Did My Lust Cause Our Miscarriage?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper.
00:00:04.560 | Pastor John, here's the next question on the list. It's a heavy one,
00:00:06.960 | and it's an email from an anonymous man. "Pastor John, did God cause or would God cause my wife
00:00:14.720 | to miscarry our child because I have a struggle with lust and pornography? I have a lot of guilt
00:00:21.120 | right now, and I don't know how to think about God's discipline and punishment for my sin. I'm
00:00:25.920 | very confused. Please help me." Wow. I see four issues, at least, in this question. One,
00:00:34.960 | what does it mean to struggle with pornography? Two, does God discipline His children for their
00:00:41.040 | sin? Three, may that discipline come in the form of harm or even death to others that you love
00:00:50.960 | as well as yourself? Four, what should you do if you believe God has dealt you such a blow?
00:00:58.640 | Let's take those one at a time. One, I don't know what our friend, unnamed,
00:01:07.040 | means by struggle, struggles with pornography. It might mean daily bondage of joining sinners
00:01:17.760 | on the screen in their wickedness by supporting them with our interest and our attention and our
00:01:24.240 | pleasure and then feeling guilty about it when we're done every day. I don't think that's much
00:01:31.280 | of a struggle. Calling it a struggle is a little less damning than what is really is, namely
00:01:40.880 | capitulation and participation. Or he might mean that he conquers the temptation 99 times out of
00:01:51.280 | 100 and in a moment of weakness gives in but quickly turns away and repents. That may be
00:01:59.600 | what struggle means. That'd be a little more meaningful to call the word struggle. Whatever
00:02:07.040 | he means, I'm glad he calls it sin, which he does, because Jesus takes this sin so seriously,
00:02:14.320 | he uses a horrible picture to describe the warfare against it and the worst possible warning
00:02:24.640 | against failure in the war. Here's what he says, Matthew 5 29, "If your right eye causes you to sin,"
00:02:34.640 | he's talking about lust, "tear it out and throw it away." Well, what? With a screwdriver?
00:02:41.280 | This is gross. This is horrible. What, your fingernails? "For it is better that you lose one
00:02:53.360 | of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell." So tearing out the eyeball
00:03:03.840 | is the most horrible description of the nature of the warfare, and hell is the most horrible
00:03:11.840 | warning of failure in the warfare, so I doubt that any of us has ever overestimated the danger
00:03:20.320 | of failing to fight lust, and I'm glad that our anonymous questioner has called it sin and
00:03:28.320 | is feeling bad about it. Number two, does God discipline his children for their sin? Yes,
00:03:37.680 | he does. This is described perhaps most fully in Hebrews 12, even speaks of bloodshed if necessary,
00:03:47.120 | that's the price we might pay for our sin. "Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you
00:03:52.720 | as sons? 'My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved
00:03:58.160 | by him, for the Lord disciplines the one whom he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.'"
00:04:04.960 | Never feels that way, but we need to believe that because the Bible says so, God says so,
00:04:11.920 | and it's very important to remember that this book of Hebrews 12 is the same book that in
00:04:19.680 | chapter 10 verse 14 says, "By a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being
00:04:28.960 | sanctified." That means in the warfare. Perfected. In other words, God can view his children both as
00:04:38.320 | perfected by Christ and still in need of perfecting in this life, and we should take tremendous heart
00:04:48.640 | from his painful perfecting work as evidence that we are perfected. Or we can add with trembling,
00:04:57.840 | he may see us in need of such protection from temptation that he takes our life.
00:05:06.720 | That's what it says in 1 Corinthians 11 29, "Anyone who eats and drinks the Lord's supper
00:05:16.480 | without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself,
00:05:20.720 | that is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died." Falling asleep means died.
00:05:29.840 | "But when we are judged by the Lord," that is put to death, "we're disciplined so that we may not be
00:05:37.200 | condemned along with the world." That's breathtaking. In other words, death, the death of a saint,
00:05:46.160 | the death of one who is perfected, the death of one whom he loves, the death is the discipline
00:05:53.200 | of deliverance from condemnation. God takes him out so that he will not be taken out
00:06:01.360 | by the devil and by sin and go to hell. So yes, the Lord disciplines and his ways are not to be
00:06:10.560 | trifled with or made little of. Number three, may that discipline come in the form of harm,
00:06:19.040 | even death, to others that we love as well as ourselves? And the answer is yes, it may.
00:06:28.240 | This was certainly the case with David's sin of adultery and murder with Bathsheba and her
00:06:35.840 | husband. Nathan the prophet said to David, "Even though the Lord," he says, "The Lord has put away
00:06:45.440 | your sin," and then the next thing, "Yet because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord,"
00:06:56.720 | and surely that is what pornography is, "the child who is born to you shall die."
