversaries add up. Good ministries end and new beginnings quickly become old. These facts are so obvious, so unavoidable, that you’d think we’d be more ready for them.

But something in us — something in me — tries to deny the obvious and outrun the unavoidable. We, of course, have developed a dozen ways and more we try to dam the River Time. Some take pictures: many pictures, beautiful pictures, pictures to freeze and frame our happiness. Some try to choreograph moments meant to be enjoyed, not arranged. Some become relationally clingy. Some treat their children as if they were several years younger than they are. I sometimes find myself attempting to extend moments longer than they should go, like a man who keeps shouting “Encore!” after the band has gone home.

Such impulses often come from a kind of anticipated nostalgia, an awareness of present gifts we can’t bear to imagine as past, as gone. So we hold a net over our brightest days, trying to catch the butterfly of lasting joy in the fields of time. But the holes are always too big. No matter how much we try, we cannot seize good seasons from the vanity of our Ecclesiastes world, where “there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 2:16).

No, we cannot stop the breezes that carry away our best moments. But we can learn to live more wisely in the wind.

The Hand That Holds Our Seasons

The brevity of beautiful seasons can seem like a kind of cruelty. And in some ways, of course, our losses do remind us of our fallen lot, that we dwell in a land where good things die. Our seasons, like our selves, go from dust to dust, the casualties of a sin-cursed world, subjected to futility (Romans 8:20). But for God’s people, Scripture would have us see our passing seasons differently. Ultimately, time does not take our best days from us; God does (Job 1:21). And therefore, wisdom comes from seeing the hand that holds our seasons.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” the Preacher tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:1). And God is the one who has made it so. “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He gives seasons of joy and gladness, seasons for holding and laughing. But on this side of heaven, he gives none of these seasons forever. In his tender and merciful timing, the giver of “every good gift” takes back the treasures he lent, reminding us that they never truly belonged to us (James 1:17). Like beams from the sun, our seasons were not ours to own.

Those who receive their seasons from God’s hand, and remain ready to relinquish them at his bidding, find a counterintuitive kind of freedom. The more ready we are to part with good gifts, the less worried we are about losing them, and the more able we are to enjoy them. After imagining his best seasons long gone, the Preacher tells us, “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (Ecclesiastes 2:24).

Or as David Gibson writes, “Instead of using these gifts as a means to a greater end of securing ultimate gain in the world, we take the time to live inside the gifts themselves and see the hand of God in them” (Living Life Backward, 45). The wise see the hand of God in their best seasons; they also see their best seasons in the hand of God. “My times are in your hand,” the psalmist says (Psalm 31:15). And if our times are in God’s hand — his good, wise, kind hand — then we don’t need to try to keep them in ours.

Stamping Time with Eternity

But we can say more. And indeed, on this side of the cross and empty tomb, after Jesus has “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10), we can’t help but say more. We may live in an Ecclesiastes world, but we are headed for a world without vanity, futility, or loss. And though we cannot keep our seasons from slipping away from us here, Scripture gives us hope that we can stamp them with eternity. “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last” — but what’s done for Christ will last.

The apostle Paul whispers of the wonder. “In the Lord,” he tells the Corinthians, “your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58) — not destined for vanity, not swept away by the wind. Or as he writes to the Ephesians, “Whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord” (Ephesians 6:8). Good works done for Christ, good seasons lived wholly to Christ, do not stay gone. Our hands cannot catch the passing moments, but Jesus’s can. Therefore, every moment given to him will become something more than passing.

Present gifts must die. But if they die in Christ, they will have a resurrection of sorts. The seasons will not return to us the same (as if we could parent toddlers again in glory), but “whatever good” we’ve done in these seasons will be remembered, rewarded, memorialized like a brick of gold on the streets of the New Jerusalem.

Gerrit Scott Dawson puts the matter poignantly in his book on Jesus’s ascension. If Jesus, the firstfruits from the dead, really reigns in deathless life, then for those united to him,

Nothing good in our humanity is lost. The memory of a body that works in health is more than recollection: it is now anticipation. The ache of true love once known but now sundered will be filled with glorious reunion. The feeling of the distant memory of Beauty, the ideal of Truth in a fallen world, the longing for Goodness that surfaces amidst the choking thorns of our wickedness, all these will find fulfillment when the firstfruits comes to harvest. (Jesus Ascended, 113)

Time may have driven our best days from us, but “God seeks what has been driven away” (Ecclesiastes 3:15). And he knows how to give back the best of our seasons — only now far better.

