(upbeat music) - Pastor John, you were in the process of moving to Tennessee the week of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado. And in the last podcast, we talked about the pastoral side of why you address natural disasters. In this episode, I want to address those who agree with your theology.

They agree that God ordains all that comes to pass, even a category five tornado for the millions of good and glorious ripple effects that will ultimately result because of this tragedy. But they disagree with your timing. When you write blogs or post Twitter updates in the midst of the destruction, what would you say to these individuals?

- Right, that's a good question. So let me give just a bigger picture and then I'll be very specific in the way to answer that question about how I feel about those couple of tweets and that timing. There are at least four reasons as I've thought about this, why people might oppose saying something about the sovereignty and goodness of God in the midst of calamity.

Number one, they just don't agree with it. And you're not addressing that person, but I'm gonna mention that person anyway. They don't agree with it. They don't think God is sovereign in the sense that he's ruling the wind and governing nature so that who is killed and who's not killed is decided ultimately by God.

They just don't believe that. I heard a sermon recently that said that explicitly. That this world is cursed, the pastor said, which of course is true. It's replaced the creative world with a cursed world. And all those bad things are owing to the curse. Well, my answer to that is yes, they are.

And God is the one who subjected the world to futility. And not only that, he didn't just do it like a clockmaker who said, okay, I'm gonna make this clock go bad now. And then steps back and watches the clock go bad. He is involved in nature, as the Bible says, everywhere repeatedly governing the natural processes like Jesus stopping the storm so that the disciples say, well, who then is this who rules, who commands the winds and the waves and they obey him, which he does in Oklahoma as well as Israel.

So that's first. They might just disagree entirely with my view of God's sovereignty. Number two, they might think that the way you say it is helpful or unhelpful. So you might say, you might choose language like, God killed your children, that's really harsh. Or you might say, God took your children, that's a little softer.

Or you might say, your children are gone and God is still sovereign. You hear the different flavors and nuances in each of those. It's how you say things really matters. So what I said, the two tweets that I tweeted were, number one, I quoted Job 119, your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house and it fell upon them and they are dead.

And what I meant and hoped by that would be that the raw biblical statement that it happened to Job who was blameless and upright and feared God and turned away from evil and was not a bad man, that it happened to him is that we would all say, there it did, it's again, again, again, they're dead, they're dead, it happened to Job, it happened to us.

Oh God, how long? In other words, just the raw factuality was expressed. And then secondly, five minutes later, I tweeted, then Job rose, this is Job 120, Jen Job rose, tore his robe, shaved his head, fell on the ground and worshiped. And my heart in this was, this is what parents are doing in Moore, Oklahoma.

They're not discussing, they're not preaching, they're not reading books, they're tearing their hair out. They're pulling on their clothes, they're falling on the ground and weeping their eyes out. And by grace, many of them are worshiping as they weep. That was the gist, that was the point of trying to just say what I believed was happening for many.

And I know Tony beyond the shadow of doubt that weeping and worshiping go together. I've experienced it, I've watched people experience it, Job experienced it, so that's number two. A person might simply say, you didn't say it helpfully. Third, the timing might be off. That's the one you mentioned.

And surely that's a crucial consideration. I mean, that's why Ecclesiastes 3 is written, right? For everything there is a season, a time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance. And if you get it wrong, you can really be hurtful.

And the last one is a person might disagree or disapprove of what you say because the medium is just not the right place. In other words, Twitter is just not a good medium that can bear the weight of such serious issues. I think some people would say that. So looking back, here's my answer to your question.

Looking back, especially on those last three, the way you say it, the time you say it, the medium you say it, I wish that those three had been perceived by me differently than I perceive them in the moment. I think the way I said it was fairly raw and I get help from that, but not everybody does.

The timing was immediate. It was 11 o'clock that night and the medium was risky, Twitter, because you can't hear any tone of voice, you can't get a broader explanation. It finds people in situations that are all over the map. So while I love the truth that I spoke and I believe in it with all my heart and it gives me help in the midst of my calamity and gives many people help, I think that was a misjudgment on my part and I'm sorry that I did it.

I pulled them down, but I pulled them down way too late and so it caused all the ruckus that it did and I just hope the Lord will take all that and turn it for good. I'm sure that this will happen again. That is, I hope that I won't judge and then misjudge, I mean misjudge and then pull things down again.

I hope I can avoid that. Oh, by the way, there's another lesson I learned. I mean, I knew it, but this taught me it. I don't think Twitter is ever designed to do tweets back to back. That's just a bad idea. I blew it when I said, okay, I'll get the people to understand tweet number one by reading tweet number two.

The medium is not designed for that. I think the reason I tweet is because I think God himself is a tweeter in the book of Proverbs and that he means for those Proverbs to be self-standing and if you can't make yourself relatively clearly understood or appropriately provocative in one tweet, you better just not tweet.

You better use a blog or something else. So I think I made a big mistake in trying to put two back to back and hoping they would be coherent and of course people can separate them out and then that doesn't work anymore. - Thank you, Pastor John, for addressing these topics and thank you for listening to this podcast.

If you have questions, please email those to askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At desiringgod.org, you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)