Dr. Piper, in light of your theology of suffering, how does that play out in your churches in developing leaders and also in how you think it should apply to developing youth ministry?

Let’s take them in reverse order maybe. I spoke over at Ridgecrest last week a bunch of times and they asked me to speak to the teenagers one night. I speak to our teenagers at their graduation banquet once a year. That’s it. I don’t speak to youth and don’t consider myself a youth speaker, so I went into that with some fear and trembling. As I prayed and sought the Lord and talked to my wife about what I should say to 15, 16, and 17-year-olds, I decided just to tell them what I always tell everybody. And I gave basically the same message and did it with as much energy as I could.

I mention it because of the way they responded, which was incredibly positive. Kids need to be challenged with theology. They really do. There’s too much fun and games. We put the cookie too low and we don’t expect them to want to think or to want to be made radical. I spoke to them on objections I get to Christian Hedonism, the pursuit of joy. I just took objection after objection that I’ve gotten over the 25 years or so I’ve been at this and gave biblical answers to each one of them, which are hard answers and tough answers, including the call to be radical and lay down your life and develop a theology of suffering.

I’ll just give you one fruit. There was one fella — tall, blonde, gold chain, bleached hair, earrings and T-shirt, and way back on the back row, slouching, folding arms, that sort of thing. We had seen his daddy almost arm wrestling him to get him into the youth meetings. This is a missionary kid we’re talking about here. My wife saw it and went up to the father after he got in and said, “We are praying for you and your boy.” She didn’t even know this guy from Adam. The dad kind of said, “What are you praying for my boy for?” We’re like, “Come on, come on. We have eyes. We know boys, too.” He began slouched over and then sat up and he smiled. I got a note the next morning from the counselor that he’d come to faith. I didn’t preach an evangelistic sermon except to commend Jesus as the most valuable thing in the universe and to want him more than you want gold chains, fancy clothes, the approval of girls, and everything else.

I don’t know what you were after in asking about youth, but what I’m saying is, let’s challenge them with a radical call to Bonhoeffer-type Christianity — “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die,” not play. And we think all we can do is play with kids. Let’s bid them to come and die. They’re looking for something to die for.

Now, leaders, I’m not sure what you’re asking there either but I’ll say what I’m thinking and if it doesn’t correlate, sorry. We’ve got about 18 elders and we have a small group ministry in our church, about 60 or 70 small groups. We train those small group leaders and we train them for how to care for people who suffer and we train them with this theology. We have them read things and they hear me preach. I want to gather around me elders, I want to gather around me small group leaders. I speak to these small group leaders once a month as they gather together and I’m always encouraging them to both have a good theology and have a tender hand. Know when to talk and when not to talk. So it figures in. It’s big-time important to help build lay leaders and staff members who share a theology and then to share a pastoral sensitivity, so that one isn’t brutal and the other a mamby-pamby do-nothing.

It’s most discomforting to think that our walk with God is deepest, most obedient when we’re suffering. That’s not what we aim for in life in the normal course of things. As a physician, I’m committed to relieving suffering. But I know in suffering, it happens — seeing the beauty of God. I’m wondering about a verse at the end of the third chapter of Job. We’ve heard that Job was a righteous man and we’ve heard that Job prayed for his children and yet he is able to say, “For the thing I greatly feared has come to me and the thing I dreaded has happened.” Did Job know that despite his righteousness that he was going to ultimately suffer and that the only real route to God’s ultimate blessing was in suffering which he hadn’t yet experienced? And should that be our modus of anticipating suffering and joy?

I’m looking at my version and it’s a little different. It says, “For the thing that I fear comes upon me (present tense), and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, but trouble comes” (Job 3:25–26). A lot hangs on that tense, doesn’t it? Let me see. I don’t know how to settle that issue of the translation here, so let me deal with it in the bigger picture, theologically. You’re a doctor. You’re trying to relieve suffering and Jesus came into the world and relieved suffering everywhere he turned. So that’s not a bad thing and I’m for that. I’m glad you exist. I’m glad 911 exists and penicillin exists. But I think you’re right. I have never heard anybody in my life say, “I saw God most clearly and I learned the deepest lessons of life when everything was going well.” I’ve never heard anybody ever say that. On the contrary, what you hear over and over again is, “I went deep with God, I learned who God was, I found him sufficient, and he became precious to me in the hard times.”

