John Piper’s 9/11 Radio Interview
00:00:00.000 | American 11, American 11, how do you hear the center?
00:00:05.000 | We have some planes, just stay quiet and you'll be okay. We're turning to the airport.
00:00:10.000 | And who's trying to call me here?
00:00:13.000 | Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll injure yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.
00:00:26.000 | 20 years ago today at 8.14 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked.
00:00:33.000 | And with it began a nightmare no one will forget to live through it.
00:00:38.000 | I was roofing my house that Tuesday morning, radio on, when national broadcasters broke in to announce one of the Trade Center towers in New York City was on fire.
00:00:47.000 | The cause was maybe a bomb. Other rumors said it was an accidental plane crash, although doubtful on such a clear day.
00:00:55.000 | We now know it was Flight 11.
00:00:58.000 | 20 minutes later Tower 2 was hit by Flight 175 and all doubt was removed.
00:01:03.000 | America was under attack.
00:01:06.000 | I remember the FAA grounding all flights immediately.
00:01:10.000 | I remember the roll call as the flight paths of the last 20 commercial jets or so in the air were anxiously narrated on radio.
00:01:18.000 | I remember hearing fighter jets were scrambled to the sky if needed to shoot down hijacked jets.
00:01:24.000 | I remember looking up into the atmosphere for confirmation of what was unfolding 1,200 miles away and finding a clear sky emptied of jets and condensation trails.
00:01:34.000 | I remember finding my way to a television in time to watch the towers fall.
00:01:38.000 | I remember street level recordings emerging.
00:01:41.000 | The sound of glass raining down on concrete.
00:01:44.000 | The sight of people fleeing from gray clouds of dust and copy paper pouring between buildings.
00:01:51.000 | I remember seeing the Pentagon on fire, evidence of a third attack, and unconfirmed reports of a fourth flight crashed into a field somewhere.
00:01:59.000 | I remember people pulled from rubble piles.
00:02:02.000 | I remember footage of jubilation and celebration in foreign places.
00:02:06.000 | I remember Air Force One flying the President to the military base 16 miles from me.
00:02:11.000 | The shock of that day remains fresh 20 years later.
00:02:16.000 | Meanwhile in Minneapolis, as the news broke on Tuesday morning, Pastor John gathered his pastoral team into a conference room.
00:02:23.000 | They pulled out a radio and put it in the middle of the table.
00:02:26.000 | "We listened and turned it off and prayed and listened and prayed," recalled Piper.
00:02:32.000 | The pastors interceded for about an hour total, mingled with radio updates.
00:02:36.000 | They asked God to pour out his mercy for wisdom in the mouths of Christian spokesmen who will be called upon to say something and for a widespread awakening from banal pursuits.
00:02:48.000 | Then the pastors gathered the staff and planned out the week.
00:02:52.000 | A 7 p.m. prayer gathering would be held that evening at Bethlehem Baptist Church.
00:02:57.000 | It was announced on local radio stations under the title, "A Service of Sorrow, Self-Humbling, and Steady Hope in Our Savior and King Jesus Christ."
00:03:05.000 | It was an evening for mourning and prayer.
00:03:08.000 | 200 attended.
00:03:10.000 | The following morning, Pastor John was called on to be one of the Christians who would speak into the tragedy.
00:03:16.000 | For him, on KTIS, a local radio station.
00:03:19.000 | "Where was God?" on 9/11.
00:03:23.000 | There for about 40 minutes, he spoke wisdom into the shock and the sorrow.
00:03:28.000 | We want to share the recording with you today on Ask Pastor John on this 20th anniversary.
00:03:33.000 | The interview covers the importance of grieving and creating space for sorrow.
00:03:38.000 | Yet a sorrow under God's all sovereignty.
00:03:41.000 | Pastor John explains why 9/11 was a call for national humbling.
00:03:45.000 | A wake-up call.
00:03:47.000 | God was shaking the foundations of America and calling sinners to come to Christ.
00:03:51.000 | A global call not just for Americans, but also for Palestinians, Saudis, and Afghans.
00:03:57.000 | In the interview, Pastor John goes deep, explaining how God can, in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world,
00:04:04.000 | ordain that something be permitted or caused.
00:04:07.000 | Even a massive sin, like 9/11.
00:04:10.000 | And yet disapprove of the very thing he has permitted or ordained.
00:04:15.000 | The cross of Jesus Christ exemplified this truth because, says Piper,
00:04:19.000 | "I don't think New York, the hijacking, the terrorism, was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God.
00:04:27.000 | The killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible than what we've just seen.
00:04:35.000 | And yet God planned it."
00:04:39.000 | The tragedy of 9/11 foregrounds God's orchestrating providence, human sin, and the magnitude of the world's daily suffering.
00:04:46.000 | It reminds us that Satan is alive and active.
00:04:49.000 | And it gives parents an opportunity to explain that ultimately, God has billions of purposes,
00:04:53.000 | doing an uncountable number of good things in lives through a tragedy at this scale.
00:04:59.000 | The whole interview remains instructive two decades later.
00:05:03.000 | "God was so merciful to me and helped me," Piper later wrote, reflecting on his studio visit.
00:05:10.000 | "I was tired and tense and aching with so many emotions.
00:05:14.000 | I think I said what God wanted said, 'What a kind God in misery and gladness.'"
00:05:22.000 | The 40-minute interview has not to date appeared on the website.
