Audio Transcript

Today we have an incredibly thoughtful and detailed question from a concerned dad. It’s anonymous. Here’s the question.

“Pastor John, my 14-year-old daughter read through the book of Job for the first time this year, and she is really struggling with how God is portrayed in that book. She has heard all of her life that God is loving and just, and cannot understand why God would allow Job and his children, wife, and servants to suffer such devastation. She’s deeply disturbed by the fact that God pointed Job out to Satan intentionally, thus drawing his attention to this righteous man, allowing Satan to take away nearly everything Job had. And for what purpose? Merely to prove a point to Satan and the host of heaven that Job’s reverence for God was unshakable.

“How would you explain this to a girl who understands the gospel intellectually, but who may not have had it applied to her heart? To her it seems that God was arbitrary and almost cruel to allow Job and everyone around him to suffer to ‘prove a point,’ or to perfect a man who was already more righteous than most of us. She wonders about the collateral damage to Job’s wife — including her faith, who suffered the loss of everything Job did, with the exception of her personal health. It does not bring her much comfort to think that following God could result in such devastation.

“I’ve talked with her about the fact that death and suffering is part of our human existence since the fall, and is a direct and indirect result of sin. We’ve talked about the fact that it was Satan’s cruelty that was the actual instrument of suffering, although within the sovereign will of God. And that this life and its suffering here on this earth is nothing compared to glory in eternity. We’ve also talked about how God himself has suffered on our behalf and bore our sins on the cross, and that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, although our sins grieve him. Pastor John, what else would you say?”

Well, I certainly want to commend this dad for the kinds of things he has patiently shown his daughter. That’s an amazing list of insights that he has shared with her. If he hadn’t asked me, “What else would you say?” I would have said what he said. Those are all solid biblical truths that he highlighted there at the end of his question. So what else — that’s what he’s asking — what else would I say? And keep in mind that if I knew her, I would try to take into account how to say them. But I don’t, and so I’ll do the best I can.

1. Recognize God’s superior value.

First, I would try to help her see what only a divine miracle can make her see — namely, that the value of God and his glory is infinitely greater than the value of all human beings who have or ever will exist. Until a person believes this and feels this — the superior value of God himself — much of the Bible will make no sense, including Job.

I’m thinking, for example, when I talk about this principle of the ultimate value of God, of words like Isaiah 40:15, 17. God says,

Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,     and are accounted as the dust on the scales; . . .All the nations are as nothing before him,     they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.

Now stressing this infinite difference between the worth of God and the worth of all other reality is not contrary to the love of God. It is what makes the love of God amazing. If you try to enhance the love of God by reducing the distance between his value and ours, you wind up replacing reality with imagination and destroying grace.

2. Begin with God’s priorities.

Second, this means that when we make judgments in this world about good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, we should never — this is what I would try to help her see — we should never start with our own sense of the good and right and beautiful and just, and then use them to judge the acts of God. Rather, we should start with the acts of God revealed in the Bible, and think our way out from there to what is truly good and right and beautiful and just.

I remember during the years 1979 and 1980, I wrestled for months with the logic of Romans 9:14–15, which goes like this:

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

And I just sat staring at that for months, saying, “How does that work? How does that logic work?” I wrestled month after month with biblical logic, saying, “I’ve got to get my head fixed. I’m not going to fix this text; this text is God’s word. My head is the problem, not this text.” And the second book I ever wrote, called The Justification Of God, was my answer to that one question — two hundred pages to answer that question. And it was driven home to me, “You will never grasp the truth of God, you will never understand the Bible, John Piper, if you start with yourself and judge God, instead of starting with God and judging yourself.”

3. Realize what we really deserve.

Third, hand in hand with this biblical, God-centered approach to reality goes the heartfelt conviction that human sinfulness — my sinfulness in particular — makes us all liable to God’s just judgment, or as Paul says, makes us all “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). In other words, every breath that every human takes is undeserved. It is another moment, another gift, of grace, and no suffering that any human receives from God in this life is more than what we deserve —ever.

“Until we feel the depth and horror of sin, much of the Bible will simply make no sense to us at all.”

Therefore, no injustice from God is ever done to any human. On the earth, everyone is treated by God better than we deserve — everyone. On the horizontal plane, in relations between humans, there are horrific injustices, which God hates because God hates sin. But we have not yet fathomed the greatness of our offense against God if we think that any suffering from his hand is undeserved.

This is why God was perfectly right and just to drown every single human being on the planet, old and young, except for eight people, in the flood of Genesis 6. He did no one any wrong; he was perfectly just in that judgment. Until we feel the depth and horror of sin like this, much of the Bible will simply make no sense to us at all.

