William Petruzzo

If John Piper wrote a book about a mystical journey to rescue a doomed kingdom, it’s unlikely that I would read it. But, lucky for all of us, he doesn’t write books like that. The Pleasures of God nearly sums up the benefit we all enjoy. Even though this book is hard to read, Piper’s thoughts are too important to miss.

The Pleasures of God is self-describing. It’s about the pleasures of God. Plain and simple.

The book is broken down into ten chapters; The pleasure of God in His Son, the pleasure of God in all he does, the pleasure of God in his creation, the pleasure of God in his fame, the pleasure of God in election, the pleasure of God in bruising his son, the pleasure of God in doing good to all who hope in him, the pleasure of God in the prayers of the upright, the pleasure of God in personal obedience and public justice, and the pleasure of God in concealing himself from the wise and revealing himself to infants.

Each chapter is an extended treatise on one of God’s specific pleasures. Each chapter is an exegetical endeavor over a single verse, from which Piper explores an impressive expanse of scriptural thought.

The first four chapters deal directly with God’s complete self-sufficiency. Or, God’s pleasure in himself, to be brief. Then, over the next two chapters, he begins to explore God’s pleasure in his interaction with us. Finally, in the last four chapters, Piper moves into God’s pleasure in his people. The breakdown, says Piper, is crucial because before we can rightly be affected by God’s pleasure in us, we must understand and appreciate God’s pleasure in himself.

The Pleasures of God explores many of the same concepts as Desiring God does, but it approaches them with a eye to more thorough theology. At least partially at the fault of Piper’s writing style, The Pleasures of God took nearly twice as long for me to read as did Desiring God. But, that complaint should be taken with a grain of salt because I believe the extra effort was absolutely worth it. Piper approaches with passion and integrity concepts that many attempt to keep under the carpet.

As with Desiring God and most of Piper’s literature, his style can feel somewhat cumbersome at times. Light readers, or readers without very much resolve, will probably find themselves frustrated by his style, and The Pleasures of God is no exception. In fact, it’s probably even more prevalent. To get through this one, a commitment to learn from Piper’s teaching will be necessary. Although, in my view, the benefits are invaluable.

The Pleasures of God is an indispensable work that the church today needs to hear. However, most will have difficulty with this one. Therefore, for the average reader, I suggest they seek first Desiring God. If after they, a fire has set beneath them to continue, The Pleasures of God is a must. If however, you’re a more ambitious and committed reader, go right for The Pleasures of God. You won’t regret it.

While waiting to speak to an advisor at the local college today, I finished John Piper’s The Pleasures of God (review pending). His final chapter dealt with God’s pleasure in concealing himself from the “wise” and revealing himself to “infants”. In this chapter he makes the appeal that wisdom is from God, but we must diligently seek it with our minds.

In responding to large portions of the church that scorn intellectual pursuit of God’s word, he has this to say:

“The manger and the Cross were not sensation. Neither is grammar and syntax. But that is how God has chosen to reveal himself. A poor Jewish peasant and a prepositional phrase have this in common, that they are both human and both ordinary. That the poor peasant was God and the prepositional phrase is the Word of God does not change this fact. Therefore, if God humbled himself to take on human flesh and speak human language, woe to us if we arrogantly presume to ignore the humanity of Christ and the grammar of Scripture.“

Piper is making a powerful argument against sensationalism. The church cannot rationally say, “we just need to focus on Jesus and pray, and worship, yadda yadda yadda,” (which I hear quite a lot) and simultaneously belittle the intellectual pursuit of scripture.

The incarnation of Christ, while spiritually fantastic, was physically near-ordinary. His death on the cross, while spiritually far-reaching, was physically in line with natural humanity. So then, if Jesus chose to come in spiritually profound manners, yet interact and exist in quite ordinary ones, then why should his Word be any different?

God’s Word, while spiritually distinct from all other words, is still God’s condescension onto earth. Much like Christ himself. Spiritually, Jesus washed his disciples feet as a servant here on earth. But, he also did it physically. So is God’s Word. Yes, it is written with the deepest spiritual reality saturating every word, but here in our world, it exists in a very ordinary manner.

So, what’s the point? Although the Word is spiritual, it’s existance is ordinary. And therefore, we interact with it, not only spiritually, but also ordinarily; thinking, asking questions, pulling apart, trying to figure it out. And in that faithful, humble, prayerful persuit, God will answer us and reveal himself to us there.