So now, does that mean then that we should expect it to come and even want it to come? I would say yes to the first and a yes and no to the second. It’s not in the sense that you shouldn’t jump off the temple. You shouldn’t presume upon God. You should go to work with AIDS victims and you should wear rubber gloves. You should live in the inner city and put deadbolts on your door. Do you see the balance? And nobody but you can decide whether you put bars on your window or never do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a person with AIDS. Nobody but God and you can work that out.

What I’m saying is, do you choose to suffer? I say you choose to get in positions of love, which will in all likelihood require suffering. You don’t look for suffering, you don’t look for pain, but you look for people in pain, lostness, and you look at the cost and you embrace the cost. You join with Moses in Hebrews 11:25–26, of whom it says, “He counted ill-treatment with the people of God more to be desired than the fleeting pleasures of Egypt.” He chose ill-treatment, but now he didn’t say, “Hit me. Hit me. Go ahead, hit me.” Or he didn’t say, “Grumble at me, grumble at me.” He didn’t say, “Threaten my life.” When it says he chose ill-treatment, it means he looked at the prospects of 40 years of leading a recalcitrant, sinful people and he said, “This is going to be hard. I could have a good time here in Egypt.” And he chose what was hard. He didn’t embrace the specifics and say, “Slap me,” but he stayed in a hard marriage. That would be maybe an example.

So I don’t know if that comes close, but I would say realistically, if it’s true that we know God best when times go hard, we should expect times to be hard and we should embrace paths of love where it’s very likely it will be hard.

If person A kills person B and then A becomes a Christian and God forgives A for his sin, how about B? How is B’s injury compensated? Where is the justice for B? And doesn’t B also have to forgive A? Now the question is not a pseudo question. Almost every Muslim you talk to, if you get serious, will finally end up with that question. So I’m looking for an answer that possibly will satisfy them.

Let’s just stop there with those. How is the injury compensated? He didn’t deserve not to be killed. It doesn’t need to be compensated. That’s my first answer. If he’s a sinner and he’s unrepentant and unbelieving, he’ll go to hell and there’ll be no compensation for his injury. What will be compensated is his sin forever. The fact that he was murdered is irrelevant to his desert before God. He didn’t deserve to be killed by this man. So on the human level, justice has to be done between humans. But if you’re talking about him and God, he’s a sinner deserving of condemnation and that he died by murder or any other way is irrelevant to what becomes of him. That’s my answer to the first one.

For the second question, let me just think about that for a minute because I’ve never heard that question before. If there were to be a reconciliation between B and A so that accounts were now even, yes he would, but there doesn’t have to be and there won’t be if he wasn’t a believer. If the murdered man was a believer then there will be a reconciliation in the resurrection and they will make it right. If he wasn’t a believer, there will never be a reconciliation and he will live with that breach forever, and so there won’t be one. I don’t think there will be reconciliation between the saints in heaven and those who have been judged. But my guess is there’s just a huge amount behind your question that I’m not even getting near. Maybe we could talk afterwards.

You’re saying this relates to Muslim evangelism and where a Muslim will pin a Christian in those things and that’s where I’d start. I don’t want to be insensitive here because if I’m talking to a real Muslim and he’s after me with that question, I’m probably not going to be as curt with him as I am with you because I’m just assuming a huge amount in this room. I’m going to try to read, where’s this coming from? How’s he doing at home with his wife? Are his kids rebelling? Is he sick? What’s the bigger theological issue here? I really want to get inside his skin to try to know how I would answer that question, but those are my two principial answers to those two parts of it.

The only way to have justice in the universe is for a Muslim to get revenge. I’ve got a huge answer to that and it’s twofold — hell and cross. Hell and cross are the two answers to revenge and why Christians should not avenge themselves. God says, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord.” If your enemy is hungry, give him food, and if he’s thirsty, give him drink. Why? God says, “I’m going to repay.” And God repays in two ways. He punishes people in hell if they don’t believe and he punishes Jesus if they do believe on their behalf. So justice is absolutely done in the universe. That’s my answer to the vengeance question.

