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.

I love how he appeals directly to Psalm 139, which is just two Psalms over from Psalm 137, which says: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

Right. I guess abortion is only evil if it’s a Jewish or a Christian baby.

I notice that Piper’s posted a follow-up to his earlier comments: http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/1968_clarifying_the_tornado/

Why would you want to be that? An Open Theist, you’re still submitting God to His creation; predicating His life by ours.

This is what happens when someone mixes Thomas and the decrees with the God of the bible; we end up with a god shaped by evil instead of His own righteousness.

I know that you are not misrepresenting Piper’s doctrine of God, Halden . . . the expose’ is good; although I would say that with your readership, you’re preaching to the choir.

In that quote, I don’t see a “strategy” engineered in advance, but such would be consistent with his hyper-Reformed perspective. It seems like the quote is pretty good until his last sentence (unless you’re an open theist): specifying that God sees even the evil parts as delightful is just plain strange, and not at all orthodox.

I have been keeping up with your series on Piper. I am an Open Theist, and so is the pastor I work for. Keep up the good work.

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.

But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through His wide-angle lens, He sees the tragedy of the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in relation to all the connections and effects that form a pattern, or mosaic, stretching into eternity. This mosaic in all its parts—good and evil—brings Him delight. (p. 39)

From what I can see, this claims that for Piper’s god, all evil events are part of his overarching strategy, which is his own self-glorification. As such these evil events bring Piper’s god delight. Piper tries to talk out both sides of his mouth on this, saying that God is still upset about evil, but this only accentuates the inconsistency. The overarching perspective is obvious. Evil is part of what Piper’s god delights to bring about because it glorifies him.

To such a view, I say a loud Nein!