00:07:05.520 | So I would certainly say in my own life, now hear this carefully, I would certainly say in my own
00:07:14.400 | life the most painful and humbling disciplining from the Lord has regularly been through the pain
00:07:23.680 | and suffering and sometimes death of those I love, rather than through any blows against my own body.
00:07:31.600 | Oh, that we only suffered in our own body. This has been the way the deepest Christians have
00:07:39.200 | always thought about the losses through the death of those they love. Jonathan Edwards preached
00:07:44.960 | numerous sermons about the way the Lord disciplines a church by taking away a godly pastor in death.
00:07:57.360 | Edwards' godly wife, Sarah, spoke about kissing the rod of God in the death of her 54-year-old
00:08:06.080 | husband, a rod of discipline that she felt more than anyone. She called it a rod of God on her
00:08:14.800 | back, and she kissed it. Every loss that we endure as sinful children of God have two designs,
00:08:25.360 | one from Satan, one from God. Satan designs our unbelief and rebellion and renunciation
00:08:33.440 | and guilt and paralysis and loss of faith. God designs our purification, and that we would hope
00:08:43.360 | less in this world and more in God who raises the dead. I don't know whether our friend who
00:08:52.800 | wrote this question lost his child in miscarriage as a direct discipline from God because of his
00:09:04.880 | pornography. I do not know. He does not know. I do know that in the loss of the child, God wills
00:09:14.640 | a new humility and a new submission and a new faith and new purity through the pain of this
00:09:22.000 | loss. So here's the fourth and final thing. What should you do? What should this person, this man,
00:09:29.840 | do if he believes that God has dealt him such a painful blow? And the answer is not in doubt.
00:09:41.520 | Many things are in doubt. Many things are uncertain in this situation, but the path of
00:09:48.240 | gospel obedience is not uncertain. The glorious truth of the gospel is that we never need to be
00:09:58.320 | sure whether a specific suffering is owing to a specific disobedience. You don't need to know this.
00:10:04.560 | You don't need to figure this out. I've dealt with so many people over the years who come into
00:10:10.000 | my office longing to know whether there's some connection between some pain and some sin,
00:10:16.000 | and I always start and end with the fact you don't need to know that. And the reason we don't need to
00:10:24.720 | be sure about that is that the gospel forgiveness and gospel righteousness imputed through faith in
00:10:31.360 | Christ does not depend on that certainty of understanding. It depends on Christ and on
00:10:39.280 | faith in him. We don't need to be sure about the connection between our particular sufferings and
00:10:47.200 | our particular sins in this life because the death of Christ is sufficient to forgive the worst
00:10:54.160 | sin in spite of the worst suffering. That's the glory of the gospel. So what our friend must do
00:11:05.040 | in this confusion—he says, "I'm confused." Okay, so I'm saying what he must do in his confusion
00:11:13.040 | is stop fretting about whether his pornography was the direct cause of his miscarriage. He should
00:11:20.400 | stop fretting about that. He will never know for sure the answer to that question short of some
00:11:27.920 | direct revelation. Whether he knew it was or wasn't, the lesson remains the same. The Lord gives,
00:11:39.120 | and the Lord has taken away, and God's merciful design for our friend is that he worship—blessed
00:11:51.840 | be the Lord—worship more deeply the way Job did, and that he renounce sin more fully the way Job
00:12:00.720 | did, and that he lay afresh on the power of the Holy Spirit to flee all temptation, and that he
00:12:09.200 | renounce in the presence of his wife for her joy, and he's done with this sin.
00:12:18.560 | That's a very helpful survey of a lot of intertwined issues in a sobering situation.
00:12:22.480 | Thank you, Pastor John, for your willingness to tackle this question and the many questions that
00:12:25.760 | we have addressed over the years. For more details about this podcast or to catch up on
00:12:29.840 | the old episodes that we've released or to subscribe to the audio feed and get the new
00:12:34.240 | episodes as we release them, and even send us a question of your own, go to our online home
00:12:39.280 | at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. We return on Wednesday to hear from a listener who wants to
00:12:44.880 | know, "How is it that Jesus is my advocate in heaven right now if his work on earth was
00:12:50.480 | completely finished?" How do we wrestle with these two seeming contradictions? That's on Wednesday.
00:12:56.080 | I'm your host, Tony Renke. We'll see you then on the Ask Pastor John podcast with long-time author
00:13:00.480 | and pastor, John Piper.
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