So why, we Christians do not go out and take vigilante justice in the world, we don’t return evil for evil, we pray for those who persecute us. We love our enemies. We should lay our lives down for them, not because we don’t care about justice, but because God is so massively concerned with justice that he handles it. He says, “Vengeance is mine.” That’s exactly the way Jesus went to the cross and was spit upon. What does it say in 1 Peter 2:23? It says, “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” That’s exactly the same as Romans 12:18–19. God is saying, “Vengeance is mine, Son. You stay on the cross. Don’t call down 12 legions of angels. You stay on the cross and pray for their forgiveness. And if they repent, what you’re bearing is my justice toward them. And if they don’t, they’re going to hell and you don’t need to do anything. Just stay there.” And that’s where we should stay, on the cross with Jesus.

Last night I found out you were a Calvinist and my question to you is how does the doctrine of election fit into the free will of Calvin’s outlook? And are some born to be damned?

It depends on what you mean by free will. So let me start with a definition that I think most Arminians think is true and really don’t believe. I think free will in order to be a problem for a Calvinist must mean ultimate self-determination. I won’t put you on the spot and ask you whether that’s what you mean by it. But I think in order for it to be a problem for Calvinists or a problem in the Bible, free will has to be defined as “ultimate self-determination.” If that’s what is meant, I don’t believe in it and don’t think it exists and don’t think there’s one verse in the Bible that teaches it, not one. So there’s not even a tension in the Bible between sovereignty and free will, if that’s the meaning of free will.

Anybody that wants to, can try to give me any verse that teaches ultimate self-determination. It isn’t there, not one. What you have that’s usually called free will is, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden. I’ll give you rest,” or “Choose ye this day whom you shall serve,” or, “Whosoever wills may come.” No Calvinist has ever denied or thought that was untrue. So there is no such thing as free will if by it you mean ultimate self-determination. If you mean real choice for which you will be held responsible, it does exist and there’s no contradiction. God chooses whom he will save and we must choose in order to be saved. That’s no contradiction because why we choose what we choose is not asserted in that. Why does one person choose and another not? And the answer there is not ultimate human self-determination. The answer is that nobody comes to the Father unless he’s drawn. Nobody comes to me unless the Father draws him. “The reason you do not believe,” Jesus says to the Pharisees, “is because you’re not my sheep.”

The second part of the question is yes. Does God create people to be damned? But I won’t just leave it at that because that doesn’t satisfy anybody. These are very weighty matters, huge matters, and painful matters for those of us who have children who we desperately desire to be saved. Nobody is damned who does not deserve to be damned. And if you can’t put those two together, don’t believe in my yes. If you cannot believe in unconditional election and that nobody is damned who does not deserve to be damned, don’t believe in election. Whatever you do, don’t believe in election because if you did, you’d make God out to be unjust, and he is not unjust. So don’t believe it.

I believe it with all my heart because it’s taught in the Bible. And if there’s a tension between unconditional election and my ability to understand, well then how can it be just for some to be damned? I live with the tension. I just live with it because they’re clear in the Bible. Nobody is damned who doesn’t deserve to be damned. All judgment will be just. And God chooses. He has mercy on whom he will have mercy and he hardens whom he will harden.

And here’s the problem with Arminians. They take a philosophical problem and silence a whole sphere of Scripture with it. They’re not willing to live with the tension, so they take what they see to be implicit — free will, that is, ultimate self-determination — and they say, well, if people are ultimately determining themselves, God can’t be ultimately determining their destiny, so this is false. They don’t care what it says in the Bible, they think it couldn’t mean that. It couldn’t mean that. Well, it does mean that and we should live with the tension. So I’m not going to try to make Calvinists out of you all. I’m going to try to make Biblicists out of you all. I want you to believe everything you read in the Bible. If you can show me one verse that says humans have ultimate self-determination, I will change my theology. I will change it for the sake of one verse. You can show me hundreds of verses that show humans have to will in order to be saved, hundreds, but you can’t show me one that says the ultimate cause of their willing is themselves and not God.