00:05:25.000 | Until now, here's John Piper the morning after 9/11 on KTIS, a local FM radio station in Minneapolis,
00:05:32.000 | being interviewed by hosts John Engen and by Chuck Knapp.
00:05:36.000 | And you'll hear Chuck's voice first.
00:05:38.000 | Here now is the interview.
00:05:40.000 | Would you bring us before the Lord in prayer and lead us?
00:05:44.000 | I'd love to.
00:05:46.000 | Father, make us a sensitive, compassionate, grieving, weeping people.
00:05:52.000 | There's so many who are wired not to be able to cry.
00:05:57.000 | There were so many all day long that if they'd given themselves one opportunity,
00:06:01.000 | would have wept like a baby, and they just held it back and held it back.
00:06:06.000 | And so I pray for the capacities to grieve.
00:06:10.000 | Christians need to grieve better than we do, so help us to do that, I pray.
00:06:16.000 | And then I pray for a great self-humbling in my heart and the heart of my church.
00:06:22.000 | Lord, guard us from anger.
00:06:25.000 | The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.
00:06:29.000 | Be slow to speak, slow to anger.
00:06:32.000 | Look to yourselves. Oh God, I pray that I would look to my own sin
00:06:36.000 | and my own bitterness, my own unforgiveness, my own disregard for God,
00:06:43.000 | my own indifference to your things that should bring judgment upon me.
00:06:49.000 | So grant the church and the country to be humbled before you, our great sovereign King.
00:06:57.000 | And then, Lord, I pray for hope to abound. Hope in our Savior and King, Jesus Christ.
00:07:03.000 | No hope in horses or chariots or the CIA or the government or the military, but hope in you.
00:07:13.000 | Some hope in horses, some hope in chariots, but we hope in the name of the Lord our God.
00:07:21.000 | Build that hope into our land, build that hope into our churches.
00:07:25.000 | You've gotten our attention, and now, oh God, I pray that we would yield to your grace and your power
00:07:33.000 | and live for Christ, make you the center of our lives and not ourselves and not our business and not our vacations.
00:07:40.000 | And then, Lord, make us a sacrificial serving people ready to lay down our lives
00:07:44.000 | to get the gospel to the unreached people and the unreached peoples around the world.
00:07:49.000 | Oh, Lord, set our priorities straight, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen.
00:07:55.000 | We are visiting with Dr. John Piper this morning, and it's a blessing to have you with us,
00:08:02.000 | author of many, many books and pastor for the sheep and the lost and just a Fuller graduate.
00:08:11.000 | There's so many things we could say, but I'm just so thankful that you were here in town
00:08:15.000 | and able to come and lead us in a time in that whole healing process that needs to occur.
00:08:24.000 | I saw pictures on television yesterday of young children in Israel, but in the Arab sections that were cheering.
00:08:34.000 | And there were adults there likewise.
00:08:37.000 | And one can't help but become upset on many levels seeing that image across the television screen of the world.
00:08:50.000 | And anger is certainly one of those, frustration.
00:08:54.000 | But as I look and as I listen to you talking about humbling ourselves,
00:09:00.000 | so much of what the world sees of Americans is anything but humble.
00:09:06.000 | And I think that that feeds, gives them fuel for what they return to us, that anger that they feel toward us.
00:09:18.000 | And so that your message in that part about humbling ourselves really hits me in the heart as I think about that in particular.
00:09:28.000 | I think one of the missing ingredients,
00:09:33.000 | I mean it's the main missing ingredient that makes that difficult for people
00:09:38.000 | is because God doesn't have the place that he needs to have in their lives.
00:09:43.000 | I mean the Bible's message of humility is not a horizontal message mainly.
00:09:48.000 | It's not humble yourself under terrorists.
00:09:51.000 | It's humble yourself under the mighty hand of God.
00:09:55.000 | If God doesn't look mighty in your life, if he isn't central and supreme and glorious,
00:10:02.000 | humility is going to be a very artificial thing in your life.
00:10:06.000 | And if he's there in his proper central supreme place, humility will come naturally.
00:10:14.000 | You know, somebody said to me out in the hall that Ann Graham Lotz said,
00:10:18.000 | "God's got our attention now."
00:10:21.000 | Or sometimes God withholds his protection so that things can happen to wake us up.
00:10:26.000 | And I think that's very, very true.
00:10:28.000 | And if you ask, "Well, what's the attention that he wants to communicate?"
00:10:34.000 | And we say, "Well, Jesus is calling us to repentance."
00:10:38.000 | You have to ask, "Well, what's repentance about?"
00:10:40.000 | And repentance is turning away from sin.
00:10:42.000 | And what's sin about?
00:10:43.000 | And sin is fundamentally about treason against God.
00:10:48.000 | But you can't even grasp the meaning of sin if God isn't viewed as worthy of infinite adoration
00:10:55.000 | and infinite delight and infinite allegiance and infinite love and infinite valuing,
00:11:02.000 | which he isn't for people in America.
00:11:05.000 | And so the responses that are appropriate are almost emotionally impossible for people
00:11:11.000 | because God is so foreign to their experience.
00:11:14.000 | One of the things that troubles me about these calamities is that God comes onto the agenda suddenly
00:11:22.000 | in people's lives, and where he finds himself is in the dock being accused.
00:11:29.000 | It's funny.
00:11:30.000 | Why don't we have a radio program or a big call-in thing to account for God's mercy
00:11:39.000 | every time the sun comes up on New York?
00:11:42.000 | Jesus said the sun comes up on the good and the bad, the rain falls on the just and the evil.
