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)

“How do you feel about Roe being struck down?” I emailed an old college friend.

“Ticked off,” she wrote back, “and scared because if I were to get pregnant, my medications, which keep me alive, are not good for babies. I was even more ticked when Tennessee enacted those trigger laws banning aborting at six weeks. I knew too many people who got pregnant in middle school and high school. . . .

“I firmly believe in protecting life. I believe in vaccines. I believe in supporting families. I believe in letting adults and their medical professionals make personal decisions that only affect them in a private manner. . . . I don’t believe abortion is evil. Or wrong. Or sinful.”

How Did Roe Fall on You?

When Roe was struck down, I was at a park, meeting another mom. She walked up and blurted out (by way of greeting), “Roe was struck down!” I gasped, sat stunned for a moment, tried to wrap my mind around the fact that I was drawing my breath, for the first time, in a post-Roe country.

Seven months ago, we all lived in the America of my birth. This was an America that legally affirmed the inalienable right of women to a form of “health care” that intentionally ends the life of children in the womb. This position, established by the Supreme Court in 1973, led to the near tripling of annual abortion deaths in the United States within eight years. More than 63 million babies lost their lives in the years between Roe’s ascendancy and its reversal.

“More than 63 million babies lost their lives in the years between Roe’s ascendancy and its reversal.”

Many people I know have prayed for this day longer than I have been alive. They have established pregnancy centers offering family education, free ultrasounds, and free clothing and supplies. They have adopted and fostered. They have cared for babies and children while single mothers were at work.

But other people I know, like my friend from college, lament and even panic over the end of Roe. They experience fear, the fear of former rights revoked and children uncared for. What is the difference in worldview that produces such perfectly opposing opinions on abortion?

From Lamentation to Celebration

How is it that I, a mother of three, and my friend, a mother of three, have such fervent beliefs — and that our beliefs are absolutely incompatible?

One of us believes that an unwanted life is worse than intentionally inflicted death, that a person who can’t survive on his or her own doesn’t have the rights of personhood, and that if we declare life to begin at birth, then that is when it begins. The other believes that murder is not a viable solution to any problem, that life is a gift and responsibility that can’t be thrown off at will, and that neither mother nor doctor has the right to kill.

We quiver with conviction in describing our views to the other. I celebrate the end of Roe in my country without reservation. She decries it without reservation.

The thing is, fifteen years ago, I would have been lamenting right along with her.

Godlessness Births Hatred

At the nominal Christian college I attended, my career-driven friends and I didn’t analyze our deepest assumptions about our futures. We didn’t realize that our vision for life was deeply influenced by the air we were all breathing, which was a confusing blend of nineties purity movement and second-wave feminism. We only knew that we were expected to “have it all,” and even I, with my stay-at-home-mom aspirations, was unwilling to imagine a life that didn’t include some kind of glorious accomplishment out in the “real world.”

A few years after graduating, having walked away from church and faith, I found myself in the pregnancy test aisle at Walgreens. Would I keep it? I thought — and then was shocked by the question. I’d grown up staunchly defensive of the unborn. But for the first time, I was actually experiencing the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. I felt the despair of not liking the world enough to bring a child into it. I imagined the reaction from friends, family, and former church members when they saw me and my baby, alone against the world.

Until that day, I had never understood the close link between godlessness and death. I don’t just mean that the wages of sin is death (it is). I mean that within just a few years of rejecting God as Father, I was also willing to reject life itself. I would have preferred not to live, and I couldn’t imagine a baby in my womb would make a different choice. My godless view of the world had created a hatred of the world, and of existence itself. Motherhood would have meant embracing life as good and worthwhile. I knew I didn’t have it in me.

God didn’t give me a baby that year. I never had to test how far my hatred of life would go.