I got worked up and I’m not worked up because of you. I like you. I liked our little conversation last night. I’m worked up because America is being hurt, in my opinion, by bad theology. I’ll just give you a concrete example. I’m sorry to keep going on about this, but pastorally I care about this issue, not intellectually primarily. I’m a pastor. I deal with people on these issues. I deal with people. My twenty-year-old son is not walking with Jesus and might go to hell. What am I to do with this? I’ve got five kids and three of my boys are red-hot for God and one is red-hot for Bob Dillon and wants to be like him and smokes like him and walks like him. I know this is on tape. Abraham, I love you. If you ever hear this tape, you know I love you. I would lay down my life for you. I wrote to him the other day in an email. I said I would jump off the edge of eternity for you.

How do you pray for Abraham? You know how I pray for Abraham? “God, get him. Change him. Take out the heart of stone, put in the heart of flesh, and write your law in his heart. Draw him irresistibly to yourself. Don’t give him suggestions. Don’t give him nudges. Get him.” I don’t understand people who pray as Arminians, who think God doesn’t have the right to change Abraham’s will. How do they pray? How do you pray for a kid when you think God doesn’t have the right to intrude upon his will and change him so that he believes and draw him to the Savior? So this is practical for me. And here’s another second practicality and I’ll stop. I can talk. People ask me everywhere I go as a Christian Hedonist, “What if you’re not happy in God and you tell everybody they’ll be happy in God in the midst of suffering. What if you’re not there?” And one of my little pieces of counsel is to pray like the psalmist who says, “Incline my heart to your testimonies and not to getting gain” (Psalm 119:36). He also says, “Open my eyes so that I may see wonderful things out of your loss” (Psalm 119:18) Psalm 90:14 says, “Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love that I might rejoice and be glad in you.” Psalm 86:11 says, “Unite my heart to fear your name.”

Now, do you hear what all those requests are asking God to do? Take you over. You’re asking him to take your will and incline it to the word, to open your blind eyes, to take your dead heart that’s not rejoicing in him and make it rejoice in him. The reason I don’t like Arminianism is because subtly it breeds in a church a disinclination to pray that way. When have you last heard a good solid Arminian pray, “Oh God, incline my heart to you. Oh God, open my blind eyes that I might see you. Oh God, take out the stony heart of mine and put in delight in you.” And when you don’t hear people pray that way in the churches, you know there’s a reason for it. Arminianism is like a curse on this land. I’m done.

With respect to evil and what you talked about last night, Job says (and you said) that God did it. Would you help me understand how God can do it and not be guilty of wrongdoing at the same time? For the Sabeans to steal the Camels, it’s a sin isn’t it?

That’s a good question. That’s hard. That’s good. Death is not a sin. It says in chapter one that the Chaldeans stole his camels and the Sabeans stole his donkeys, or whatever. So if they say God did this, then we’re saying God endorsed stealing. That’s a good question. We have to ask those kinds of questions and get an answer for them. Now, the way to answer a question like that, I think, is to point to a place where we would all agree that God does, in fact, control, rule, or ordain sin. And the clearest place is the cross. Acts 4:27–28 says:

Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

You’ve got Herod, Pontius Pilate, the soldiers, and the Jews. Herod mocked him and put a robe on him. Pilate expediently handed him over to be crucified and washed his hands. The people cried, “Crucify him, crucify him.” The soldiers drove in the nails. And every one of those is sin — sin, sin, sin, sin. And it was predestined and planned by God.

Now, all that does is make the problem worse. That’s not an answer. I just want to get us all on the same playing field here. If you believe Isaiah 53, which says that it was the will of the Lord to bruise him, then you must be able to live with two sentences. I’ll just say the two and then commend that we live with them. Maybe I’ll put it in one sentence: To sin is not the same as ordaining that there be sin. God never sins. Jesus never sinned and God never sins. But God ordains that there be sin. And if you say, “Nope, can’t handle that, the brain won’t handle it. That cannot be. If you will that sin be, you’re as guilty as if you’d sinned,” I think you’re going to have to throw the Bible away because the Bible has God sovereign over sin everywhere.