00:11:48.000 | This is an inexplicable grace to our land.
00:11:53.000 | Why don't we call God to account for treating wicked people so kindly?
00:11:58.000 | I heard you say this morning, Chuck, when I got up, that you wanted to focus on the cross.
00:12:03.000 | And I love that. I love that.
00:12:05.000 | And I said, "Oh, good. Good. If we focus on the cross, we'll be safe today."
00:12:09.000 | But the text that's most central about the cross in relation to this supremacy of God
00:12:16.000 | in all of our calamities is Romans 3, where it says, "We've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
00:12:24.000 | We are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus,
00:12:29.000 | whom God put forward as a demonstration of his righteousness because he had passed over former sins."
00:12:38.000 | Now, if you just think about that for a moment, what it's saying is, "God said I must sacrifice my son
00:12:48.000 | in order to vindicate my righteousness in view of how leniently I have treated sinners."
00:12:57.000 | Now, that's the gospel. That's the meaning of the cross that we want to make central here at KTIS.
00:13:02.000 | The cross is the moment and the means by which God vindicates his righteousness
00:13:09.000 | in the face of how unjust his mercy appears.
00:13:14.000 | What American worries about that?
00:13:17.000 | What American loses sleep over the injustice of God in the sun rising and people being spared?
00:13:23.000 | And when the stock market is climbing and when the interest rates are falling
00:13:28.000 | and when the commerce is flourishing, which one of us says, "How can God treat us this way? We're so bad."
00:13:35.000 | Who says that? Which is what we ought to say.
00:13:37.000 | Instead, when anybody gets their wills crossed or anybody endures pain,
00:13:43.000 | whether it's cancer or a plane crash, God gets called to account.
00:13:47.000 | There's something wrong here.
00:13:49.000 | And what's wrong is that he's simply not supreme, and therefore we don't understand sin,
00:13:54.000 | and therefore we don't understand the cross, and therefore our whole worldview is bent out of shape.
00:14:00.000 | So when others, like I've heard in the hallway out here, say, "He's got our attention,"
00:14:05.000 | I think he wants us to say, "I am God. I am God. I love people.
00:14:10.000 | If they would bow to me, I have put my son forward to forgive their sins
00:14:15.000 | and have them home with me forever and ever, but don't toy with me."
00:14:19.000 | People across the world see that of us, that we as an American people are not, for the most part, humble.
00:14:29.000 | Right, and yet they call us a Christian nation, and therefore Christianity gets made synonymous
00:14:35.000 | with all of America's music and all America's movies, with the great Satan.
00:14:41.000 | And I just want to, for one, on the air say, "I'm not speaking as an American.
00:14:46.000 | I am an alien and an exile on this planet. My citizenship is in heaven.
00:14:52.000 | I await a Savior who will come, who will transform this lowly body into a body like His.
00:14:57.000 | I'm a foreigner in America. I'm a foreigner in Palestine and Israel and Russia and Indonesia.
00:15:04.000 | I speak, I hope, for another king and another allegiance,
00:15:10.000 | which is what the Muslim world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, the secular world,
00:15:17.000 | they need to hear that Christians are not synonymous with Americans.
00:15:23.000 | What a perspective. Causes us to stop and really think, I hope, causes us to assess,
00:15:29.000 | where are we looking personally, self-examination.
00:15:33.000 | This is what I was thinking when you were saying that Colossians chapter 3 says,
00:15:37.000 | "The words of Christ and all the richness live in your hearts and make you wise.
00:15:40.000 | So use His words to teach and counsel each other.
00:15:43.000 | Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts."
00:15:46.000 | And this is what you were just saying, verse 17, "And whatever you do or say,
00:15:49.000 | let it be as a representative of the Lord Jesus Christ."
00:15:52.000 | Ambassadors, we are here as aliens, but representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:15:58.000 | And all the while giving thanks through Him to God the Father. That's it.
00:16:03.000 | It's so hard. I feel for you guys. I said to Neil Stavem last night, he dropped over and visited us.
00:16:08.000 | And I said to the people, I don't really look forward to being on the radio
00:16:11.000 | because it's hard to talk theology and do pastoral care in this medium.
00:16:17.000 | And yet these guys have to do it. You're stuck with it. You can't run away like other people can.
00:16:23.000 | I said, I feel for these guys. I want to join them there.
00:16:26.000 | And I just want to encourage you to do that, to be representatives of Jesus Christ
00:16:32.000 | and what makes it so hard for you and me is because we're speaking into an audience
00:16:39.000 | that doesn't have in place the worldview to make sense out of things that would fall into place for us.
00:16:50.000 | I mean, they'll ask you some just blunt, painful question about a piece of the tragedy.
00:16:55.000 | And you got to take them back to the foundations. You got to go deep.
00:17:00.000 | You got to go back to the beginning and say, where did sin come from?
00:17:04.000 | What has happened in humanity?
00:17:07.000 | What is the depravity that Romans 1 talks about where God just hands people over to their own depravity?
00:17:13.000 | What is the futility of Romans 8 where it says he subjected the world to futility,
00:17:18.000 | which means the pain and the suffering in the world where we groan,
00:17:21.000 | even we who have the spirit groan inwardly waiting for our adoption, the sons, the redemption of our body.
00:17:27.000 | What is death, which came into the world through one man?
00:17:30.000 | As sin entered the world, so death through sin.