Aching for Heaven

Perhaps you find yourself in precious days you know will pass. You feel the sand slipping through your fingers. You see the moss beginning to grow over your happiest moments. A few days more, and you will sit beneath a leafless tree, the season past and gone. But then a few days after that, those in Christ will find themselves in a season that will never end.

Now, heaven’s eternal season will not be static. However much we discover of God, the shoreline of his perfections will ever bend over the horizon, always as “immeasurable” as before (Ephesians 2:7). But somehow, the stream of eternity will roll on without carrying away anything good, without ever reintroducing mourning, crying, or pain (Revelation 21:4). We will enjoy change without parting, growth without loss, a season without sadness.

I have been wondering, then, if I might live more heavenly minded if I learned to read my aches rightly. For when I feel time running faster than I can follow, what I’m really yearning for is life with Jesus. And the question I should really ask is this: If even this fallen world holds moments as precious as these, what will eternity with him be like?

Every good season will come to an end, but only for now. So when the thought creeps in, “You are living some of the best days of your life,” we can respond, “Maybe of this life. But far better days will begin when this life ends.”

What is Look at the Book?

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

Audio Transcript

Over the years, we have taken up a lot of questions from listeners who struggle with self-doubt — wondering if they are in fact an unbeliever; asking whether they have committed the unpardonable sin; asking whether they have or will fall away; asking whether they are one of the non-elect. There are a lot of sober, fearful, self-reflective questions like these that come up all the time in the emails we get. That’s true today in this question from Aaron.

“Hello, Pastor John! I’d like to first say that you have truly been a blessing to me. I thank God for you. I’ve recently started to pursue a better relationship with the Lord. I often come across this phrase, though, in the New Testament about the ‘hardened heart.’ My question is: How would I know if my heart was hardened against God? What does this mean? And how can I ensure that I don’t have a hardened heart toward God?”

Let’s start with the most general meaning of “hardness of heart” in the Bible, and then we can move to the specifically Christian meaning of “hardness of heart” in relation to God — and how to avoid it or how to get rid of it.

Unfeeling Heart

The most general meaning of the hard heart is a heart that lacks ordinary feelings of tenderness and compassion — for example, compassion for the poor. “If . . . one of your brothers should become poor . . . you shall not harden your heart . . . against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him” (Deuteronomy 15:7–8).

“We avoid getting a hard heart by being in a healthy community of believers who exhort us every day.”

Or not just compassion for the poor, but also compassion for the sick or the disabled. In Mark 3, Jesus sees a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, and he says to the people surrounding him, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4). “But they were silent.” Now, that was not a hard question to answer, right? Is it okay to save life or to kill? And they were silent. And it says Jesus “looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5).

So, the most common meaning for “hardness of heart” is a heart that cannot be touched and moved and made to feel tender emotions — empathy, sympathy — toward suffering. It’s like a stone; it can’t feel what it ought to feel. So, Jonathan Edwards, in his book Religious Affections — which I recommend very highly; it was powerful in my life at a certain point about fifty years ago — defines hardness of heart like this. After he surveys so many texts, he says, “Now, by a hard heart is plainly meant an unaffected heart, or a heart not easy to be moved with virtuous affections, like a stone, insensible, stupid, unmoved and hard to be impressed” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:117). That’s Edwards’s definition.

Unrepentant Heart

We can see that same reality as the Bible moves from the ordinary lack of feelings for the poor and the disabled to a lack of responsiveness to God. The hard heart refuses to hear God, refuses to turn to God in repentance. Zedekiah, it says, “stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the Lord” (2 Chronicles 36:13). In other words, he felt no compelling desire to repent and turn to the Lord. He was unfeeling, unresponsive, like a stone to all the efforts made by the prophets to speak truth into his life.