A good friend went to the hospital this afternoon with appendicitis. After about 13 hours in the emergency room, they finally carted him into surgery to remove his appendix. Another friend, who’d been with him since he’d shown was feeing anxious. So, we went for a stroll through the hospital. Before long, we found ourselves in the “healing garden”. Basically, just a well groomed area just outside the hospital which was lined with benches.

It seems to me that if they have a healing garden, they ought to be taking patients out there. Then again, maybe that’s why I’m not a doctor.

In any case, we sat down on a bench, on the the back of which was an all weather notebook attached with a steel cable. It’s a notebook intended for patients and loved ones to open and write thoughts and feelings in. A little sticker on the front also let us know that it was also a publishing resource for the KGS corporation. On the last filled out page of the notebook an anonymous writer named Tom shared these thoughts:

“The will God will never take you where the grace of God will not protect you.”

There’s almost no doubt in my mind that Tom got that advice from some author. But, regardless of where he found it or if he thought it up himself—for believers—the sentiment is true. In fact, it’s that very sentiment, rooted in the finished work of Christ, that allows the believer to keep moving foreword. To seek harder obedience. To love God more completely.

Because of Christ we can know without a doubt that what God requires of us will not destroy us. That is excellent news. Thank you Tom for the reminder. But back to the story of my friend in the hospital. He was slated to leave for a mission trip to India in just six days. That’s not going to happen now. I see this saying as speaking to this situation in two ways.

1.It is clear from this ailment that God has other plans.
2.God’s other plans are here.

God would not allow him to go and do something both honorable and something he desired to do, and yet perhaps that was his grace that he will not. We cannot know what might have happened if he went, but we can be sure that it is better that he doesn’t.

Isn’t the will of a sovereign, yet loving, God comforting? I think so.

Revelation 22:1-5:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

If the end times prophecies were given as an encouragement and comfort to the church as she endures through hardship, then this passage is the the consummation. When all is said is done and all that is done is finished, Jesus’ servants will see his face at last. That’s powerful imagery.

That is nourishing food to produce spiritual stamina.

In the chapter on God’s pleasure in the prayers of the righteous, John Piper has this to say. From The Pleasures of God:

“My hope is that a desperate sinner, who lives in a Death Valley desert of unrighteousness, hangs on this biblical truth: that God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer–my thirst. That is why the sovereign freedom and self-sufficiency of God are so precious to me: they are the foundation of my hope that God is delighted not by… resourcefulness… but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace.”

The whole context around that statement is Piper’s take on the tho views of God’s pleasures. Do we see God as a kind of watering trough, which, when drank from, empties. Or, do we view God as a mountain spring, which is always self-replenishing and satisfying? If we see God as a trough, then he is pleased when we serve him by refilling the water. But, if we see God as a mountain spring, then he is pleased when we simply enjoy him.

I find this analogy, and Piper’s statement powerful. While I consistently fall at the weakness of my knees, the Father is not pleased chiefly by my willpower to stand. He’s pleased mostly by my desire that he would help me to stand.

This morning at church, the pastor at my church began a short series for Advent titled, “The Supremacy of Christ.” He began with Colossians 1:15-16. It goes like this:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”

The sermon was fantastic. Unfortunately, the preacher did not bring the message expressly back to the fullness of the Gospel, but it was outstanding nonetheless. And, while the preacher did not bring things home, my own heart did.

As I read the words of Colossians, the magnitude of the cross struck afresh. Jesus is the image (“the exact representation”, Hebrews 1:3) of the invisible God. Meaning, the same God who spoke the world into creation in the beginning of Genesis. The same God who flooded the world. The same God who led the Israelites out of Egypt through the Red Sea and into the desert. Jesus is our perfect picture, our exact representation of that God.

Then, not only is he the perfect representation, he’s also the means by which everything—everything—has come into existence. You and me, everything seen and unseen. Felt and unfelt. Known and unknown. Everything, has been created by the means of Jesus.

Then, not only that, but everything, at least in some sense, was created for him. There is nothing that is withheld from Christ, for his glory. It is all for him.

And that God, that very member of the triune God, stepped down, onto earth and died a sinners death. A death on behalf of sinning creatures who, since the beginning, have defamed him and countless times attempt to dethrone him. That is the God, the Christ, the Jesus who hung on the cross for you and for me. The firstborn over all creation, graciously and wonderfully dying a sinners death for love, for righteousness, for justice. To bring about justification, repentance, propitiation, reconciliation and sanctification.