Fearing Life in an Unsafe World

A few months later, God saved my soul, and he brought a man into my life a year after that. As the years passed, he gave me three precious children. I am currently expecting a fourth. I am far enough along that if I wanted to end the heartbeat that I’ve now heard half a dozen times, I’d have to drive to one of about six states in the country.

When you spend all your time nurturing life, feeding life, telling young children about the wonders of life, it’s harder to remember what it was like when death seemed preferable to life. But I can still put my finger on that fear, especially in the early hours of the morning if I awake from a nightmare or hear my child coughing. It’s the fear of life itself. The fear of responsibility’s weight.

Even in my latest pregnancy, I still experience that fear of bringing new life into a world that is in one sense totally unsafe. Even under the protection of marriage and family, my children are held only by God’s hand, and I still have to wrestle with him daily over the promises he’s made for them (and the promises he hasn’t). I now understand more deeply than ever how pain and fear is part of the curse connected to motherhood, and how only in Christ can any of us see the world as it is: a place of hope, joy, blessing, and ultimate victory over sin and death. It is a place worth bringing children into — but only because it’s a place ruled by a kind and loving Father.

“This world is a place worth bringing children into — but only because it’s a place ruled by a kind and loving Father.”

And yet, without the lens of hope that drops into place when we embrace the kingship of Christ, death seems stronger than life — and sometimes even preferable. We all are living with our terminal disease, in a world with its own terminal disease.

Besides the realities of death and curse, we all inherit cultural attitudes toward motherhood without knowing we’ve done so. We all breathe air from a place that chooses to see child and elder care as unskilled labor, which we outsource to the less educated. It’s a place that sees motherhood as the final cap on a pyramid of career moves — just one more accomplishment to adorn a more necessary list. It’s a place that tells its women to throw off encumbrances (including people) that keep us from tending to ourselves first and always. It’s a place that disincentivizes fatherhood and subsidizes abandonment and murder. It’s a place that has managed to sell women the word empowerment, by which she trades love and commitment for the total loss of self and becomes a sexual commodity for the pleasure of men who have no intention of cherishing her humanity.

True Value of Motherhood

Motherhood is valuable. It’s not valuable like a Precious Moments card; it’s valuable like time is valuable, like life itself is valuable. It’s valuable with the kind of value that God names when he blesses meek things, quiet things, unseen things. It has a value that reaches beyond the fiscal, that asks better questions than “Can I earn more than the babysitter I pay to watch my children while I’m gone?” and “Do unwanted pregnancies result in children who are a burden to the church and state?”

This is what’s valuable in God’s economy: life, because he made it; and love, because he embodies and commands it.

And looking at life and love as fundamentally valuable means that we look at motherhood as the stewardship of something fundamentally valuable. A single mother is the steward of something fundamentally valuable. A married middle-aged mother is the steward of something fundamentally valuable. An adoptive mother is the steward of something fundamentally valuable.

A woman who accepts the call to motherhood steps into a story written by someone else. She steps in despite inevitable fear and pain. She steps in to demonstrate in her own body the unanswerable story of life triumphing over death. Motherhood is God’s inventive answer to the question, “Is life good, or isn’t it?”

And when the laws of the land step forward to throw the burden of proof back onto death (instead of onto life for mothers and children), that law has made a step toward confirming and proclaiming the truths built into God’s world and word.

Thou Shall Not Kill

When Roe was struck down, more was accomplished than the erection of more hoops for abortion-minded mothers to jump through. It was a moral marker for our nation. Every time a human government makes or upholds legislation that reflects accurately the good established by God in his world and word, it functions the way it was meant to function. It sends a message about what is right and what is wrong. It establishes a moral code that does in fact work in the hearts of the people.

I rejoice in the reversal because of lives saved. But I also rejoice the way I always rejoice when truth is declared, from any lips, in any forum. A breath of fresh air blows through the nation in the form of sanity, as our human hearts are reminded of a law that was stamped there before we knew ourselves, stamped without our own consent: Thou shalt not kill.