We see it even more generally in Romans 2:4–5: “Do you presume on the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath.” God’s kindness, God’s patience, God’s long-suffering, Paul says, ought to melt the heart with thankfulness and humility and repentance, and instead it meets with a heart of stone — unresponsive, unmoved, unthankful, proud, insolent. When the word of the Lord came to the people through Zechariah the prophet, it says, “They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear . . . the words [of] the Lord” (Zechariah 7:12).

So, hardness of heart in the Bible is a heart that is like stone in that it is unmoved, unfeeling, unresponsive — sometimes to human suffering, but, worst of all, unmoved, unresponsive, unfeeling toward God’s word and God’s mercies, God’s gospel offers. The warmth of God’s mercy shines on it, and it doesn’t melt. The reign of God’s grace pours out on it, and it doesn’t soften. Diamond-hard, it resists God.

Stone Made Flesh

So, we ask, how do we get rid of it, or how do we avoid getting it — a hard heart? Getting rid of a hard heart is decisively, the Bible says, a work of God — a miracle, a gift — and we should ask for it if we don’t have it.

Here’s Ezekiel 36:26–27 — this is a beautiful statement of the new covenant that Jesus fulfills when he sheds his blood for sinners:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh [that is, a tender heart that can feel, can be touched]. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

That’s the same, I think, as what we call being born again or being made alive or being called out of darkness into light. It’s a gift, it’s a miracle, it’s a work of God, and we should receive it as a gift.

Keeping a Tender Heart

Second, once we have been given a soft heart, we avoid getting a hard heart — reverting to hardness — by being in a healthy community of believers who exhort us every day, and help us recognize the deceptive nature of sin. Now, I say that because that’s exactly what Hebrews 3:13 tells me to tell you. It says, “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” That’s amazing. Get in a good community where you’ll be exhorted day by day with pointers to the deceitfulness of sin.

Sin is deceitful. It tells lies, and those lies harden the heart. If we don’t counter the lies of sin with the truth, our hearts are going to grow hard. And God has designed fellow Christians to remind us of this truth — the beauties, the preciousness, the worth, the satisfying nature of God and his ways, and the lies of sin. People need to speak that into our lives.

Sin tells us that God and his ways are not satisfying. That’s the main message of sin. Let me say it again: the main lie of sin is that God and his ways are not satisfying. And if we give place to those lies — we accept them; they start to grow in our heart — we become stones toward the all-satisfying God. Instead of God, sin becomes our satisfaction. We love sin. Sin has tricked us and made itself to look like what satisfies and made God look boring and unsatisfying. God begins to bore us, and if no one steps in and helps us feel the deceptive folly of sin, we’re going to wake up someday utterly like a stone, unable to enjoy God.

So, Hebrews 3:13 says, “Don’t let that happen.” Instead, confirm your calling, confirm your election. Show that you are a true Christian. How? By both exhorting and receiving exhortations every day “that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

Just over 250 years have passed since John Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” and introduced it for his congregation for New Year’s Day 1773. He had been a pastor in the quiet market town of Olney for almost a decade, but his earlier life had been anything but quiet.

He had passed through many dangers, toils, and snares: reckless decisions and a reckless love affair; trauma and kidnapping; near shipwreck, near starvation, and near-death illness; enslaved and then a slave trader. But by the end, he was a transformed man. He became a wise spiritual counselor, a powerful preacher, a popular hymn-writer, and in due course a courageous abolitionist. When his autobiography was published, shortly after he was ordained, the people of the town used to stare at him when they saw him in the street. Amazing grace, indeed.

Of the many surprising stories behind the song, one of the most poignant concerns Newton’s friendship with the troubled poet William Cowper. The day the congregation sang “Amazing Grace” was Cowper’s last day in church.

Golden Years of Friendship

William Cowper had suffered great mental anguish and had even been suicidal ten years earlier. At an asylum just outside London, he recovered, by the grace of God, right around the time when Newton arrived at Olney as a pastor. The two met three years later and became fast friends.

Indeed, Newton invited Cowper to move to Olney, and for about twelve years they were pretty much neighbors, with just a small orchard between the vicarage and Cowper’s home on the market square. Cowper had been living in Cambridgeshire with the widow Mary Unwin and her household, and they all moved together into the home they called “Orchardside,” pleased to think they would be in a place where the gospel was preached and loved.

