Well, I think the results are definitively in:
Do You Like Threaded Comments?
Yes: 66.67%
No: 33.33%
Threaded comments have won by a landslide in last week’s poll. As such they will be staying in place. However, I have increased the number of levels down that they can go. Hopefully that will help their clarity in threads where the comments tend to multiply.
In answering some comments I came across some more crazy stuff from Piper on what he believes about his god and evil. Try this one on for size:
After the planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, I was interviewed and people would ask me, “Where was God in this?” I said, “Well, God could have very easily blown those planes off course by a little puff of wind, and he didn’t do it. Therefore God was right there ordaining that this happen, because he could have stopped it just like that.” Everybody who believes in God should say that, because that is how powerful he is, as it was said of Jesus, “The winds obey him” (Matthew 8:27). And so just a simple wind by the command of Jesus would have blown those planes away and they would have crashed and 60 people would have died instead of thousands of people. But he didn’t do that. Why is it comforting to believe that?
The answer is because there are 10,000 orphans who wonder if they have a future. Will they have a future if God isn’t powerful for them? I’m coming to those families and I’m saying when they ask me, “Do you think God ordained the death of my daddy?” I say, “Yes. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the very power by which God governs all evils enables him to govern your life. And he has total authority to turn this and every other evil in your life for your everlasting good. And that’s your only hope in this world and in the next. And therefore, if you sacrifice the sovereignty of God in order to get him off the hook in the death of your daddy, you sacrifice everything. You don’t want to go there.”
The sovereignty of God, while creating problems for his involvement in sin and evil, is the very rock-solid foundation that enables us to carry on in life. Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives? So yes, absolutely, I believe in the sovereignty of God and I believe in its comforting effects.
Please take note: “Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?” Come again? If God wasn’t the one bringing down evil on us, who would we turn to for help? It doesn’t get crazier than that.
Piper’s god is a crazy sociopath, not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. I don’t feel like I’m making any sort of stretch in saying that.
As already noted, for John Piper evil, suffering, and death are all ultimately determined and decreed by his god as part of his own plan for self-glorification. For Piper this is inestimably a good thing. Because God is God it is good for God to seek to magnify himself in all things. And, moreover the presence of suffering and death in the world adds to God’s glory in that through these events God’s wrath and justice are manifested in the world. This is a crucial point. God’s wrath against sin must be displayed through the inflicting of punishment in order for God’s glory to be seen.
And, since this god has determined every specific event of suffering—all for the sake of his glory—it follows that all human suffering and death that takes place is willed by him and brings him greater glory. Thus, for Piper it is of the utmost importance that, rather than blaming his god or being angry with him in events of suffering and death we ought instead to rejoice in the fact that through these displays of his wrath against sin, Piper’s god is glorified.
As such, then I submit that on Piper’s view of god it is actually immoral for Christians to be angry about suffering and death in the world. In fact, it is absolutely essential that Christians be delighted about it because anything that contributes to his god’s glory is worthy of delight. Thus, Piper is supremely inconsistent in his constant opposition to abortion. Piper’s god requires aborted babies in order that god’s wrath against sinful human beings. Remember we are all born totally depraved; the fetuses deserve what they get! However, Piper is utterly inconsistent about this, in his constant opposition to abortion:
Abortion is a God issue, and I think the first way you see that is in Psalm 139 where it says “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (verse 14). And the language that is used is that a baby is knit together in its mother’s womb. Well who’s the knitter? The knitter is not nature. The knitter is God, which means that what’s happening in a woman’s tummy is that God is at work. God is making a human being.
Now, you don’t mess with that. You just don’t get in God’s face and say, “Let me at it! I’m going to take it out! I’m going to chop it into pieces.” You don’t do that.
And you don’t do it for God’s sake. God gives, God takes away, God makes babies. We don’t make babies. We put the pieces together through sexual relations and God causes a being that never was and now is and always will be to come into being.
In complete contradiction of his whole doctrine of god, here Piper says that in committing abortions, human being interfere with and circumvent his god’s own work, getting in the way of his god’s attempts at creating life. But how is this possible, since Piper’s god is ultimately in control of everything and, in fact, actively determines all events of human death and suffering for the sake of divine self-glorification?
The point of all of this is to again underscore how deeply demonic Piper’s god is. Piper’s god loves to see people suffer and die because it glorifies him. Piper’s god needs and desires aborted babies. If Piper or his followers were to be consistent in their attempts to follow this god, they would praise him for every baby that is aborted. If they truly delighted in this god’s glory, they would sing songs of praise whenever a baby was aborted, whenever a bomb fell on a random home, whenever an orphan was denied care. All of these events of suffering and death glorify their god—they should love them.
The fact that Piper cannot be consistent with his view of god is just another sure sign of the false and demonic nature of the theology he espouses. And it constitutes yet one more reason why the false god of Piper should be abandoned in favor of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the Spirit comes to us “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” (Isa 61:1)
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