00:17:33.000 | Those massive underpinnings of how we explain everything aren't in place for your listeners, many of them.
00:17:39.000 | And so in order to answer questions at the upper level, we have to go down to the lower level and rebuild some foundations.
00:17:47.000 | I just want to encourage you to, when you get a tough question, which no doubt you do, we all do.
00:17:54.000 | Jesus didn't automatically just jump in at the level of the questioner.
00:17:58.000 | He sometimes just said something that must have made them scratch their head
00:18:02.000 | because he knew they didn't have the categories for understanding his answer.
00:18:06.000 | So we need to rebuild and we're doing that right now. That's part of what we're doing.
00:18:10.000 | Looking through several excerpts from editorials and one from Oklahoma that struck me earlier this morning,
00:18:17.000 | a part of that article, editorial in the paper said, "Some will blame God for Tuesday's events.
00:18:22.000 | How could he not protect us from such evil?" That's how the world looks at this.
00:18:28.000 | Right. And the very way the question is crafted is almost unanswerable.
00:18:33.000 | Because as soon as you use the word "blame," you've implied guilt.
00:18:38.000 | Blame implies guilt.
00:18:40.000 | So they've muddied the waters because they cannot make the theological, biblical distinctions
00:18:46.000 | between ordaining that something be which you may in fact grieve over and disapprove of.
00:18:56.000 | See, now there's a category that is very hard for people to get a hold of.
00:19:01.000 | And yet I find it all over the Bible that God can, in his sovereign, overarching providence of the world,
00:19:09.000 | ordain that something be permitted or caused. He's involved causally in different ways and different acts.
00:19:17.000 | And yet disapprove of the very thing that he has permitted or ordained.
00:19:24.000 | People simply can't get it.
00:19:26.000 | So the word "blame" immediately hangs you on the horns of a dilemma you don't want to be hung on.
00:19:31.000 | Because to say, "No, you don't blame him," they think, "Oh, you mean he's on a vacation, he's out there,
00:19:36.000 | he had nothing to do with this, he wasn't watching, he fumbled the ball, he couldn't manage it."
00:19:41.000 | Or, "You've got him as a sinner."
00:19:44.000 | Those are your two options. Well, those aren't the biblical options.
00:19:47.000 | God is sovereign, and yet when he wills and ordains that there be pain and suffering in our lives,
00:19:55.000 | he's not doing it as a sinner or as an evil God.
00:19:59.000 | God has ways to ordain things in his mysterious sovereignty that are for our good in spite of being incredibly painful.
00:20:11.000 | And, here's the mystery, in spite of involving massive sin.
00:20:15.000 | And the place where that is so vividly clear in the Bible is at the cross.
00:20:20.000 | That's why I'm so glad you're staying here at the cross,
00:20:23.000 | because I don't think New York, the hijacking, the terrorism was a greater sin than the killing of the Son of God.
00:20:32.000 | I think the killing of the Son of God was more horrific, more terrible, more wicked, more horrible than what we've just seen.
00:20:41.000 | And yet, God planned it.
00:20:46.000 | So clear, Acts 427, "Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the Jewish people are gathered to do what your hand and your plan have destined to occur."
00:21:02.000 | All the biblical promises of the coming of the Son to bear our sorrows and to bear our griefs were predicted 700 years before they happened.
00:21:13.000 | And yet, there wasn't a more sinful act in the universe than the nailing of the Son of God to the cross.
00:21:20.000 | And therefore, if we're going to be believers in the love of God for sinners at the cross,
00:21:27.000 | we have to believe that he has the capacity to ordain that his Son die and yet not be a sinner in killing him.
00:21:36.000 | If he can do that, then I'm going to stand up on Sunday and say, "Though I don't have all the answers,
00:21:43.000 | my God and your God reigned on September 11, and he is not cruel, he is not wicked, and he's not a sinner."
00:21:53.000 | And the glory is that because he reigns, he can comfort every soul, he can answer every prayer,
00:22:02.000 | he can heal every disease, he can rescue from every calamity, he can hold back from us every harmful thing that would not be good for us.
00:22:10.000 | And if he were sovereign, then I don't know what hope we could ultimately have for our future and we would lose our gospel.
00:22:19.000 | Let me just mention, I appreciate, dear sir, your heart on providing the answer.
00:22:25.000 | It's not necessarily grabbing a piece of the tragedy.
00:22:28.000 | And then trying to define that little piece, you have to define it first of all in light of the tragedy as a whole,
00:22:33.000 | but the foundation as a whole as well.
00:22:36.000 | And as God's people, we are not simply representing this tragedy in the United States,
00:22:41.000 | we're representing the whole of Christ and the offering of God and what sin does to us.
00:22:46.000 | And we were born broken and we're watching this happen again.
00:22:50.000 | And not just the whole of Christ, but the whole of pain, because what's so strange and irrational about the human heart
00:23:01.000 | is that it takes pulling together in one cataclysmic calamity to awaken us to what's happening every moment of every day.
00:23:12.000 | Whether it's in hospitals across the country.
00:23:16.000 | You know, there are a lot of people right now whose mom or dad or wife or husband is breathing their last with pulmonary disease and gasping.
00:23:26.000 | Just like some of those folks are gasping right now under the rubble.
00:23:31.000 | That's not unique.
00:23:33.000 | And so it's awakening us to feel the magnitude of the world's misery,
00:23:39.000 | which forces an issue that we ought to be dealing with all the time is what is this misery all about?
00:23:47.000 | And the biblical answer is it's all about sin.