For My Friend on the Other Side

As I continue talking with my friend, I gently press for logical consistency by asking questions about rights. When does the infant in the womb become human? On what basis do we confer the right to live? If the baby has no right to live until it has passed through the birth canal, what about a few moments after it has passed through? A few minutes before? If we confer the right to live only on human beings who are competent to survive, what does that mean for the disabled child or adult, or even for a healthy baby in the first few years after it’s born? She keeps talking with me, and for that I’m grateful.

As we talk, I’m aware that underneath the logical issues about human rights, the strength of her beliefs has more to do with the pain of motherhood under the shadow of death. What she really wonders is, Is life good, or isn’t it?

Does someone have a sure hand on the steering wheel of this dangerous world, or not? Should we not limit life on the earth when life is so difficult and dangerous? Is there any possible reason to do what is right in obedience to the King who reigns justly, to embrace the gift of life even when the costs are so high? Could his promises possibly be true, really true, when he says that soon, every tear will be wiped away, “and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4)? Will we see him face to face and hear his account of everything sad coming untrue?

When I look this last question in the eye, it’s too much for me to bear. I know it’s too much for her heart too, if she ever thinks of it in the watches of the night. Some things seem too good to be true.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, and welcome back to a new week, number 499 in our history. Amazing! And we start week 499 with a question from a listener named Elizabeth, who has an interesting question about the saving work of Christ. “Hi, Pastor John. I am studying 1 Peter, going through your LAB videos, and digging deeper to share with my fellow stay-at-home moms at church. My question pertains to tauta in 1 Peter 1:11, translated ‘subsequent.’ I’m trying to tie together ‘the sufferings of Christ’ and his ‘subsequent glories.’ It does not seem to simply refer to a chronological progression. Peter very often ties suffering and glory together (1 Peter 1:6–7, 10; 2:12; 3:9, 14; 4:12–15; 5:1, 10).

“So, here’s my question: Did Jesus have to suffer in public for God to give him those glories? Couldn’t Jesus have lived a perfect, law-abiding, substitutionary life for us in total isolation or at least in obscurity? I know he underwent his formal temptations alone. So, could he have died serenely, then risen, and defeated death and sin, but not by suffering in public? Or if he had done this, would he have not received the ‘subsequent’ glories? Was it required for him to suffer publicly and die early? So then, again, what’s the ‘subsequent’ relationship between his public sufferings and his eternal glory?”

I’m drawn to answer this question, even though in one sense it’s the kind of a “what if” question that the Bible doesn’t really address directly (“What if Jesus had lived a perfect, sinless life and died a natural death at age 85 — could that life and death save us?”). The Bible doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on that possibility. And so, you might think, “Well, why would you even go there?” Nevertheless, in trying to answer this particular question and questions like that, we are led to ponder the wonder that God did it, in fact, a certain way — he planned for his Son to suffer agonizingly, publicly, extremely — and why he did it that way. And that’s worth our serious meditation.

Christ’s Public Payment

So, as I have pondered the question of whether our redemption could have been accomplished by the perfection of Christ without the public suffering of a crucifixion, I see at least six reasons that the Bible gives for why this could not have happened — in other words, why Christ’s public, horrific suffering by crucifixion was absolutely necessary for our salvation.

1. Predestined Plan

The first and perhaps the most obvious reason is that these particular sufferings were predestined by God before the foundation of the world. It was God’s eternal plan that his Son suffer in this way. Acts 4:27: “Truly in this city 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.”

So, everything that Herod, Pilate, those Gentile soldiers who drove the nails and the spear, and the crucifying mobs — everything they did to Jesus in those last hours was God’s plan. It had been predestined to take place. It was not up for grabs. The alternative of a leisurely life and an 85-year-old death was not in the plan. That’s the first reason. It couldn’t have happened.