Cowper and Newton had much in common. Both men had lost their mothers when only six years old, both had suffered abuse at boarding school, and both were “men of letters” with literary interests. But most of all, they were both serious about their faith in Christ.

For six years, their friendship grew. Newton, about six years older, encouraged the bashful Cowper to share in the work of pastoral care, prayer meetings, and hymn-writing. These were the golden years of their friendship. Newton admired his friend’s poetic gifts, and one or the other wrote hymns each week for the parish services. Olney knew something of a local revival. When a new building was opened for prayer meetings, Cowper wrote with a real sense of God’s presence,

Jesus, where’er thy people meet,There they behold thy mercy-seat;Where’er they seek thee thou art found,And ev’ry place is hallow’d ground.

There were hints, though, that Cowper still struggled with soul distress from time to time. When Mrs. Unwin, like a mother to him, was seriously ill, he wrote with some melancholy of an “aching void” in his spirit, compared to just after his conversion:

What peaceful hours I then enjoy’d,How sweet their Mem’ry still!But they have left an Aching VoidThe World can never fill.

Still, remarkably, he could turn this spiritual melancholy into an exemplary hymn of prayer for a closer walk with God. This was a prayer for all of us.

A Chasm Opens

Writing this way would become more difficult later. In 1771, he felt a profound disquiet and told Newton, “My Soul is among Lions.” A year later, Newton observed, “Cowper is in the depths as much as ever.” But truth be told, none of these troubles predicted what would happen on the second day of January 1773. This was altogether unexpected.

The day after “Amazing Grace” was sung in church, Newton was called urgently to Orchardside. Cowper had collapsed back into a dark depression and was suicidal. It was a complete breakdown. Three weeks later, the same thing. Newton and his wife Mary went to Orchardside at four in the morning and stayed for four hours. And then at some point in February, Cowper claimed to hear a divine voice announcing his own damnation: he was uniquely cursed by God.

A chasm of spiritual despair had opened. Cowper expressed this most horribly in a poem the next year called, “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion,” in which he described himself as “damn’d below Judas; more abhorr’d than he.” And whereas the biblical sons of Korah were swallowed by an earthquake in God’s judgment, it was Cowper’s fate to be “in a fleshly tomb . . . Buried above ground.” Newton would continue as his friend, but he could no longer be Cowper’s spiritual advisor in the same way.

Newton and Mary took Cowper and Mrs. Unwin into their own home in April for fourteen months and were on constant suicide watch. Newton sought medicines for his friend. He would even try one of the new electrotherapy machines, in case anything might help. In the end, nothing did. Cowper would find his way to a kind of sanity through his poetry, his classical scholarship, his letter-writing, and his contemplation of nature. Indeed, he became one of the great poets of his era. But the spiritual despair never lifted, and at times, he nearly sank beneath the waves. This was the image for his last poem, in 1799, where he describes a castaway, lost at sea, but concludes,

We perish’d, each, alone;But I, beneath a rougher sea,And whelm’d in greater gulphs than he.

Candle in the Window

Newton left Olney for London in 1780, and we can trace the course of the two men’s friendship in their letters. They maintained a genuine mutual affection and even conviviality in their correspondence, though there were moments of tension as Cowper moved into different social circles that were less spiritually earnest than Newton would have hoped. It was hard for Newton to let go of his role as mentor, jealous for his friend’s spiritual well-being. He also found it difficult to be sidelined or kept in the dark about some of Cowper’s literary projects.

Nevertheless, the friendship endured to the end. It seems to me that this is sometimes what happens over the years with friends, as you work through irritations, reconcile, learn to let love cover a multitude of sins (on both sides), and just stand vigil. I am reminded of ways I have tried to stay in loving relationship with friends who have departed from the faith or drifted away for unknown reasons. Even if it hurts to lose some intimacy, one keeps a candle in the window.

I find it very moving to see how Newton never gave up on Cowper spiritually but encircled his friend’s mental illness within a larger faith perspective. It was like he held on for him. In 1780, Newton wrote from London to his friend, “How strange that your judgement should be so clouded in one point only, and that a point so obvious and strikingly clear to everybody who knows you!” He wasn’t about to share in Cowper’s spiritual despair.

No, he added, “Though your comforts have been so long suspended, I know not that I ever saw you for a single day since your calamity came upon you, in which I could not perceive as clear and satisfactory evidence, that the grace of God was with you, as I could in your brighter and happier times.”