How can we not glorify that Jesus. Let’s ask that question, how?

I’ve spent the last few days with Indelible Grace Music. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the project, but others are not. The idea behind the ministry is honorable and frankly, just plain cool. The gist, although over simplified, is to reproduce very old, often forgotten, hymns for a new generation of Christian worshippers and thinkers. Here’s a quick excerpt from the statement on their website:

We want to be a voice calling our generation back to something rich and solid and beyond the fluff and the trendy. We want to remind God’s people that thinking and worship are not mutually exclusive, and that not everything worth knowing happened in the last three years. We want to invite the Church to appreciate her heritage without idolizing it. We want to open up a world of passion and truth and make it more that just an archaic curiosity for the religiously sentimental. We believe worship is formative, and that it does matter what we think.

Pretty cool, right? I agree. I stumbled on Indelible Grace while looking for really excellent renditions and arrangements of old hymns. You’d be surprised how few there really are. In fact, if you search for hymns on Amazon MP3, you’ll come up with several thousand results that all sound more or less exactly the same.

Then, while doing my monthly peruse of eMusic (read about it here), I came across Indelible Grace’s Music. I was stunned. They literally have a plethora of modern hymn arrangements, something like 85 of them. While there are a handful I’m really not enthusiastic about (i.e., really cheesy), the majority of them are performed with a great deal of care and, dare I say, relevance.

Most of the arrangements range from mellow indie-folk melodies, to heavier rock, to full blown southern-slide-guitar country. The performers also range from people I’ve never heard of, to bigger names in Christian music, like Derek Webb.

Indelible Grace also makes implementing hymn arrangements into worship services relatively easy. On their website you’ll find pretty comprehensive listings of hymns they perform, as well as lyrics and chord charts for various instruments.

I would very much like to see churches put Indelible Grace’s hard work to good use in their local congregations. Because the words we sing are indeed formative. And, in many ways they do shape our theologies and our ideas about God. In fact, I fairly often hear people quote songs, thinking they’re quoting scripture. If that is the case, then let’s bring real depth and real substance into our songs. Lets sing hymns.

Here are some of my favorite recordings from Indelible Grace Music so far:

O Help My Unbelief
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Come Then, Lord Jesus
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Hear Our Prayer (The Litany Song)
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go
Album: Indelible Grace Side B

O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus
Album: Indelible Grace Side A

O Come and Mourn
Album: For All the Saints

Not What My Hands Have Done
Album: For All the Saints

Lead Me On O King Eternal
Album: Beams of Heaven

Jesus Lover of My Soul
Album: Beams of Heaven

Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah
Album: Beams of Heaven

Poor Sinner Dejected With Fear
Album: Pilgrim Days

This list is in no wise exhaustive. There are many other great recordings on these albums, but this list is a pretty good taste of what’s there. If you like what you hear in these, I would strongly recommend you go ahead and buy the albums. You won’t be disappointed. But, good news!

Get Indelible Grace Music for FREE!

I’m probably breaking some rules somewhere, but I just think that this music will be a great blessing to many, so I’m going suggest it anyway.

On eMusic now, if you’ve never signed up, then sign up! They’ll give you 50 songs for free. They’re yours to keep. When you sign up, you’ll have to give them a credit card so that when the month is over they can start charging you the subscription fee, but it’s a trial. So, just cancel before the month is up and it wont cost you anything. But for the purposes today, the trial will get you about 4 out of 6 of the Indelible Grace albums.

So, get on there. Sign up. Download the Indelible Grace Music. Cancel your account right away. Or, keep the service going. It really is great.

From his book The Holiness of God, in the chapter dealing with God’s justice, RC Sproul discusses Uzzah’s sin of touching the Arc of the Covenant. You can read the whole story of Uzzah in 1 Chronicles 13. Uzzah was the priest who, while transporting the Arc, touched it when it appeared to become unstable and threatened to fall to the ground. Immediately when Uzzah touched the Arc, God struck him dead. To many, this appears to be a twisted sense of justice. Sproul has this to say:

“[Uzzah’s act]…an act of holy heroism? No! It was an act of arrogance, a sin of presumption. Uzzah assumed that his hand was less polluted than the earth. But it wasn’t the ground or the mud that would desecrate the ark: it was the touch of man. The earth is an obedient creature. It does what God tells it to do. It brings forth its yield in its season. It obeys the laws of nature that God has established.”