You read the Old Testament prophets. He’s using Cyrus here and using Ahasuerus there. He’s guiding and using sin everywhere to accomplish his purposes. Now back to the question. I just leave space for mystery here, somehow God can ordain that these Sabeans arrive and steal without becoming the thief himself. His hands are not dirty in managing the dirt of these Sabeans. And if you say, “Well I don’t get it,” neither do I, finally. But that’s our God, that’s my God, anyway. God is sovereign over thieves and he’s sovereign over murderers and he’s sovereign over liars and he accomplishes his purpose through righteous deeds and through sinful deeds. Just think of what the implication of this would be. If you had to say that God could not manage the world through sin, what’s left? That’s my best shot.

I have an ongoing, friendly, yet most of the time not always friendly debate with my friend who doesn’t really believe in God’s sovereignty in this way. And when we talk about Job, he says that Job was a specific man in a specific time and God had a conversation with the devil about Job, but we can’t generalize that to all of our suffering. I just was wondering how you would respond to that.

I would respond by reading James 5:10–11, which says, “As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” I think James says, “Here he is. He’s given to you as an example for how it’s going to be with your life.”

Here’s the second thing I’d say. I would take him to Luke 22 where Peter is about to deny the Lord. Jesus says to Peter, “Peter, Satan has demanded to have you that he may sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail and when you have turned, strengthen your brethren.” That is one authoritative word. Wow. There’s the same picture. Satan went to God and said, “Give me Peter.” And God says, “You can have him for an hour but I’m taking him back.” Satan puts it in his heart to be so afraid that he denies the Lord three times. Jesus tells him ahead of time, “You’re coming back and when you come back, you’re going to strengthen your brethren.” Think of the authority behind that. If you believe in free will of an ultimate self-determination, Jesus couldn’t know that. If Peter can ultimately determine his own return or not, Jesus can’t say with any authority to him, “When you come back.” Jesus is totally in charge here. God is totally in charge here. He is saying, “You get one hour.” Earlier in Luke, it says, “This is the hour of darkness.” Jesus is saying, “You get one hour, Satan, one hour and then we’re taking it all back. I’m coming out of the grave and Peter is coming back. We’re going to make this thing big. We’re going around the world, we’re bringing Satan down.”

Just think of this moment. It’s only told in one Gospel. After the third denial, it says, “Jesus looked at him.” Just feel it. I don’t think that look was, “How could you?” I think it was, “You’re done. Now, come back.” And he weeps his eyes out and he comes back. And three times Jesus says, “Do you love me, Peter?” “I love you.” “Do you love me, Peter?” “I love you.” “Do you love me, Peter?” “You know I love you.” Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” And he’s been doing it ever since with his writings. I love Jesus. He’s big. He’s authoritative.

In the first book of the Left Behind series, all those Christians disappeared, were raptured and they didn’t go through any tribulation. It seems to me that this is a dangerous teaching because Christians will not be prepared mentally or spiritually to go through calamity because they think they will escape suffering. Would you comment on this?

I agree 110 percent. I am not a pre-tribulationist. I’m a post-tribulationist. I won’t take any survey here. My dad is a pre-tribulationist and I’ll bet Clayton is still a pre-tribulationist sitting over here. Clayton and I used to go round and round on this. He’s been in my church for 20 years, although he’s living elsewhere now. I tell stories about you still, Clayton, about standing up in the middle of a service saying, “No.” I love the story because we’re such good friends and Clayton comes back to the church and works at the pastor’s conference. I won’t ask where you are, eschatologically, but I mention that because I love people who are wrong on this. I have to because my dad is and I love my dad.