00:23:52.000 | And therefore, it's all about the God who is moral and holy and just and who defines sin as sin and whether there's redemption.
00:24:02.000 | That's the message.
00:24:04.000 | And so you're right. We're forced back to deal with huge things.
00:24:09.000 | There's a piece that we haven't mentioned yet that probably should as far as worldview goes.
00:24:15.000 | And Satan, Satan is a massive part of the Christian worldview.
00:24:21.000 | And we ought to ask, where was Satan yesterday?
00:24:25.000 | And of course, nobody knows precisely except to say that the biblical picture is that Satan hates God.
00:24:34.000 | He hates his purposes. He wants people to dishonor God.
00:24:37.000 | Mainly, he tries to squash the faith out of everybody's life.
00:24:43.000 | He demanded, it says in Luke 22, 32, I think, Satan has demanded to have you, Peter, that he might sift you like wheat, Jesus said.
00:24:52.000 | But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.
00:24:56.000 | So here you have Satan desiring to sift Peter like wheat.
00:25:01.000 | Now, I think that picture means just like you'd put wheat in a sieve, shake it, and it would tear it at the wheat and rip off the outside, you get the kernel.
00:25:12.000 | Satan wants to shake Peter, tear off his faith, and just have the natural Peter fall through and live the rest of his life in happiness and peace off in the suburbs somewhere.
00:25:23.000 | Fine. And no faith.
00:25:25.000 | And Jesus said, I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.
00:25:30.000 | And then he says this absolutely sovereign word, when you have turned, strengthen your brethren.
00:25:39.000 | In other words, I know you're going to turn, and I have effectually interceded with my Father on your behalf.
00:25:45.000 | You are going to drop three times tonight, but you're going to stand again, my friend.
00:25:51.000 | So Satan is involved in all these things, and he's moving people to do horrific acts.
00:25:58.000 | And I don't doubt that he was stirring and moving in the evils on those plains and in the weeks and years that led up to it.
00:26:05.000 | But Jesus is, he who is in us is stronger than he who's in the world.
00:26:11.000 | He holds this Satan on a leash. According to Jesus, he commands the evil spirits, and they do what he bids.
00:26:18.000 | So Satan can never get outside God's control.
00:26:22.000 | That's the point of the book of Job, I think.
00:26:24.000 | He's got to get permission to mess up this man's life and take his children and put boils on his face and on his body.
00:26:32.000 | And Job stands back and says, "When Satan has done all this, the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.
00:26:40.000 | Blessed be the name of the Lord."
00:26:42.000 | Or when his wife says, "Curse God and die. What in the world are you holding fast your integrity for?"
00:26:47.000 | He says, "You speak like one of the foolish women.
00:26:49.000 | Shall we not receive evil at the hand of the Lord as well as good?"
00:26:55.000 | And you kind of shucks, say, "Wait a minute, Job. You missed it. Satan did that. It says Satan did that.
00:27:00.000 | What do you mean, 'Shall we not receive evil as well as good at the hand of the Lord?'"
00:27:05.000 | And the writer adds, "Job did not sin with his lips," as though he knew we were going to misinterpret at that point.
00:27:12.000 | What Job was testifying was that Satan is to be hated.
00:27:16.000 | Satan is to be fought. Satan is to be resisted.
00:27:18.000 | Satan is to be hated.
00:27:21.000 | But God reigns Satan. God reigns over Satan.
00:27:25.000 | He's not running loose in the world without his leash in the hand of an almighty sovereign God.
00:27:31.000 | If he were, our hope would be very fragile and, I think, nonexistent.
00:27:39.000 | The thought I had last evening as I was going to sleep was that Satan did his work long ago on this one.
00:27:47.000 | You know, these people who are involved in such incidents, and we read yesterday's Psalm 36 where it says,
00:27:52.000 | "Sin whispers to the heart of the wicked and deep within their hearts, and they have no fear of God to restrain them.
00:27:57.000 | In their blind conceit, they cannot even see how wicked they really are.
00:28:02.000 | And they lie awake at night hatching sinful plots."
00:28:06.000 | Well, he did their work, and I'm imagining Satan just sat back and watched it happen.
00:28:11.000 | Well, whether he sat back and watched it happen or he did what he did to Judas, remember that word in Luke 22?
00:28:19.000 | Satan entered into Judas, and he went and he took the 30 pieces of silver.
00:28:25.000 | So Satan has indirect and direct ways of working, and perhaps Satan entered in that morning.
00:28:34.000 | He just did a decisive work, but he also does these preparatory works.
00:28:38.000 | Well, he gets your heart ready. Sure.
00:28:39.000 | And it doesn't take Satan. I mean, let's not be too quick to say, "Oh, Satan did this."
00:28:45.000 | Our flesh is plenty evil to do this sort of thing. Oh, yeah.
00:28:49.000 | The world is plenty evil to set things up so that we do it.
00:28:53.000 | Sin, Paul called sin a power, an indwelling power within us that rises up and takes us captive.
00:29:01.000 | So we don't need to blame Satan for every evil thing that happens because we're bad enough to do it without bringing him in as an explanatory factor,
00:29:11.000 | which is why I think Jesus didn't focus on Satan when they brought him the news about the Tower of Siloam falling on the 18
00:29:18.000 | or the mingling of the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices.
00:29:21.000 | He simply said, "You repent. You repent. Not you run away from Satan."