Cowper’s last letter was to Newton, and he couldn’t help but look back to those times when faith had seemed secure. “But I was little aware of what I had to expect, and that a storm was at hand which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible, blot out that prospect for ever.” And then he closed his letter, saying goodbye: “Adieu Dear Sir, whom in those days I call’d Dear friend, with feelings that justified the appellation.”

Mercy in the Storm

Often, for both men, the image of the storm seemed most fitting. If Newton’s storms had been faced so often on the North Atlantic itself, Cowper’s were internal. It was near the beginning of his troubles that he had written in faith,

God moves in a mysterious way,His wonders to perform.He plants his footsteps in the seaAnd rides upon the storm.

I think Newton continued to believe this for his friend, to the end. As Cowper had written in this same hymn:

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take,The clouds ye so much dreadAre big with mercy, and shall breakIn blessings on your head.

Cowper had also written earlier of the blood of Christ “drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,” and in one of the stanzas he looked ahead to his own death. One day, this poet would sing again:

Then in a nobler, sweeter songI’ll sing thy pow’r to save;When this poor lisping, stamm’ring tongueLies silent in the grave.

This was the strong thread of faith that Newton held for his friend. We cannot make sense of all the suffering of this life, but we can trust in a mercy beyond the grave. As the Song of Solomon says, “Love is strong as death” (8:6).

Cowper’s case had to be the most difficult pastoral challenge of Newton’s life. And it must have broken his heart. He wrote, “Next to the duties of my ministry, it was the business of my life to attend to him.” He was by no means a perfect friend, but Newton offers a good example of what it might mean to walk with friends who go through the valley of the shadow of death. God’s “amazing grace” is deep enough for all this and more.

Part 3 Episode 212 Genuine worship treasures God above all things and fuels God-centered passion in people. What if our worship doesn’t look or feel like that? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper addresses this still relevant question from Malachi 1:6–14.

As the Author reads the final sentences of this world’s story, as the final sheep steps into the fold, as the last martyr’s blood spills to the ground, we hear heaven suddenly swell — with silence.

The hallelujahs halt. As a “darkness to be felt” stretched over the land of Egypt (Exodus 10:21), now a silence to be felt stretches over heaven itself. The burning ones bite their tongues from screaming “Holy, holy, holy!” Saints momentarily quiet their songs about the crucified Lamb. The apostle John reports “silence in heaven for about half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). Heaven, that place of highest praise, sinks into the solemn stillness of an army on the eve of battle.

As all quiets onstage, trumpets are distributed to seven archangels, and the spotlight shines on a priestly angel (possibly the Lord Jesus himself), who wades through silence to stand at an altar with a golden censer and much incense. He is to burn the incense before the throne. He performs what the Old Testament priests once did in the temple, when the gathered people went silent, and the fragrant smell of burning incense rose into heaven. But what cloud of aromas now rises before the Lord? Incense from the golden bowls, the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8).

At the end of this world, heaven quiets itself to solemnize the prayers of God’s people, rising as worship before God. John writes, “And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Revelation 8:4).

And for what do these prayers plead? In one word: justice.

Appeals of the Apocalypse

The hushed scene picks up from the intermission of chapter 6, where John sees the ascended Lamb break the seven seals one by one. The breaking of the first four seals unleashes different horsemen, who bring violence, famine, and sickness (Revelation 6:2–6). Hades gallops close behind (verses 7–8). Saints are slaughtered during this period of broken seals.

At the breaking of the fifth seal, John sees their host, “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” (Revelation 6:9). In silence, overhear the theme of their prayer:

They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10)

“Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been” (Revelation 6:11). That moment arrives in chapter 8. Silence to hear solemn appeals of murdered saints now crying out for God to avenge their blood.

Commentator Grant Osborne strikes the vital note: “The silence in heaven is an expectant hush awaiting the action of God, but that is not to be just an outpouring of wrath but God’s answer to the imprecatory prayers of the saints (6:9–11 recapitulated in 8:3–4). Thus there is worship (the golden censer with incense) behind the justice” (Revelation, 339). The scent of worship will soon rise from the wrath. God’s sentence against the impenitent persecutors is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but to his saint’s prayers.

