What’s the Point of Your New Trilogy of Books?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Well, as many listeners know, Pastor John,
00:00:05.840 | you have been writing a lot of new books these days,
00:00:08.480 | which has been great to see.
00:00:09.960 | It's also a little bit daunting to know what you've written
00:00:12.660 | and why you've written particular books.
00:00:14.560 | So today's question comes from a listener named Derek
00:00:16.960 | in Jackson, Mississippi.
00:00:18.780 | Pastor John, I just received in the mail a copy
00:00:21.200 | of your 13 volume collected works,
00:00:23.720 | and I'm blessed by your ministry
00:00:25.080 | and I love having your books all together on my shelf.
00:00:28.520 | And then of course, I recently purchased your two new books,
00:00:32.160 | A Peculiar Glory and Reading the Bible Supernaturally.
00:00:35.880 | I have a lot of reading to do,
00:00:38.280 | but I would love to hear in a couple of paragraphs
00:00:42.000 | how these two new books add to your legacy.
00:00:45.120 | What are the main points you want readers
00:00:47.000 | to take from each of them?
00:00:49.000 | - I'll go Derek one better.
00:00:51.440 | The two books he's referring to,
00:00:54.200 | A Peculiar Glory and Reading the Bible Supernaturally,
00:00:56.840 | are really the first two of three, a kind of trilogy.
00:01:01.240 | And I just finished writing the third,
00:01:04.340 | which Lord willing, will be published in the spring of 2018.
00:01:08.580 | So let me try to give him the big picture of all three,
00:01:13.200 | rather than just the first two that he asked about.
00:01:16.680 | So here I am, 71 years old.
00:01:19.520 | And when you're 71, in your eighth decade,
00:01:22.600 | that always sounds older.
00:01:23.800 | It's amazing when I think about it.
00:01:26.100 | You don't think about your future productivity
00:01:28.880 | the same way you did when you were 35.
00:01:31.320 | You're more keenly aware that you probably won't get to do
00:01:37.040 | all you would like to do.
00:01:38.840 | And the time that remains is unknown.
00:01:43.140 | It always is unknown, but it feels especially unknown
00:01:46.080 | when you're in your eighth decade
00:01:47.800 | and you realize you have to make some critical choices
00:01:52.020 | and leave out some things, leave some things undone
00:01:55.240 | that you might have chosen to do if you could live forever.
00:02:00.240 | And as I've pondered now my life
00:02:03.080 | and what I have done so far and what I would like to do,
00:02:07.300 | nothing has seemed more important to me
00:02:11.000 | than to focus on the authority and the meaning
00:02:15.240 | and the heralding of the Word of God, the Bible.
00:02:20.160 | And so that's what these three books are about,
00:02:22.660 | those three words, authority, meaning, and heralding.
00:02:25.940 | But before I give in a nutshell what they are,
00:02:29.820 | let me say why the Bible seems so crucial to me
00:02:34.100 | at this juncture in life.
00:02:36.180 | Everything I've created,
00:02:38.120 | I'm thinking mainly of the things that I've written,
00:02:41.360 | is either based on the Bible or built on sand.
00:02:46.360 | I don't expect any of John Piper's ideas
00:02:50.660 | to survive me or be useful when I'm gone
00:02:54.920 | if they are not faithful extensions
00:02:58.780 | of the meaning of God's Word into life.
00:03:02.920 | My authority is zero.
00:03:05.900 | God's authority is everything.
00:03:09.140 | Whatever I have said that accords with his truth
00:03:13.180 | shares in his authority.
00:03:16.740 | And it might be useful when I'm gone.
00:03:19.780 | I suppose that's why there's a collected work.
00:03:22.060 | Somebody thinks so.
00:03:24.180 | That's the first reason for wanting to focus on the Bible
00:03:29.180 | in this last chapter of my life,
00:03:31.460 | namely to show why I have written the way I have written,
00:03:36.120 | basing everything on the Scripture
00:03:37.980 | and trying to show that it is based on the Scripture.
00:03:40.940 | The second reason for this focus
00:03:43.780 | is that I realized that the Scriptures are inexhaustible
00:03:48.740 | and there's so much more to see in them
00:03:52.020 | than I've been able to draw out
00:03:53.740 | or than anybody's been able to draw out.
00:03:55.640 | So I desperately don't want people to substitute my books
00:04:00.540 | or my insights for their own inquiry into the Scriptures.
00:04:05.540 | I really believe this,
00:04:06.900 | that there is so much more divine light and truth
00:04:11.900 | ready to break forth from God's Word
00:04:15.900 | than I have seen or others have seen up until now.
00:04:19.620 | Therefore, encouraging people to press on
00:04:23.620 | with a life devoted to Scripture
00:04:25.980 | is vastly more important
00:04:27.860 | than hoping that they'll press on with what I've written.
00:04:31.740 | So that's the second reason.
00:04:33.420 | Here's the third one for this focus on the Bible
00:04:36.300 | here in the last chapter of my life.
00:04:39.500 | Generations to come until Jesus returns
00:04:43.740 | are going to face new crises, new challenges,
00:04:46.500 | new issues that I have not faced and others have not faced.
00:04:51.500 | And therefore, if people depend on what I've written
00:04:56.740 | or what others have written,
00:04:58.260 | they're gonna be swept away when the challenges come
00:05:01.260 | that we never addressed.
00:05:03.980 | But I have total confidence in the Bible
00:05:08.020 | for meeting those future challenges.
00:05:11.120 | My confidence for the future of the church
00:05:13.700 | and for the future of young pastors, for example,
00:05:17.180 | or Christians in general,
00:05:18.540 | is not that they read 20 years from now what I have written.
