These days, when John Piper speaks I get a bit nervous. Don’t get me wrong, I love John Piper. I think he’s probably the greatest living preacher (though whether he still counts as that now that he’s ‘retired’, or at least stepped down as a preaching pastor, is a conversation for a different setting). I’ve greatly benefited from his books and sermons. And yet, post-retirement John Piper always keeps me a bit anxious. Sometimes when he speaks, what pours out is solid, God-exalting, Gospel gold. But sometimes these days when he speaks he tells us that women shouldn’t be cops.
So when Coronavirus and Christ arrived in the mail, I was a bit nervous.
I shouldn’t have been, it is exactly the kind of excellent I should have expected from Piper. As with his previous books, it is thoughtful, Biblical, and focuses the reader clearly on the Gospel. Unlike his previous books, it is short (no doubt a result of it being dashed off–I can’t imagine he spent more than a week or two on this hundred-page book). So even my normal John Piper-book complaint that it’s a hundred pages too long doesn’t apply here.
So what does Christ have to do with the coronavirus? Well, if you’ve read any Piper at all, you know that God is sovereign over the coronavirus, that it exists for His glory, that whatever suffering Christians may endure is for our good to draw us nearer to God, and that whatever suffering non-Christians may endure is to call them to repentance and belief in the Gospel–the good news that Christ has lived the perfect life we should have lived and paid the penalty on the cross that we should have paid, and that if we repent and believe we can have that life and death counted as ours and be reconciled to God. Felt knowledge of God’s sovereign hand at work is at the same time bitter to the non-Christian and sweet to the Christian:
“knowing that the same sovereignty that could stop the coronavirus, yet doesn’t, is the very sovereignty that sustains the soul in it. And not only sustains, but sees to it that everything, bitter and sweet, works together for our good–the good of those who love God and are called in Christ. (Rom. 8:28-30).” (50)
For us as Christians to be able to bear through a plague sweeping around the world, we need to be able and willing to see the hand of God at work in it, and submit to His hand while we pray, serve, and worship. Piper’s book is a good help to this, and I encourage you to give it a read.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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