Before this volcano, mouths do not open, eyes do not shut. How does God respond?

Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. (Revelation 8:5)

Fire falling, thunder crashing, rumblings, lightning lashing, earth quaking — “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling” (Zechariah 2:13). And so begins the final judgment, for verse 5, writes G.K. Beale, “is to be interpreted as the final judgment, not as some trial preliminary to that judgment” (Revelation: A Shorter Commentary, 169).

Prayers to End the World

Again, God’s wrath against the impenitent is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but a response to his saint’s prayers. His children’s pleadings escort that judgment, beckon it forth. “The utterly astonishing thing about this text,” comments John Piper,

is that it portrays the prayers of the saints as the instrument God uses to usher in the end of the world with great divine judgments. It pictures the prayers of the saints accumulating on the altar before the throne of God until the appointed time when they are taken up like fire from the altar and thrown upon the earth to bring about the consummation of God’s kingdom. (The Prayers of the Saints and the End of the World)

Do we find this astonishing? Are we more prone to interrogate (rather than to appreciate) such prayers? “Do our prayers,” asks Beale, “come out of a sacrificial life, or do we come asking God only to throw us life-preservers to rescue us from our own foolishness? The prayers of the saints as pictured there focus on the holiness and truthfulness of God and a desire for that to be manifested in the execution of his justice. Are our prayers directed toward obtaining benefit for ourselves or glory for God?” (168).

Sheltered from much persecution, the sweetness of this incense has not yet pleased me as deeply as it might. It hasn’t needed to. Egypt’s whips have not struck my wife’s back. Pharoah has not tossed my children into the Nile. The unjust judge has not yet denied me a hearing. Romans 12:19 hasn’t met any existential crisis: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” But it has for many saints who have been more profoundly inflicted by injustice and scarred by sin.

Hesitations about imprecatory prayers, especially in the West, often expose (among other things) a lack of sympathy with our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history.

Venerating His Vengeance

Whether you and I can relate circumstantially to these prayers for justice, such judgments have their place in our worship. The first thing we see Israel doing after deliverance from Egypt is gathering at the Red Sea, tears of gratitude flowing down their cheeks, voices joining in song to praise God for saving them by sinking their foes like a stone (Exodus 15:5). Saints of old could see the crushing of their enemies as God’s covenant love for them:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,     for his steadfast love endures forever . . .to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,     for his steadfast love endures forever; . . .to him who divided the Red Sea in two,     for his steadfast love endures forever;and made Israel pass through the midst of it,     for his steadfast love endures forever;but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,     for his steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1, 10, 13–15)

The psalmist can’t finish sentences detailing God’s righteous judgments without inserting praise for God’s love to his people displayed in the same act. Thus, after the prayed-for judgment falls at the end of time, we hear the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,

Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants. (Revelation 19:1–2)

Thy Kingdom Come

When the priestly angel reaches into his golden bowl, will he find our prayer there? While many of us may not often have prayed for God’s retribution to fall upon the wicked, Jesus teaches us to fill up that bowl in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9–10).

Martin Luther once taught us that this is to place all that opposes our God’s dominion into a pile and pray: “Curses, maledictions, and disgrace upon every other name and every other kingdom. May they be ruined and torn apart, and may all their schemes and wisdom and plans run aground” (Luther’s Works [1956], 21:101). “Thy kingdom come” is the positive way of praying, “Destroy every other kingdom that resists your will or stands in your way.”

Or as Piper exults,

What we have in Revelation 8:1–5 is an explanation of what has happened to the millions upon millions of prayers over the last 2,000 years as the saints have cried out again and again, ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come.’ Not one of these prayers, prayed in faith, has been ignored. Not one is lost or forgotten. Not one has been ineffectual or pointless. They all have been gathering on the altar before the throne of God.

We pray for God’s dominion, a dominion that will overthrow all others. We pray for King Jesus to return, knowing judgment must come with his heaven (Revelation 1:7). We desire God’s righteous justice to be satisfied — at the cross or in hell. And we desire most of all that our Savior come so that the dwelling place of God is again with man — thy kingdom come!