00:05:23.540 | That's not my confidence.
00:05:25.660 | It is the inspired Word of God
00:05:28.380 | that equips people for every good work, 2 Timothy 3:17.
00:05:33.380 | And I think in that text,
00:05:36.100 | every good work means that the Bible
00:05:39.300 | will be completely sufficient for every new challenge
00:05:42.700 | that the church faces until the trumpet sounds
00:05:45.660 | and Jesus Christ appears in the clouds.
00:05:48.200 | The Bible will be sufficient,
00:05:50.180 | not the writings of John Piper.
00:05:52.860 | So those are the reasons that I have put huge focus
00:05:56.900 | on the Bible in the last three years of my life.
00:06:01.460 | The three questions that have driven me
00:06:04.900 | in these three books are, one,
00:06:07.040 | do we have a Word from God that is true,
00:06:10.340 | reliable, authoritative, able to meet all our needs
00:06:13.660 | for living a life pleasing to God
00:06:15.740 | and good for people and saving our souls?
00:06:19.060 | And so I wrote the first book, "A Peculiar Glory,"
00:06:22.820 | to give my answer to that question, and my answer is yes.
00:06:26.460 | And I try to show that you don't need
00:06:28.820 | a formal theological training
00:06:31.620 | in order to discern with complete confidence
00:06:35.100 | that the Bible is the very Word of God.
00:06:39.460 | And the answer has to do with, as the title says,
00:06:42.680 | the revelation of the glory of God in Scripture.
00:06:46.260 | The second book is built on the first
00:06:49.060 | and asks the question, if the Bible shows itself
00:06:52.660 | to be completely true and reliable and authoritative,
00:06:55.980 | a Word from God by virtue of the revelation
00:06:59.540 | of the glory of God through it,
00:07:02.180 | how then is a person to go about reading this book
00:07:07.180 | so as to find God's intended meaning?
00:07:10.540 | And the essence of the answer, the essence of the book,
00:07:13.940 | is to show the paradoxical intersection
00:07:18.860 | of the supernatural dimension of reading
00:07:22.060 | and the natural dimension of reading,
00:07:25.060 | relying upon the Holy Spirit utterly
00:07:28.080 | and relying on our ability to think
00:07:31.780 | and construe meaning in clauses and phrases and arguments.
00:07:35.220 | It's a kind of paradox that the book deals with.
00:07:38.100 | And then the third book that I just finished
00:07:41.020 | raises this question.
00:07:42.220 | If the Bible is true and authoritative
00:07:44.340 | and if you can get meaning from it
00:07:47.180 | by reading in a natural, supernatural way,
00:07:50.940 | how then is it to be heralded, proclaimed, preached
00:07:55.740 | toward the ultimate goal of the universe,
00:07:58.300 | namely white-hot worship of God's people now and forever?
00:08:03.740 | So it's a book on preaching and my proposed title,
00:08:07.400 | and I don't know what the title will be,
00:08:09.800 | my proposed title right now is
00:08:11.740 | Expository Exaltation, Text, Reality, and Worship
00:08:16.740 | in Preaching Christian Scripture.
00:08:21.980 | And I would just say one more thing to Derek,
00:08:24.340 | and if this sounds like these are only for pastors
00:08:29.140 | or preachers, that would be a mistake.
00:08:31.680 | I hope that he and others will find them useful
00:08:36.680 | because everybody should be asking these three questions.
00:08:41.020 | Can I trust the Bible, book one?
00:08:44.060 | How should I go about reading it to get God's meaning,
00:08:47.260 | book two, and what should I expect
00:08:50.900 | from my church and my pastors
00:08:53.620 | when they proclaim this book to me, book three?
00:08:56.140 | So my prayer is that when I'm long gone,
00:09:00.620 | these three books will not so much preserve
00:09:03.280 | John Piper's insights from Scripture,
00:09:06.620 | though they are some of that,
00:09:08.320 | but rather will equip the church to trust the Bible,
00:09:12.500 | find their meaning and insight from it,
00:09:15.860 | and herald the Scriptures for generations to come.
00:09:20.460 | Man, that's one of our highest priorities at DG,
00:09:22.760 | making sure Bible readers have the tools
00:09:24.900 | and the equipment necessary to make biblical discoveries
00:09:27.140 | of God's glory all by themselves.
00:09:29.300 | Thank you for writing these books, Pastor John,
00:09:31.420 | and thank you for your heart to equip
00:09:33.240 | a new generation of leaders and preachers
00:09:35.820 | to come after you.
00:09:37.420 | So cool to see.
00:09:38.780 | Well, this is my chance to let you know
00:09:40.100 | that you can subscribe to our audio feeds
00:09:42.060 | and search our episode archive
00:09:43.600 | and even reach us by email with a difficult question
00:09:45.620 | that you're facing in life.
00:09:46.740 | You can do all that through our online home
00:09:48.200 | at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:09:52.980 | Well, how can we sinners be spiritually dead
00:09:56.440 | and blind to the glory of God
00:09:58.340 | and yet also culpable and guilty
00:10:00.620 | for not seeing and embracing the glory of God?
00:10:04.380 | How do those two facts come together?
00:10:07.340 | It's a question that comes out of Pastor John's recent book,
00:10:09.780 | A Peculiar Glory, and it's on the table on Wednesday.
00:10:13.220 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:14.180 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast,
00:10:17.100 | and we'll see you then.
00:10:18.260 | (upbeat music)
00:10:20.840 | (upbeat music)
00:10:23.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]