00:29:27.000 | This is interesting. On Sunday morning was our communion Sunday in church,
00:29:31.000 | and I preached on Paul's warning to examine yourselves.
00:29:35.000 | Why have you come to this table? What have you brought with you?
00:29:38.000 | And of course, all the other things Paul talks about up to 1 Corinthians 11,
00:29:43.000 | dealing with divisions and dealing with sin in the church and the astonishment he has that they're kind of pleased with themselves,
00:29:50.000 | that they're accepting all these things. And then he comes to the table and you must examine yourself if you come to worship.
00:29:55.000 | I walked away from the sermon on Sunday just beating myself up that we were too harsh in saying, "You and God have got to get this right."
00:30:03.000 | And this is exactly what you've been saying all morning. "You and God have got to get this right."
00:30:08.000 | What we saw yesterday lies in the heart of all of us.
00:30:11.000 | In fact, if you go on and read the rest of that passage, something absolutely stunning is said that would really make you wonder if you'd been too harsh,
00:30:19.000 | because he says, "If you don't discern the body and you don't examine yourself carefully, this is why some are sick among you and some have died."
00:30:31.000 | We said that. Somebody said it's the most dangerous service a church can hold, because it has direct consequences to how you approach it.
00:30:43.000 | But what makes it so mysterious and amazing and wonderful is that the death there is pictured as a way of not coming into condemnation.
00:30:55.000 | We are being judged by the Lord that we might not be condemned by the Lord.
00:31:00.000 | That's right.
00:31:01.000 | So that even death, and this is relevant, "Oh, is this relevant?"
00:31:05.000 | It's exactly right.
00:31:06.000 | Even death can be a mercy from God.
00:31:10.000 | See, there you go.
00:31:11.000 | Well, we're talking to Pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church, and we so appreciate you coming in and just opening the word and setting our eyes back on Christ.
00:31:21.000 | We mentioned this morning in Hebrews chapter 12 where the writer says, "Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men," and that's what we're doing, so that you will not grow weary.
00:31:33.000 | Well, now at three minutes before eight, I wonder, Dr. Piper, if you would lead us again in prayer for healing, understanding.
00:31:41.000 | Father in heaven, our hearts go out to hundreds of thousands of family members who to this moment don't know what's become of their loved ones, and I pray that you would turn their hearts to you and that you would cause them to submit their wills and their hearts and their lives to you and to look to you for help and strength.
00:32:04.000 | I pray, oh God, that you would bring your unique kind of consolation through Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us.
00:32:14.000 | I pray that you would pour out the Holy Spirit upon us, oh God, as a church of Jesus Christ and upon the world for awakening.
00:32:23.000 | I pray that you would assert your glorious, gracious, kind, merciful, powerful, just, holy supremacy into the American life and make Jesus Christ the issue today.
00:32:36.000 | And may people see him for whom he really is and savor him and love him and trust him and treasure him and count him more precious than anything else in all the world.
00:32:46.000 | Oh God, let this tragedy not happen in vain, but get people's hearts for yourself so that they not only have some relief in this world, but everlasting joy, everlasting peace, everlasting life.
00:33:00.000 | Lord, we want to see the greatest possible joy come, and that will come for eternity through Jesus Christ alone.
00:33:08.000 | So magnify your son, Lord, in this calamity, I pray, so that people will reap a harvest of righteousness and a harvest of everlasting peace and joy.
00:33:20.000 | Through Christ I pray, amen.
00:33:23.000 | - Amen.
00:33:24.000 | - Spoken from the heart.
00:33:26.000 | - KTIS FM in the Twin Cities at 10 minutes after 8 o'clock.
00:33:32.000 | We are visiting with Dr. John Piper, who is helping us overcome evil with good.
00:33:37.000 | And so we think that on the day when we start to look around, and I think yesterday I was numb.
00:33:45.000 | I was just numb by all of it.
00:33:47.000 | I couldn't believe 24 hours ago we were here watching the monitors and saw something go on, didn't know what it was, and thought, well, perhaps it's an accident.
00:33:58.000 | Well, then a second plane flying into the other tower, and then within minutes, here we are.
00:34:04.000 | We're in the same shock that I felt as a kid when President Kennedy was assassinated.
00:34:11.000 | I felt it again when the shuttle exploded.
00:34:15.000 | There have been other times in my life as well when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
00:34:21.000 | These are all things that I in my 20s have imprinted now.
00:34:26.000 | It just feels like it's in my DNA for this shock, and then the plane going into the Pentagon, and you realize this is an awful day.
00:34:35.000 | And so now the shock, I guess, is I don't know if it's wearing off, but now it's like, how do we make any sense?
00:34:42.000 | Where do we start?
00:34:44.000 | How do we rebuild?
00:34:46.000 | And I know the focus needs to be on the cross, because I've said that.
00:34:50.000 | I've been taught that in the last 10 years, but that's difficult too.
00:34:55.000 | So you're helping to shape the perspective and maybe sharpen the image.
00:35:00.000 | Well, I think you said it well, that the order is one moving from the immediate personal experience of emotion that the Bible cares a lot about
00:35:12.000 | to the more reflective, quiet, coming to terms with truth.
00:35:19.000 | We need both.
00:35:20.000 | We can't just jump in with both feet at the theoretical, theological level at the most raw moments of life.
00:35:28.000 | There's a time for silence and a time for speaking.
00:35:31.000 | There's a time for embracing and a time for refraining from embracing.
00:35:35.000 | And so as the time goes by, pastors need to step up to the plate with fiber in their tree and give people a rock to stand on and a trunk for the branches to hang on.