I’m not a dispensationalist in that way and I do believe we’re going to go through the tribulation. One of the things I said to Clayton 15 years ago was, “Clayton, when we enter the horror, then we’re going to be together in this and you’ll say, ‘Well, John, I’m glad you got me ready.’ And if the Lord suddenly lifts me out of here and takes me back, I’m going to look at you and we’ll do high five and I’ll admit I was wrong.” There are people in my church who give me books every week to read on this and I don’t read them anymore. I’ve studied enough and I’m speaking lightly about this for a reason. I don’t want it to be a divisive issue in the church. I don’t want churches to split over this. Yes, it’s important. You put it in the right perspective that we need to at least talk enough to each other so that if there’s a sudden, imminent rapture by which I get called away for seven years while all hell breaks loose on the earth, I’ll have some understanding of what’s happening. And you pre-trib folks need to have listened long enough to me so that if you turn out to be wrong, then when all hell breaks loose and you are included in it, you will have some mental and theological framework with which to handle this.

First Peter 4:17–18 says, “For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And ‘If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?’” I could take you to texts that show you why I’m not a pre-trib person, but I don’t think we want to get into that level of controversy over that. I’d just say, yes, this teaching about suffering is important. It’s important eschatologically.

Here’s one last comment. If you were to go to Sudan today and talk to the church where they’re taking their sons and daughters and selling them into slavery and where they’re crucifying Christians and where they’re holding them over hot coals and pressing their chest down on them and telling them to deny Jesus and you told them, “But you are going to escape the tribulation,” I think they would not get it. I think they would laugh at you. I think they would cluck their tongues. I think they would say, “What’s this? What’s this? What’s this big escape thing if right now in Sudan, God is not exerting his hand to relieve me from this horrible suffering for his name?” And I know one answer to that would be, “Well, that’s not the wrath of God and the wrath of God is coming during the tribulation.” There’s no big difference. No big difference.

Whether it’s the wrath of God or the permission of the suffering under God’s sovereignty, it’s going to feel the same. It doesn’t hurt any more when you’re lying on the coals. So yes, daddy, we’re together and one way or the other we’re going to be together forever — Clayton, daddy, and whoever else in this room. We’re not going to divide over it.

Do you believe that once a person is born again it is possible for them to lose their salvation?

No, but let me give you some reasons. Do I believe that once a person is born again, he can lose his salvation? That’s the one point Arminians do like about Calvinism, namely eternal security. Let’s call it the perseverance of the saints, however, lest we get into an easy believism which contaminates so much American evangelicalism. All it means is that you walk to the front, sign a card, and go to heaven even though you live like the devil. That’s not true. That’s not what the doctrine means. I’m not saying yes to that. I’m not saying, “Pray a prayer when you’re six and never darken the door of a church again or read your Bible or pray or care about God, but you’re saved because you did your little prayer thing and made your decision.” That’s not what the doctrine means. What the doctrine means is that, based on the sovereignty of God, when you profess faith truly, the Holy Spirit moves in and he causes you to stay true to him.

There are a lot of verses on the perseverance of the saints, but not many know the glory of Jeremiah 32:40. Now, this is the New Covenant sealed by the blood of Jesus, which every person in this room who’s a born-again believer can lay hold on and enjoy until the day you die. And so I hope you do enjoy it. It says, “I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” That’s the perseverance of the saints and you have to believe in the sovereignty of God to have that kind of a security. If you don’t believe in the sovereignty of God, if you’re an Arminian in this sense, you have to develop a kind of easy believism that says it doesn’t matter how you live, whether you apostatize, if you made your commitment and your decision and signed your card or whatever, you have to be home free otherwise there can be no security because you have a free will. You can opt in and out every day. So in order to be secure and yet not have easy believism and have holiness in the Christian walk, you have to believe that God fulfills the New Covenant, which is to write the law on your heart and to cause you to walk in his statutes. So the answer is no, a person cannot lose their salvation.

I wonder if you’ll just maybe take a moment and talk about the church in America today. We talk about praying for revival and yet we’re not persecuted in this country at this point. Now, next week the stock market could crash and we could go through some trials and tribulations. There’s so much suffering and persecution in other parts of the world, but we’re still considered a Christian nation. We have a lot of born-again people in the United States. But can you just comment on what you see for the church in America?