Sproul doesn’t stop there in his explanation, but for my attention now, this is the section that caught me. I have always had trouble reading these passages about Uzzah. I can’t help be see a fatal accident and an overreacting God. But as Sproul points out, it was not simply a momentary sin that resulted in Uzzah’s death, it was a heart condition of arrogance that contented itself that way well before the physical offense.

Uzzah had to assume, deeply, that his hands were "less polluted" than the ground. All of God’s many, many explicit commands would fall by the wayside in Uzzah’s mind, because Uzzah arrogantly presumed his worthiness.

Now, for me, I see a couple of things that stand out.

1. Reading into God’s word with "eisegetical" eyes is a dangerous practice. Uzzah reinterpreted all of God’s commands not to touch the Arc, based on one single presumption that his hands were not as filthy as the ground. He was wrong and paid dearly for it. So similar is the person who turns a deaf ear to the Gospel because he knows he’s a good person and he knows God doesn’t send "good" people to hell. God’s word must speak for itself; we cannot tell it what to say.

2. The death of Jesus is magnified even more in Uzzah’s death. God instantly poured his wrath out on Uzzah and his blasphemous gesture. In a split second, we get to see God’s holiness and his terrifying commitment to uphold that holiness. Uzzah’s death reminds us that we’ve all arrogantly reached out and blasphemed God, yet Jesus has taken upon himself all of that wrath which was due to our sacrileges and bore them on the cross. So, even today, while we continue to reach out and touch the proverbial Arc, Jesus continues to plead our case on the grounds of his spilled blood.

The most recent chapter of The Pleasures of God by John Piper was seriously outstanding. The chapter dealt with “God’s Pleasure in Election”. As you can probably guess, Piper uses the chapter to show and defend God’s glory in the reformed understanding of election.

I really wish I could share the whole chapter with you, but unfortunately that would be a copyright violation—not to mention a whole lot of transcribing. So, instead, I’ll share just a short excerpt.

When expounding on Deuteronomy 7:6-8, Piper says this:

This passage teaches again the freedom of God’s grace in loving and choosing Israel. Notice the question that verse 7 raises: Why did God “ set his love upon you and choose you”? Moses answers that it was not because of their greatness. They were very small, unlikely candidates for being chosen by God. Why then did God delight in them and choose them?

Verse 8 gives [the answer:] “It is because the LORD loves you.”  Now remember what the question was from verse 7. The question was: Why did God set his love upon you? So the… answer Moses gives is: “Because he loves you.” He loves you because he loves you. That is what I mean by the freedom of God and the freedom of electing love. He doesn’t set his love upon them because they qualify fro his love. He loves them because he loves them.

Many have trouble with the question of why God chooses some and not others. Many grasp for reasons why some might be chosen and others not. There’s a sense of “fairness” that seems to be lost when people ponder the God’s freedom in election. That’s just what it is, freedom. He is free to choose who he will for whatever reason we cannot know.

We ought to be thankful that our wills are not as free as we would be led to believe they are. If they were, then God would not be free as free is he really is and if God were not free we would have already perished by now.

The past few days I’ve been reflecting on the idea in Romans 2:14-15:

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them”

This idea of the work of the Law being written on people’s hearts is very interesting. It’s clear that in a fairly universal sense all cultures tend to agree with some basics tenets of morality. Murdering is bad. Lying is un-virtuous. Stealing is reprehensible. Sex is wrong apart from commitment. Yet many people who agree with these things, and who’s conscience is stricken because of them, do not know of the express commandments from God about them.

What’s the deal with that? Why do human beings seem to universally agree on some very basic moral structure, while the religious and moral institutions vary dramatically?

Well, it seems that this is exactly what Paul has in view when he says that the gentiles are a “law to themselves". There is a God and he is Holy and he has graciously given such a law in the hearts of people–even those who don’t know him. But, I think, there’s something even more astonishing than that.

We all know that God’s law is more demanding than any person can survive. In the heavenly court, no human will be justified on the basis of God’s law. All have sinned and all are guilty. But, if we were to scale back and look at only the requirements of man’s law–the one written on every man’s heart–we would still be guilty. Not only are we unable to keep God’s perfect law, we are unable to keep our conscience clean on our own terms.

Even apart from God’s holy law, a savior is not only necessary, he is imperative to our very lives. Praise the Lord that God had done what he has and that all sins are paid for through the atoning, justifying, propitiating, sanctifying work of Jesus Christ on the Cross.