00:35:51.000 | And whether we're quite there or not, we're forced to be there.
00:35:56.000 | And my passion is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples.
00:36:06.000 | And so the reason I come back again and again to the supremacy of God in these moments is because I think if we lose it, we lose the most precious thing in the world.
00:36:19.000 | We lose everything.
00:36:20.000 | And one of the texts that's been on my mind in recent minutes especially is the book of Lamentations.
00:36:29.000 | Now, there's not a more horrific book in the Old Testament because it's after the carnage of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
00:36:39.000 | And it is so horrible that women are boiling and eating their children.
00:36:46.000 | And out of that setting, Jeremiah writes two things that I think if you lose the one, you lose the other.
00:36:59.000 | The one we all love is the hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness."
00:37:03.000 | Right in the middle chapter, he writes, "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.
00:37:11.000 | They are new every morning. Great is Thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore I will hope in Him."
00:37:19.000 | I mean, how can he say, "Mercies are new every morning" when things like this are happening?
00:37:24.000 | Mercies are new every morning.
00:37:26.000 | And just a few verses later in the chapter say, "For the Lord will not cast off forever.
00:37:33.000 | Though He cause grief, He will have compassion.
00:37:38.000 | According to the abundance of His steadfast love, for He does not from His heart," is the literal translation.
00:37:46.000 | "Willingly," it says, "He does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men."
00:37:51.000 | So there you have back to back, the Lord causes grief and His mercies are new every morning.
00:38:00.000 | So my gut feeling is I want mercy in my life.
00:38:04.000 | I want to live by mercy. I want to give mercy. I want to live mercy for people.
00:38:08.000 | And I think I'm going to lose verses 22 to 24, the mercy verses, if I lose the supremacy verses just a few verses later.
00:38:18.000 | Which is why I'm so zealous that God be given His rightful place in these moments and that we not kind of shuttle Him to the side and say,
00:38:25.000 | "Well, let's just deal with human misery here."
00:38:27.000 | Because my only hope in dealing with human misery is a great, holy, good, gracious, sovereign God who with all of His mystery can answer our prayers
00:38:39.000 | and can do miracles beyond what all humans can do, can restrain sin.
00:38:44.000 | Like He did to what? The King of Bimelech in Genesis 20 where Abraham said, "She's my sister."
00:38:52.000 | You know, "Sarah's my sister." And so she goes into the harem and could be slept with that night.
00:38:57.000 | And he doesn't, Bimelech doesn't sleep with her.
00:39:00.000 | And in the morning, God confronts him and he apologizes because he didn't know what was up.
00:39:06.000 | And God says, "I kept you from sinning."
00:39:10.000 | Now God can do that. God can keep people from sinning.
00:39:15.000 | One puff of His breath and the plane misses the tower.
00:39:19.000 | One slight restraint and this guy falls down in the plane instead of going into the cockpit.
00:39:26.000 | God can do that. And that He can do it creates problems for us in dealing with the calamity
00:39:33.000 | and creates hope for us in coming out of the calamity into a life where we know He will not let anything befall us but what is good for us, like Romans 8, 28 says.
00:39:43.000 | So it's so important to me that even though it's painful sometimes to hear in moments of crisis that we give God His rightful place as the sovereign merciful Lord of the universe so that we have a gospel for people.
00:39:55.000 | Well, it's been quite the morning and Dr. Piper, we just want to say thank you for sharing your heart with us this morning.
00:40:00.000 | I know that it is, it has been a part of the refuge that God has been using to bring some peace to some hearts.
00:40:08.000 | Maybe raise more questions, I guess, as well.
00:40:11.000 | But I pray that there are questions about the solid rock, the foundations that we're all standing on as God's people.
00:40:16.000 | When you were speaking about lamentations, I was thinking of David's words when he says, "I waited patiently for the Lord. He turned to me, He heard my cry.
00:40:25.000 | And He, God, took me out of this horrible pit."
00:40:27.000 | Philosophy can't do it, determination can't do it, consensus can't do it, and just a vote at a voting booth can't do it. It's God.
00:40:36.000 | And he goes on and says, "Put a new song in my mouth, put my feet upon a rock. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord."
00:40:44.000 | Which means that the extended time of desolation was the means to a new song, which was the means to people trusting Christ.
00:40:53.000 | Those are the kinds of connections our people have just got to see so that they don't linger in the desolation without thinking God has no good designs.
00:41:02.000 | Absolutely, and that there is a rock, that there is a solid foundation.
00:41:06.000 | And as I was speaking to one of our listeners and staff members here on the college campus, he said, I think very vividly, "We've watched this house built on sand crumble to the ground.
00:41:16.000 | Now which are we going to do? Are we going to build our new house on the rock from the foundation of Christ?
00:41:24.000 | Or are we going to try the sand thing again? Well, let's go to the rock."
00:41:28.000 | It makes life look like the World Trade Center coming down.
00:41:32.000 | The trigger word for me in all of that is fear. That's the word. Many will fear him.
00:41:37.000 | And I see that word in so many places as it says, "Fear is the beginning of wisdom."
00:41:44.000 | Right, and I just read in Hebrews yesterday, I believe it was, when Christ is described, it says, "His delight will be in the fear of the Lord."
00:41:55.000 | If we find the covert in the cleft of the rock where we're safe in Jesus through the cross, the hurricane of God's might ceases to be threatening and becomes gloriously satisfying.