What should I say? There aren’t as many born-again people as we think there are. There are a lot of nominal Christians and very few born-again people, probably. I’m not excessively pessimistic or excessively optimistic. I watch the prayer movement and David Bryants coming together of many streams in the hopes that a river of awakening will develop as more and more people pray — “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

I think that promise was made to Israel, not America, and that the repentance there is the repentance of the church. But it is, in principle, a true thing. If we repent, if we humble ourselves, God comes and he moves. But revival is so much a work of God that you can’t make it happen. You can’t twist God’s arm in this. You can ask for it to come and you can preach truth that could be the tinder which the Holy Spirit puts a match to if he is pleased, but you can’t manage revival. You can’t make it happen. God makes it happen. So I think we should pray toward it and work toward it with truth-telling and evangelizing, and then leave to God whether America goes under or America revives. Practically, I simply try to live my life that way and not predict. I want to be a truth-teller as much as I can. I want to pray as hard as I can. I want to love as much as I can.

Here’s my little image. As I read the Bible, it’s going to get bad at the end of the age. I see that in Matthew 24. It says the love of many will grow cold. It says, “Those who endure to the end, will be saved.” And then it says, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come.” Now I put that verse over against the other verse, and I ask, “Who is going to do that?” I’ll tell you, it isn’t going to be lukewarm people in the face of Muslim swords and Hindu unbelief and radical persecution. And yet, it’s going to happen. So some people at the end of the age are going to be red hot for God and some are going to be very cold because lawlessness is multiplied. All right, now the question is here we got 400 people, which should we be? There’s no doubt who we should be. We should be the red-hot ones and we should go back to churches and with all of our might preach and counsel and teach and pray so that our churches become red-hot.

There is nothing in pre-millennial, pre-tribulational, dispensational eschatology that would contradict one church being red-hot for God when Jesus comes and it might be yours and it might be a whole denomination. So I picture a glacier coming over the world of indifference in the church and coldness and lawlessness. The love of many will grow cold. Here comes a big glacier of the American church. I think that’s there and coming. Now, our job is to torch the glacier, to torch the glacier. Glaciers are ice and torches are fire. We torch the glacier. So here it starts to come over my church. I get all the people to come, get their torches and my torch, and we’re just going to torch this glacier so that at least the ice over Bethlehem has a big hole in it all the way up to the sky and we can see blue up there and God’s pouring down blessing on Bethlehem.

A lot of churches could do that in a city so that there’s this massive hole in the glacier in your city when Jesus comes. In other words, I think, though you may have an eschatology that says there’s going to be a Laodicean lukewarmness over the world when Jesus comes, it doesn’t have to be everywhere. The light gets lighter and the dark gets darker simultaneously. Be among the light. That’s the practical use of predictions, I think — to pray toward cities, denominations, churches, small groups, and campuses where the fire is burning so hot that, as the love of many grows cold, the glacier just goes around that campus. It doesn’t cool that campus.

I don’t want us to get into any kind of a fatalistic view of America or of Saudi Arabia. Who knows whether Saudi Arabia may be the red-hot place for Jesus when he comes. Who knows? God is sovereign, right? It’s a glorious thing to be an evangelist when God is sovereign, because if you don’t then you say, “We could never win a Muslim country. A Muslim country could never be red-hot for Jesus.” Do you believe in God? That’s probably not what you’re asking, but I’m not a sociologist or a prophet in that regard. I just know what I want to be because I read the Bible.

In light of all the behind-the-scenes dialogue between Satan and God, and in light of James 2:19 — you believe that God is one, you do well; even the demons believe and shudder — I’m wondering two things. Number one, how much does Satan really know, and to use your words, does he really get it? Number two, after all these years of his schemes backfiring for the sanctification of God’s people, why doesn’t he just give up?

That’s a really good question. I like to think about that question, not because it yields happy answers but because it does help me get a little better realistic grasp on my own son and the situation I’m facing in the world.

Why doesn’t Satan get it? He clearly doesn’t get it. And what he did in the life of Jesus proves he doesn’t get it because he starts off in his ministry with Jesus trying to get him to turn stones into bread and to jump off the temple and to bow down to him. In other words, he is saying, “Avoid the cross. Avoid the cross.” Jesus said, “I’m going to go up to Jerusalem in three days and they’re going to kill me.” And Peter said, “No way.” And he said, “Get behind me, Satan.” So there is Satan again trying to divert Jesus from the cross. So that’s smart. That’s smart. Who put it in the heart of Judas to betray him? Satan. Well, wait a minute. Do you want him on the cross or do you not want him on the cross?