Not one of our prayers for Christ to come, to bring his kingdom, and to make all our deepest wrongs right will be lost. They are gathered in a bowl, soon to be burned as incense before the throne and scattered as fire upon our enemies. Some of us stare at the skies, joining that solemn silence, groaning for justice, and aching for home. He will not disappoint. He will not delay a moment longer than his Father determines. As we wait, we close the distance and assault the interval with one beautiful weapon: prayer. Come, Lord Jesus!

Part 2 Episode 211 Knowing that God is our Father is one thing; understanding how we should relate to him as such is another. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Malachi 1:6–14 to demonstrate how knowing God as Father should lead us to honor him.

Seminary is often good but rarely safe. An ever-present danger stalks the corridors of higher education — the looming threat that you will know much more and be much less. This danger is a kind of insanity — a shriveling of the soul — that finds potentially fertile soil in propositions, paradigms, arguments, and facts. That is not at all to say theological education should be avoided. But if reason consumes a man’s heart, if his imagination atrophies, then he may know more facts about God but enjoy him less. That means God’s glory is at stake in our sanity.

But what is sanity? Well, one philosopher defines sanity as “a proportion with reference to purpose” (Ideas Have Consequences, 54). In other words, the sane mind is the balanced mind — what Paul would call the sober mind (2 Timothy 4:5). The sane man is stable — clearheaded, set in soul, poised to act. Insanity, on the other hand, never finds its feet. The insane man fixates on the peripheral and forgets the bull’s-eye. He is unstable.

With that in mind, how does one stay sane in seminary? Or more broadly, how can a Christian cultivate holy sanity in higher education of any kind? Below are five insights gleaned from wise men and refined through experience.

1. Feed Your Imagination

By and large, modern education aims to impart knowledge as a means to practical results. It concerns itself with facts and techniques, practices and paradigms. It tends to chunk and divide, to parse and separate. It prefers the objective and the prosaic. The rational mind, what C.S. Lewis calls “the natural organ of truth,” is the prime instrument for this kind of education (Selected Literary Essays, 265).

However, Lewis recognized that the imagination is “the organ of meaning.” It synthesizes and unites, systematizes and unifies. The imagination sees the forest without forgetting that it’s full of trees. In fact, you can see neither the trees nor the forest without the imagination. As Mark Twain said, “You can’t rely on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” And so, sanity in school relies on an imagination in focus. Without a disciplined imagination, education will leave you with a pile of facts and no way to unite them into a cohesive view of reality.

I don’t mean to imply that reason is not important. It is! But it’s also fraught with danger. As G.K. Chesterton asserts, “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. . . . I am not . . . in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger [of insanity] does lie in logic, not in imagination” (Orthodoxy, 17). Reason is dangerous because, as Wordsworth put it, reason “murders to dissect.” Thus, when reason dominates theology, you are left with a neat stack of propositions and no person left to worship. Reason alone without imagination cannot produce balance or wisdom. As Gandalf says to Saruman, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom” (The Lord of the Rings, 259).

So, if your goal in school is to be more like Gandalf than Saruman, cultivate your imagination. Feed it good stories. Baptize it in the word of God. Let it loose on the world. Carve out time to keep your imagination both disciplined and childlike. Read, listen, watch. A holy imagination will keep you sane.

2. Embrace Mystery

Education is rightly concerned with reducing mystery. However, too often, we mistake clarifying mystery with eliminating mystery. The former is healthy; the latter is lunacy. Chesterton — that champion of paradox — warned, “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity” (Orthodoxy, 31).

Therefore, learn to love mystery. It is a gift given by God, a good part of our creaturely limitations, and theology is about putting mystery in its proper place. Mystery humbles us — it brings us back to earth and sets us firmly on the Rock. As Augustine said, when we try to “gaze at light inaccessible,” especially in “the holy scriptures in their multifarious diversity of form,” God uses it to wear Adam down (The Trinity, 97). Mystery chisels away at the man-exalting pride that makes us think we can know all things. And it remedies the mad hubris that knowledge so often breeds (1 Corinthians 8:1).