00:42:14.000 | In the eye of the hurricane is a safe place to look at this mighty God.
00:42:20.000 | Our God is a consuming fire, Hebrews says, and yet he doesn't have to be frightening to the soul that is safe in Jesus.
00:42:29.000 | You mentioned to me on the phone yesterday, Chuck, about children and people struggling.
00:42:35.000 | In fact, I heard on some station people talking about that this morning.
00:42:39.000 | I was just trying to find you this morning quick before I came over and they were talking about children.
00:42:45.000 | And I just want to stress to parents that we expect too little of our children.
00:42:51.000 | They are capable of discerning and grasping some pretty weighty things about God and are probably willing to embrace them more quickly than many adults.
00:43:03.000 | When we tell them the story of the flood, we ought to tell them it's about the judgment of God on humanity and everybody drowned because of how horrible sin is.
00:43:13.000 | And when we tell them the story of the feeding of the 5,000, we shouldn't say this is about the sharing of a lunch.
00:43:19.000 | This is about a mighty Christ who takes five little loaves of your life and feeds 5,000 people.
00:43:25.000 | He can do wonders with your little life. Give yourself to him.
00:43:28.000 | We need to get our kids into a big vision of God.
00:43:32.000 | And I got a little five-year-old girl. She's sitting right outside that window there.
00:43:36.000 | This is a homeschool outing for her to see how the radio works.
00:43:39.000 | And she said this morning, "Now, a plane was stolen and hit a building."
00:43:48.000 | And I said, "You know what happened? God allowed something very terrible to happen so that he might bring about great good.
00:43:58.000 | Let's pray that millions upon millions of divine, gracious, merciful purposes would happen in people's lives."
00:44:10.000 | For example, Talitha, we're praying right now. We're praying. We wouldn't have been praying like this before.
00:44:17.000 | I mean, when you say, "What's the purpose of God in these kinds of things?"
00:44:20.000 | One answer is billions of purposes.
00:44:23.000 | God is doing things that we can't imagine. And we just need to put our hands over our mouths, submit to him, and go back to the cross.
00:44:31.000 | And maybe I watch the clock come into an end there, and I need to go, and you need to go, and I'm so glad Michael Smith is coming.
00:44:38.000 | But let me just end on the gospel. Can I?
00:44:41.000 | Yes, please.
00:44:43.000 | I've been reveling in Romans for three years at Bethlehem.
00:44:47.000 | And preached, "There is therefore now no condemnation," to those who were in Christ Jesus last Sunday.
00:44:53.000 | And it's, of course, and I want the listeners to hear this and know it with all their hearts,
00:44:58.000 | that the fact that there can be no condemnation is not rooted in our goodness, but in Christ's sufficiency on the cross.
00:45:05.000 | The Son of God died for sinners. Everyone who comes to him can have absolute, total pardon and forgiveness.
00:45:13.000 | They can be clothed in a righteousness not their own. When they're faced with the last judgment or the accusations of Satan,
00:45:19.000 | they can say, "No, there is over me no condemnation because I am in Christ Jesus."
00:45:25.000 | But here's the note I think we need to strike at this moment.
00:45:29.000 | That message goes out to every nation, every people group, every color, every ethnic group in the Mideast, in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan.
00:45:40.000 | And that same gospel saves every kind of person.
00:45:44.000 | So I just plead with the Church of Jesus Christ not to fall into the trap of starting to stereotype Arab people or Palestinian people
00:45:56.000 | or people of a certain color as having a certain bent. That is the essence of racism.
00:46:02.000 | It's the essence of prejudice. Lumping a group together, taking one lousy apple and making the whole barrel rotten.
00:46:09.000 | Oh, that the Church would say, "Jesus Christ died for all," so that whoever will believe of any color may have eternal life and escape perishing.
00:46:22.000 | Whether they go down in a plane, whether they go up in smoke, Christians have a message in the midst of tragedy.
00:46:28.000 | They have a message at funerals, a message at weddings.
00:46:31.000 | And it is a glorious thing to be a Christian.
00:46:34.000 | I buried an old man when I came to the Church 21 years ago who looked up from the bed to me and he smiled as he was dying.
00:46:40.000 | He said, "Pastor John, the greatest thing in the world is to be saved."
00:46:47.000 | And we can offer that to every single person.
00:46:50.000 | So bless you, brothers, as you keep offering the good news on this station.
00:46:54.000 | It was an honor to be here with you.
00:46:56.000 | A rich interview.
00:46:57.000 | This was John Piper's appearance on the morning after 9/11 on KTIS, an FM radio station in Minneapolis.
00:47:04.000 | God has ways to ordain things in his mysterious sovereignty that are for our good in spite of being incredibly painful.
00:47:12.000 | And that means ultimately God is doing billions of good things in lives because of this tragedy.
00:47:17.000 | And so we "put our hands over our mouth, submit to him, and go back to the cross."
00:47:23.000 | In the end, "Our God reigned on September 11th.
00:47:28.000 | He is not cruel, he is not wicked, and he is not a sinner."
00:47:33.000 | That's instructive 20 years later.
00:47:36.000 | Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:47:40.000 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:47:41.000 | We'll see you back here on Monday with Pastor John back in studio.
00:47:44.000 | We'll see you then.
00:47:45.000 | [end]
00:47:47.000 | [music]
00:47:49.000 | [end]
00:47:50.000 | [music]
00:47:51.000 | [end]
00:47:51.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]