4. Trust your benevolent Father.

Fourth, Job is in the Bible, like all other descriptions of suffering of the righteous, to help us be ready for our own suffering with confidence that it is not ultimately owing to caprice or to nature or to sinful man or to Satan, but it is in the hands of our all-wise, all-powerful, all-good Father.

This dad says of his daughter, “It does not bring her much comfort to think that following God could result in such devastation.” And my response to that sentence is this: God doesn’t expect us to be comforted by the suffering that following him will bring. He expects us to be comforted that all the suffering he appoints for us will be for our ultimate good, for the advancement of his wise purposes, and that he will keep us for himself through them all.

But it sounds like this young lady has not made peace with the promise that if Jesus suffered, his followers are going to suffer. That’s a promise. I’ve been struck with this again recently as I’m working my way through 2 Thessalonians for Look at the Book. Paul is speaking to new Christians — baby believers, several weeks old as Christians — in 2 Thessalonians 1:5, and he says this: “This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering.” Paul had said to these brand-new Christians in 1 Thessalonians 3:3 not to “be moved by these afflictions. For you yourselves know that we are destined for this.” And now it has happened, and he calls it “the righteous judgment of God” to fit us for heaven.

“All the suffering God appoints for us will be for our ultimate good.”

Oh, how pastors and youth leaders need to teach the biblical doctrine of the necessity of Christian suffering in obedience to Jesus. They need to say to young people that Christ is not calling them to an easy life but to a life of serious joy, not silly joy, and that most of the things young people live for will vanish like mist in the face of real life — especially life in the service of a crucified Messiah.

5. Pray to see as God does.

So the last thing I would ask of our young friend is that she would pray with me, and with her father, the prayer that we all need to pray every day — namely, that the Lord would enlighten the eyes of our hearts to see God and to see the world and the way God does things in the world, in order that we might make wise judgments the way he does.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15767747/does-christian-love-esteem-some-more-than-others

Audio Transcript

Chapel is designed to be a meeting on your part with the King of kings and the Lord of lords himself. Over the years, there has been the same, basic objective: that chapel is to be a time of worship. Not a lecture, not an entertainment, but a time of meeting the King.

Those were some of the closing words from a man’s final minutes on earth. The preacher is V. Raymond Edman. He’s 67 years old. It’s a Friday-morning chapel at Wheaton College, on September 22, 1967, five and a half decades ago. His sermon is titled “In the Presence of the King.” Edman preached for about eleven minutes, paused, collapsed, and died — and entered into the presence of the King of kings. A stunning event.

In chapel that morning, along with about two thousand other Wheaton students, was 21-year-old John Piper. And Pastor John, you rarely ever mention this event: once late in an article you wrote in 1995, but nowhere in a book or sermon, and never here on APJ. So, take us back to Wheaton in 1967. Who was V. Raymond Edman? What do you remember about that fateful Friday morning? What impact did the chapel have on your ministry? And as you listen to the audio recording over 55 years later, what strikes you now?

The room we were meeting in when “Prexy” (as those who knew him well called him), V. Raymond Edman, died was called Edman Chapel, named after Dr. Edman in 1960 when it was built. So, the building in which he died bore his name already. It’s a large, concert-like venue, beautifully white and blue, with huge chandeliers. It holds about 2,400 people, with a main floor where the students sat during chapel and then a balcony behind.

Chapel was required of all students in those days, so the main floor was almost always mostly full. I was sitting near the back on the main floor on the right-hand side as you face the platform (I think my row was about three or four from the back). We sat in alphabetical order. So, nobody chose whom they sat with.

Discipline of Stillness

So, what do I make, then, as I listen to these last minutes of Dr. Edman’s life (which I did in getting ready for this)? What an amazing experience to listen. Frankly, if you listen to the whole thing, I think you can hear Dr. Edman — in his voice and in the content of his message — that he was displeased with the casual way students were treating chapel.

His entire narrative of his meeting with Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian king, with its elaborate protocol of bowing and silence as one approached the earthly king, was designed by Dr. Edman to encourage students to come to chapel and meet the King of kings in that spirit. That’s the whole point of his message. “Stop talking as you enter the foyer,” he pleaded with them. He pleaded that, when they walk into chapel, they wouldn’t talk with each other, but cultivate what he called the discipline of “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

He had written a book of devotions called The Disciplines of Life. I had the book. I can’t find it right now, but I remember reading it while I was still at Wheaton. His burden in the book — and in the chapel message and elsewhere — was paradoxical, like the Christian life. He knew on the one hand that the deeper life — “the exchanged life,” as he called it (he was very influenced by Hudson Taylor, by the way, in that regard). He knew that the deeper, exchanged life — Christ for mine, mine for Christ — was a profoundly free and Spirit-inspired life.

“Speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again.”

Yet on the other hand, this life was marked by rigorous disciplines that flowed from the Spirit. And he saw those disciplines being eroded in the 1960s in the church and in the students at Wheaton. And that book and this chapel message were his way of earnestly calling students to discipline themselves to be still and know that God is God. And so, he lamented the roar of student conversation in chapel. He even asked — with, I think, only partial humor — “Is it louder than the lions at Brookfield Zoo?” I didn’t hear any laughter when he said that.

Final Moments

So, we were all sitting there when, suddenly, he stopped for no apparent reason. There were a few seconds of silence. He turned to his left and just collapsed. It was not a gentle collapse, as I recall. He hit the floor like a log, and the sound was frightening. He didn’t crumple. You thought it was quiet before? Good night. Now it was breath-holding quiet as two thousand students trembled inside. “Oh no. What has just happened?”

Dr. Armerding, the new president, who was sitting right behind him in the main chair behind the pulpit, immediately knelt down over Dr. Edman. Then he stood as medical people were coming to the platform, and he said with beautiful, perfect equanimity and the dignity he was known for, “Let us pray.” And he prayed briefly for Dr. Edman and dismissed us in silence.

So, I went to my classical Greek class with Gerald Hawthorne in Blanchard Hall, and after we prayed, we tried to go on with our lessons. But soon the chapel bell tolled a long series of solemn bells. And we assumed that meant the chancellor had died. And he dismissed class, and that’s basically where my memories stopped.

Verge of Eternity

As I listened to those last minutes of the chapel message, about eleven minutes before he collapsed, several things struck me.

As I listened yesterday, I was trembling inside. I had this awareness, “This man is going to meet Jesus in eleven minutes.” It was as though I were there, and I knew something he didn’t know. “You’re going to die in eleven minutes. 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . You’re going to meet the King of the universe face to face in eleven minutes. You will not finish this message, Dr. Edman. You will not finish anything that is not finished now. Your life will be over in eleven minutes.”

I actually looked over to my computer screen at the numbers ticking off the seconds. And they felt like heartbeats to me. And then he stopped. Now, I’m ten years older than Dr. Edman was when he died. This was a good rehearsal for me. That’s what this is for. This is a rehearsal.

I think the final minutes of Dr. Edman’s life and message have been a bit romanticized. It’s more realistic to say that in those last minutes, not only did he speak of entering the presence of the King — that’s what’s been remembered, and rightly so — but he was also dealing with student misbehavior, just real down-to-earth, inglorious, practical, disappointing behavior. And he talked about speakers who come to chapel and are bad speakers. “They tilt like windmills,” he said, and say things unhelpful. That’s not glorious.

Ordinary Deaths

This is the way it struck me: that’s the way most of us are going to die. We won’t be on some mountaintop of sinless spiritual fervor. We won’t. We’ll be dealing with some mundane, frustrating, ordinary issue like students making a ruckus coming into chapel, speakers that are embarrassing to listen to — trying to say something helpful about this frustrating reality. And here’s the beautiful thing: in the midst of dealing with ordinary, mundane, frustrating disappointments, Christ will shine through. And he did.

The very last things, the very last words out of Dr. Edman’s mouth, were an exhortation not to return evil for evil, or (to say it positively) to treat disappointing chapel speakers better than they deserve — that is, courteously. Here’s what he said in his last words, words of counsel about how to treat unhelpful speakers. He said, “Our part as Christians is to be courteous. Any indication of disinterest or displeasure on our part would be an unnecessary discourtesy to him, and so I would ask you to desist.” And he fell over. So, the last word, the very last word, was, “Treat them better than they deserve.” Just like Stephen, right?

That’s the way the Christian life is going to be at the very end. I think it’s going to be a mixture of mundane, frustrating, disappointing reality and shafts of light — shafts of light from the word of Christ breaking in, and yes, the glory of the King just over the horizon, a moment away.

Live with the End in View

As I listened and counted down, I thought, “These could be my last eleven minutes right now.” Even as we talk, right? I could drop over here at my desk. I’m standing. I could fall to my left, fall to my right. So, Piper — here’s the admonition that’s landing on me — speak in a way that you would be okay with if a recording of your last minutes were played over and over again on earth and in heaven.

My prayer after listening to this message again after 55 years is that when I die, I would be found like Dr. Edman, commending the love of Christ — and that while I live, I would be found like Dr. Armerding, beautifully discerning what love calls for in every unexpected moment.