Now, here’s my conclusion. Sin is irrational. I look at my son and I plead with my son. I give him reasons. I point to the stupidity and the vanity and the emptiness and the hopelessness and the ruination and he agrees and walks away. Sin is irrational. It’s irrational. So there’s no answer to your question. There’s just no answer to sin. It’s insane. It’s suicidal. The people who do it know it’s suicidal. Have you ever tried to reason with an alcoholic? Have you ever tried to reason with a person in the bondage of sin? You can use all your arguments. They’ll probably agree with all your arguments and they’ll go right back and kill themselves again. It is just crazy. I do not understand sin. I have no category for understanding Satan and why, knowing what he knows, he continues this way. Now, you ask what he knows. Does he know that he’s going to lose in the end? I think he does know he’s going to lose in the end. The reason I say that is because when Jesus came to the Gadarene Demoniac, do you know what they said, this legion of devils that came out of his mouth? They said, “Are you here before the time? Are you here before the time? What do we have to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High? Why are you here before the time?”

What does that mean? That means they know He’s going to, sooner or later, cast them into the lake of fire. They did not expect him to do it today, into those pigs. So I think demons do know it’s history. But they’re so irrational, I don’t know. Do they think, “Maybe we can get some good triumph,” or, “We’re going to make it as bad as we can for the elect”? I don’t know. Sin is irrational.

You shared a couple of examples from the life and ministry of Jesus — the man who was born blind and Lazarus. You said both were for the glory of God. In both of those instances, Jesus, in a sense, shows up on the scene and turns things around in such a way that the display of God’s glory is seen in what happens and it stirs faith in people. How do you see the intersection of that kind of ministry with what you’re talking about, that the glory of God is seen in the suffering? It almost seems like the two examples you cite from the ministry of Jesus is that the glory of God is seen in the alleviation of the suffering and it is in the alleviation of the suffering that those people come to believe. So there’s a tension there. Can you talk about the intersection of the move of God in life to alleviate the suffering and the glory of God seen in the perseverance through the suffering?

That’s an excellent question. All I want to do is affirm what you observed, that the glory came to Jesus in both of those situations through the alleviation of the suffering, which God ordained. And God ordained it, that he might get glory through the alleviation of it. So how does that fit with Job where I’m arguing that the God-trusting embrace and endurance of suffering is a display of his glory. And here’s what I would say. It certainly is not either or and both are true. Maybe I should not have used that as an illustration where I did. Maybe that creates the problem. So let’s just admit that the glory of God is displayed in the alleviation of suffering through the miracles of Jesus, for example, and other miracles and in your lives, the doctor’s life, and other lives. I mean, we want to be about alleviating suffering in people’s lives. At cost to ourselves, we want to help people to have better lives, especially eternal lives.

But here’s the other side. In the Bible, there is also the testimony that God gets glory through suffering that’s not alleviated. I’ll just give you one or two examples. At the end of John, Jesus tells Peter what kind of death he is going to die. He says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go. (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God)” (John 21:18–19).

That’s what I’m after. Here’s a man who doesn’t get delivered. He got crucified. Peter, tradition says, was crucified upside down because he didn’t want to be crucified like Jesus. He didn’t think he was worthy to be crucified right side up. And he glorified God in it. So that’s the way I would say it.

Then there is a principle I would get from Second Corinthians 12, where Paul says, “All the more gladly do I rejoice or exult in my tribulations, calamities, weaknesses, because when I am weak, he is strong.” That would be another one. Also, in Philippians 1:21 Paul says, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:20–21). And then he gives the illustration of how he would be glorified in his death. He says, “To live as Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). So Christ is magnified in your death if dying for you is gain. So yes to the glorification through alleviation and yes to the glorification through the absence of alleviation and the trust in a God who’s going to bring you through it and out on the other side of it in the resurrection as your treasure.