So, Piper takes a break from exposition of Romans and decides to deal with the question of why God gives hard texts (and I think this sermon was one of the catalysts for his “Think” conference and book that just came out:
“Instead, I want to do something I haven’t done before in the eleven months we have been working through this letter. I want to step back from the text and ask: what are some of the implications—for life and culture and history and worship—of the sheer fact that God has given Christianity a Book and a text like this and built the Church on it?
In other words, what was unleashed in the world by the fact that Christianity not only declares salvation from sin through faith in Jesus, but that Christianity also builds its message and its ministry and its mission on a Book, the Bible, and on books in the Bible like the Letter to the Romans, and on paragraphs in the letter like Romans 3:1–8? What personal and cultural and historical impulses were unleashed on the world when God inspired Paul to write a paragraph like Romans 3:1–8 the way he did?
Now you may ask, Why are you asking that question here? Couldn’t you ask it at any paragraph in the book, or in the Bible? What is stirring you to ask that question here? There are two answers at least. One is this: I found this passage to be about as hard a paragraph to deal with as any in this letter. The difficulty of following the train of thought in this paragraph is enormous. I just listened to a sermon on this text by Martyn Lloyd-Jones from forty years ago in London. He commented at the outset that this is one of the most difficult paragraphs not only in Romans, but also in the whole Bible.
I wrestled so hard trying to figure out how Paul’s argument worked here, and I prayed so fervently that God would give me light and guard me from error, that I felt forced to ask, “God, what does this mean, that you have ordained that such a difficult paragraph to be in your Word? What am I to learn from this?” Someone might say, The difficulty is our problem, not God’s; if we were more spiritual, and more docile, we would not find God’s Word so difficult (which is true up to a point). You must remember, however, that the apostle Peter said in his second letter, “Our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him [not in folly of intellect, but in wisdom given by God!], wrote to you, as also in all his letters … in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:15–16).
What God Unleashed with a Word Foundation
Let me mention four things and then balance them with the less complex side of the gospel. Four things: desperation, supplication, cogitation and education.
1. Desperation (A sense of utter dependence on God’s enablement). I see this in 1 Corinthians 2:14, “A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.” The natural man (all of us without the Spirit’s work in our lives) should feel desperation before the revelation of God. He needs God’s help. Well the same thing is true of spiritual—but finite and fallible and sinful—people like me, when I meet difficult texts of God’s Word. I should feel desperation—a desperate dependence on God’s help. That is what God wants us to feel. That is something he has unleashed by inspiring difficult texts.
2. Supplication (Prayer to God for help). This follows from desperation. If you feel dependent on God to help you see the meaning of a text, then you will cry to him for help. I see this in Psalm 119:18, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your law.” Seven times in one psalm the psalmist prays, “Teach me your statutes” (119:12, 26, 64, 68, 124, 135, 171). Or as Psalm 25:5 says, “Lead me in thy truth, and teach me.” By inspiring some things hard to understand, God has unleashed in the world desperation which leads to supplication—the crying out to God for help.
3. Cogitation (Thinking hard about Biblical texts). You might think, “No, no, you are confused, Pastor John. You just said that God wants us to pray for his help in understanding, not to think our way through to a solution.” But the answer to that concern is, No, praying and thinking are not alternatives. I learn this especially from 2 Timothy 2:7, where Paul says to Timothy, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything.” Yes, it is the Lord who gives understanding. But he does it through our God-given thinking and the efforts we make, with prayer, to think hard about what the Bible says. So when God inspired texts like Romans 3:1–8, he unleashed in the world an impulse toward hard thinking. Alongside desperation and supplication there is cogitation. Which leads finally to …
4. Education (Training young people and adults to pray earnestly, read well and think hard). If God has inspired a Book as the foundation of the Christian faith, there is a massive impulse unleashed in the world to teach people how to read. And if God ordained for some of that precious, sacred, God-breathed Book to be hard to understand, then God unleashed in the world not only an impulse to teach people how to read, but how to think about what they read—how to read hard things and understand them, and how to use the mind in a rigorous way.
Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” Impart understanding to others, Timothy, in a way that will enable them to teach others also. In other words, the writings of the apostles—especially the hard ones—unleash generation after generation of education. Education is helping people understand something that they don’t already understand. Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn’t already have. Education is cultivating the life of the mind so that it knows how to grow in true understanding. That impulse was unleashed by God’s inspiring a Book with complex demanding paragraphs in it.
Balanced by Simplicity
Now, I said earlier that I wanted to balance this with another kind of impulse from the Bible that flows from the less complex side of the gospel. How shall we do this? Perhaps it would help to do it like this: consider that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), and that God is God (Isaiah 45:22; 46:9). In the truth that God is God is implied that God is who he is in all his glorious attributes and self-sufficiency. But in the truth that God is love is implied that all of this glory is moving our way for our everlasting enjoyment.
Now those two truths unleash through the Bible very different impulses. And we will see that a balance is introduced here, lest we make of Christianity an elitist affair, which it definitely is not.
That God is love unleashes the impulse of simplicity, and that God is God unleashes the impulse of complexity.
That God is love unleashes the impulse of accessibility, and that God is God unleashes the impulse of profundity.
That God is love encourages a focus on the basics, and that God is God encourages a focus on comprehensiveness. One says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). The other says, “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).
That God is love impels us to be sure that the truth gets to all people, and that God is God impels us to be sure that what gets to all people is the truth.
That God is love unleashes the impulse toward fellowship, and that God is God unleashes the impulse toward scholarship.
That God is love tends to create extroverts and evangelists, and that God is God tends to create introverts and mystics.
My prayer for this sermon is this: first, for believers, I pray that seeing these different impulses in Christianity—and particularly in the inspiration of a Bible with hard things and simple things—you will embrace both of them. If you lean toward one side (as all of us do), that you will be respectful and affirming to those toward the other side. And that you will cherish the fuller manifestation of God in his Church and in the world. And may we help each other embrace all that God means to unleash by his Word in the world.
Steve Allen
ACTION Zambia
www.aliveinafrica.com
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