So, let us not imagine that our schooling can eliminate mystery. Thank God, it doesn’t! Biblical mysteries do not disappear when revealed; they deepen and become richer. When Paul unveils the poetic mystery of Christ and the church, it doesn’t suddenly become mere prose (Ephesians 5:32). It becomes a new and wider ocean to swim in — a whole heaven to enter and explore. Greater still, the Trinity is an inexhaustible source of joy-producing wonder — a mystery we will marvel at for eternity (1 Corinthians 2:9). Mystery will keep you sane.

3. Be Prone to Wonder

Most classes aim to equip you with empirical knowledge — bits of information obtained by a method and verified by the senses — a good goal in its place. But accumulating facts rarely throws wide the door of wonder. And wonder is the well of a sane soul. Knowledge as such is not an end in itself. We want to see glories, behold marvels, awaken wonder. We aim, in our studies, to recover a childlike astonishment at the world God has made. As Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder” (Tremendous Trifles, 7).

One way to reawaken this wonder is to stay omnivorously attentive to creation. The Psalms beckon us, again and again, to see God’s works and stand in awe. Perhaps the best biblical example of this pursuit is Agur, the author of Proverbs 30, who had a posture of mystic wonder and happy humility. He attended closely to eagles, rock badgers, ships on the sea, serpents, and sex. And what did he find? They were too wonderful for him! When is the last time anything was too wonderful for you? Wonder will keep you sane.

4. Awake to Magic

We live in an anti-magic age. After all, we are “enlightened,” and most classrooms sit in the shadows of that “light.” Modern education often teaches us to “reflexively experience the world as unmagical,” as Paul Tyson writes (Seven Brief Lessons in Magic, xi). However, this “disenchanted” view of reality is false. It’s a lie — a modern myth. The world is thick with magic, rich with enchantment, and soaked in glory. We need to regain our sensitivity to the true magic of God. We need to become disenchanted with modernity’s disenchantment. In a sermon, C.S. Lewis reminds us,

Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing [the] shy, persistent, inner voice. (The Weight of Glory, 31)

This kind of sanctified magic is indispensable to our sanity. Tyson defines magic as anything outside of measurable, material, mathematically modellable reality. “Magic is concerned with the shimmering cosmic meanings . . . that lie just below the surface of the apparent” (Seven Brief Lessons in Magic, 8). Magic is what causes us to wonder at the world and find meaning within it.

Therefore, whether you call it glorious or supernatural or numinous or miraculous, come alive to the magic of God. He spoke reality into being — creation is his en-chant-ment (Psalm 33:6–9). So, on a snowy night, go watch the tiny ice castles float down from the heavens to drape the world in white. On a spring morning, go watch the raucous sunrise God is spinning into being. Sit and observe a squirrel battle in the backyard, advancing a generational nut feud. Be reminded that trees are star-powered, water-fed wood towers. Pay attention, and the spell of God’s words will quickly enchant you. Magic will keep you sane.

5. Love What God Loves

Finally, remember that before the modern era, education in general (and seminary especially) aimed at shaping right desires. Augustine named this ordo amoris — ordered loves that regard all things according to their true value. Here is the ultimate aim of education: well-ordered, balanced, stable affections — knowing and feeling, seeing and savoring. Knowing serves as a handmaiden to godly affections.

Classical education expert Steve Turley summarizes the educational vision from Plato to Lewis:

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things. . . . Students thus encounter the manifestation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in every area of their lives, sanctifying the senses and imagination alike with a synthetic vision of the glory of God. (Awakening Wonder, 105)

Sanity consists in loving things as God loves them. If insanity is the imbalance of a soul, then sanity is its harmony. Holy education holds this aim in the crosshairs: holy, joyful sanity. We want to love what God loves. Hate what God hates. Forgive what God forgives. Laugh at what God laughs at. Enjoy what God enjoys. Mock what God mocks. That is holy sanity and the aim of all good education. Ordered loves will keep you sane.

To borrow the words of the Lord of Education, if you gain a degree in school and yet forfeit your soul, what does it profit you? If your imagination atrophies, if you lose a taste for mystery, if your wonder wanes, if you become disenchanted, and if your loves are disordered, what have you gained?

May our triune God help you cultivate holy sanity in all your studies so that you might love him with a whole soul.

Knowing God as Father
Knowing that God is our Father is one thing; understanding how we should relate to him as such is another. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper opens Malachi 1:6–14 to demonstrate how knowing God as Father should lead us to honor him.