(upbeat music) - Pastor John, in episode number 468, you talk briefly about ISIS and the terrorism in the Middle East. On this subject, it raises the question for us over whether or not Christian adults should watch the gruesome ISIS beheading videos online, or even look at the gruesome pictures of ISIS evil.

Should we or not? How do you think through this question? - It seems to me, Tony, that there are reasons why it might serve a person to watch such a thing, and there are reasons why it might not. And maybe what would be helpful is if I mention a few of those reasons, and people then can decide which group they're in.

Will it serve them or will it not serve them? Will it help them love people and love God to watch this, or will it not? And of course, that does imply, I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with seeing this horror. I don't think seeing horror is necessarily sharing in the sin of the horror.

So first, why or how might it be helpful to see it? And I'll start with a personal example. In June of 2004, I went back to check this. Paul Johnson, an American helicopter mechanic in Saudi Arabia, was kidnapped by al-Qaeda, and they threatened to kill him if prisoners weren't released.

And of course, the prisoners were not released, and they killed him. And they put the video and the pictures of his beheading online. Now, that was the very first time in my life I had ever had the occasion to even think about looking at such a thing, and I did.

I did. They found his head a month later in a refrigerator in Riyadh. I went to the news site, and I found the picture. I have it, and here's the weird thing. I copied it. It is in my iPhoto. So I looked at it again to get ready for this.

His head is sitting on his back. I mean, I just thought of his wife or his kids, just the horror of such a thing. So, "Piper, what are you doing? Are you sick? Why did you even go there? And why, for goodness sakes, did you save it?" And here's what's going on in my head.

I thought to myself, "We in the modern West are often so insulated from real, horrible, physical suffering and death. We have 911 and emergency rooms and antibiotics and morphine, and they've put us so out of touch with the kind of suffering and death that much of the world deals with constantly.

We can hardly feel what it's like to really risk our lives or confront the most dangerous and horrible kinds of evil head on." And so it seemed to me that I needed, John Piper in 2004 needed to be confronted face to face with this kind of horror, this kind of evil.

I needed to feel some of the revulsion or horror that many people around the world have to face daily, including Christians, and sometimes because they're Christians. And the biblical basis, I gave it some thought those years ago. Are you getting a biblical basis for this kind of thinking? And what I thought of in those days and reflected on again was Hebrews 11:37 that says, "They were stoned.

They were sawn in two." Think of it. They were sawn in two, probably alive, with one of those big two-man logging saw type deals. They were sawn in two. They were killed with a sword. They went about in skins and sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated. And that last word, mistreated, it's not a light word, like a slap on the cheek.

It's a horrible word, and it's used one more time in the New Testament, namely chapter 13 of Hebrews, verse 3, where it says, "Remember those in prison as though in prison with them and those who are mistreated." These are like people who are being sawn in two. Those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.

And I don't think that means in the church. I think that means you have a body. They have a body. You have a body. They're being slaughtered. You have a body. Can you imagine what it's like for them to be slaughtered? I think that's the gist of this text, getting inside their skins and sharing.

And so I thought, I have a body. I need to feel a little bit of what it would be like to have a knife at my throat with somebody saying, will you renounce Christ? So I think it may be good for some of us who feel a bit cloistered and sanitized and distant from the horrors of the world, whether murders in our cities right here or terrorism around the globe, to have a little bit of exposure to this horror so that we're not naive and at least not as naive.

Maybe we can't really prepare ourselves for what that would be like, but it sure is good to try, I think. So the day is going to come. If I read the book of Revelation rightly, the day is going to come when such horrors will be more common and more close to home.

And if we've not come to terms with them theologically and emotionally, our faith may collapse when face to face, we see this horror. I mean, I can imagine a lot of Christians whose theology is so weak when it comes to God's sovereignty and suffering in sovereignty, that when they see something like that, they just become emotionally unglued.

They are totally undone and throw away their faith in a good and sovereign God. But I said there were reasons both ways. On the other hand, it's not a duty. I don't mean to put anybody under any kind of pressure to do this. There's no biblical mandate to look at a horrible picture or to see horror.

And we need to know ourselves. If it's going to give you nightmares, if it's going to otherwise decrease your ability to function in a loving way, then don't by any means look at it. So that's the criterion in the end. Will looking at such a thing increase your emotional capacities to do good to others, or will it decrease them?

Thank you, Pastor John. And we have talked about this more in the past. In the episode we titled "Facing Death Faithfully," that was episode number 91 in the archive. It's valuable content to check out. We return on Monday with a more happy theme. And we'll hear from a listener in Dubai who is wondering whether or not her wedding needs to be conducted in a church.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend. you