Everybody stands somewhere in that relationship, he writes. Maybe you see the Bible as anti-intellectual. Or, in crisis, you found the Bible’s promises false. Dozens of positions are possible. But the important question is this: Where do I stand?
![A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness by [Piper, John]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q82%2BbUAKL._SY346_.jpg)
Also available to be read free online at . . .
http://www.desiringgod.org/books/peculiar-glory
A textbook on natural law is impersonal. But the Bible is personal. “The main difference between a letter and a textbook on physics is that the letter is designed to connect you to the mind and heart of the writer, and the textbook is not” (Piper, p. 23).
But a larger question looms: Do we live in a personal universe made by a personal Creator with plans and purposes for us? That opens an area too broad to discuss here. Let’s, then, assume the personal Creator exists. How does this personal Creator communicate with his human creatures? He does it through the Bible.
What Piper sees in the Bible, especially in its crowning revelation of Jesus Christ, is moral and spiritual beauty. That view took shape in the home. His parents “ . . . tried to form their ideas about God and man and sin and salvation from the Bible “ (Piper, p. 24). That’s what you do if you see the Bible as communication from your Creator.
Not everyone views the Scripture that way. In fact, writes Piper, the closer we get to the end of the world, the more embattled it will become. Piper found this personally true. As he progressed through college, then seminary, then graduate school in Germany, the more he found his Bible-view attacked.
However, even against such odds, he never thought of “holding on to my view” of the Bible. Rather, “It felt more like my view of the Bible was holding on to me” (p. 25). His view of the Bible became more “clarified, and brightened, and deepened . . .”—like looking at life through the Bible. In its pages, he says, he saw the glory of God (p. 26).
Illustrations: “If you are standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or rafting down the Colorado River inside the canyon . . . it is proper to say you are held by the view, the sight, the vista. That is what the Bible was doing for me” (p. 27).
In 2012 Piper and friends rafted in outboard-driven rubber boats down the Colorado River inside the Canyon. A strong rain blew up soaking everyone and obscuring everything. They found refuge on the shore. Then the clouds parted and they resumed their journey. Suddenly, dozens of waterfalls burst from the sides of the gorge. Red water. Water bursting from under ground so forcefully, it became a single, huge waterfall. Piper was entranced. This, he writes, is a picture of how the Bible, filled with God’s glory, captivates him.
One of the “glories” of God in the Bible that most held Piper was God’s sovereignty. He studied Romans 9:1-23. And his studies turned into a book, The Justification of God (https://www.amazon.com/Justification-God-Exegetical-Theological-Romans/dp/0801070791/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490387071&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=The+Justificaation+of+God).
“As I worked on Romans 9 day after day for months, the vision of God’s magisterial sovereignty not only became more and more clear, but it took hold of me in a way I had never planned” (p. 31).
From that Piper sensed God saying, “I will be proclaimed, not just analyzed. I will be heralded, not just studied and explained” (p. 31). Consequently, Piper resigned his teaching position at Bethel College (where he had been teaching for several years) and accepted the call to pastor Bethlehem Baptist Church, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“For thirty-three years (of pastoral ministry), week in and week out, I gazed at the words of Scripture until I saw through them to the Reality, and then I preached what I saw” (Piper, p. 32). Piper writes that he wondered, not if the congregation would come to hold his views of Scripture; but, “Would the view of God’s glory in the Scriptures hold them as it has held me?” (p. 33).
Apparently it did. After seven decades of pastoral ministry, Piper writes, “[God] has kept me—held me—by his glory by revealing his glory to my heart year after year so that other glories would not lure me away . . . The word mediates the glory, and the glory confirms the word” (p. 36).
Piper climaxes Chapter 1: “I know of no greater quest than this: Is the Bible God’s word? Are the Christian Scriptures true? How do we know?” (p. 36).
It’s on this quest A Peculiar Glory now takes us . . .
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