2. Fulfilled Scriptures

Second, these sufferings were prophesied in God’s word — the Old Testament scriptures that cannot be broken. Over and over again in the Gospels, the details of the final sufferings of Christ are said to be “that the Scriptures might be fulfilled” (Matthew 26:56; Luke 22:37, 24:26; John 13:18; 19:36). For example, “He was pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). Pierced. Not cancer, not old age, not cardiac arrest. He was pierced for our transgressions.

“The horrific public shaming and sufferings of Christ were scripted down to the details.”

In other words, the horrific public shaming and sufferings of Christ were scripted down to the details of what would happen to his clothing in the Old Testament. If those writings cannot be broken, then the sufferings could not be avoided.

3. Fitting Sufferings

Third (and this gets closer to the heart of the matter), Hebrews 2:10: “It was fitting [underline that word; put a big red circle around that word; it’s an amazing word] that he for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

This is very profound, and it is worth much study and hours of meditation. God’s eternal decision to achieve our salvation through the sufferings of Christ is not arbitrary or whimsical or meaningless, but is owing to a profound fitness, appropriateness, suitableness as God considers all things. It is appropriate; it is suitable; it is ultimately, you might say, beautiful. That is, it’s in perfect harmony with all of God’s other acts and plans. We can spend a lifetime probing into why it is fitting, but let Hebrews 2:10 fly like a great banner over the sufferings of Christ. It was fitting — right, good, suitable, beautiful — in the mind of God for our salvation to be accomplished this way and not another way.

4. Sacrificial Lamb

Fourth, the death of Jesus was an intentional sacrifice given by God similar to the sacrificial offerings of a lamb in the Old Testament. Jesus, Paul says, is “our Passover lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7). So, just as in the Old Testament, allowing a sheep to get old in the flock and die from mange was not a sacrifice. That’s not the way it worked. You took the sheep and you handed him over with your heart and with an intentionality.

So, Christ growing old in some remote village and dying would not have been a sacrifice of God slitting the throat of the precious Lamb of God. The word slaughter is used in Revelation for what happened to the Lamb and how he accomplished our salvation. There was an intentionality to the sacrifice. Jesus was offered up on the cross as a sacrifice. Hebrews 10:12: “When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.”

5. By His Blood

Fifth, over and over in the New Testament, Christ is said to accomplish his saving work by means of his blood. For example, Romans 5:9: “We have now been justified by his blood.” Hebrews 9:22: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” I think that’s another way to draw out the significance of Christ’s death as a sacrifice.

6. Even Death on a Cross

And then finally, number six, Philippians 2 describes the humiliation of Jesus from the highest point of equality with God, to the lowest point of death — and then he adds, “even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), as the path from the highest to the lowest, as the path that God rewards with the exaltation of Jesus, not only to new life in resurrection, but to the acclamation of all the nations as Lord of lords.

Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death . . .

And then these words are not throwaway words, because it had to be the lowest point to accomplish our redemption:

. . . even death on [the most despicable, shameful, painful instrument of execution] a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6–11)

“There is, in God’s mind, a path to glory for his Son, and this path was a painful, humiliating death by crucifixion.”

There is, in God’s mind, a path to glory for his Son, and this path was a painful, humiliating death by crucifixion. It was the depth of the suffering, it was the ignominy of the cross that he endured that was the lowest point that he had to reach for God to reward him with the highest office of lordship as a Redeemer.

Worthy to Be Lord

Perhaps one last passage to point to the fact that the slaughter of the Lamb was what made Jesus a fitting ruler of all the peoples of the world — namely, Revelation 5:9–10:

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals [in other words, “Worthy are you to be the Lord of the unfolding of history”], for you were slaughtered [esphagēs, not died in a remote village at age 85], and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.

So, for those six reasons at least, I would say, we can say that the glorification of Jesus Christ and the achievement of our salvation did indeed require the kind of sufferings he endured, and we will sing the song of the Lamb, the slaughtered Lamb, forever and ever as a tribute to those sufferings and our salvation.