The Heart of Scripture

What Jesus Demands from the World
By John Piper
Crossway Books, 2006
(400 pages, $19.99, hardcover)

reviewed by S.N.D.

In the early 60s, at the age of fifteen, this mere reader first came to faith in Jesus under my Dad's preaching in a small rural church. When I then began to read the Bible more earnestly, Dad gave me the following assignment: read through just the red print in the New Testament (the words of Jesus) ten times. Unfortunately I have yet to complete that task; I made it through only five or six times, so I still have some work to do. But Dad's assignment marked indelibly in my mind the lesson that the heart of God's written Word lies in the blood-red recorded sayings of His Son, the incarnate Word.

John Piper's aim in What Jesus Demands from the World seems very close to Dad's intent:

The aim of this book is God-glorifying obedience to Jesus. To that end I am seeking to obey Jesus' last command: "Make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:19-20). Jesus' final command was to teach all his commandments.

And Piper's strategy seems similar to Dad's: immerse the Bible reader [forgive my Baptist terminology] in the red print of the Gospels:

I gathered and recorded all the commands by reading the Gospels. This included implied commands (for example, "Blessed are the merciful" implies "Be merciful"). The list was over five hundred. . .After several passes, I was able to include all the commands in about thirty categories.

These thirty categories developed finally into fifty chapters which Piper structured "to draw the reader from shorter chapters and gentler demands towards the more difficult (but no less precious) demands of Jesus." While he cites numerous Old Testament passages to illuminate Jesus' sayings, there is only one New Testament reference outside of the Gospels:

I do not cite the rest of the New Testament for my understanding of Jesus in the Gospels. Citing the whole New Testament is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and in my preaching I do not hesitate to bring Scriptures from anywhere to help make any text plain, provided I don't change the meaning of either text. But in this book I have given my rendering of Jesus almost entirely through the lens of his own words as recorded in the Gospels.

While it is clear from his footnotes that Piper has amply studied the works of recent and 20th century New Testament scholarship, in an introductory chapter entitled "A Word to Biblical Scholars (And Those Who Wonder What They Are Doing)" he bluntly states "that I estimate most of the fruit [of that scholarship] to be unreliable and unusable to accomplish what Jesus aims to accomplish in the world."

He argues that a straightforward reading of the Gospels provides the most "real", reliable, and radical portrayal of Jesus available and that it is the "only portrayal that has any chance of shaping the church and the world over the long haul." Long after scholarly theories and movements have come and gone, the Gospels will remain "in the hands of the masses. I will wager my life that this was God's idea and that it will be worth all my remaining breath to try to understand what is actually there and teach it faithfully."

The fifty chapters that follow are vintage Piper and some think contain his best work to date. Probably every reader will disagree with some of his commentary, some aspects of his rendering of Jesus. Exegetes may contest some details. Sacramentalist believers can reasonably take issue with his non-sacramental understanding of the Lord's Supper.

(For whatever it's worth, probably very little, I wish that Piper would dig theologically a little deeper into the theme of God's glory, which is central to this work. I fear that he sometimes, unintentionally I'm sure, leaves the impression that God wants us to glorify Him for His sake, implying that in some way He needs to be glorified by his creatures. If I adequately understand the doctrines of the Trinity and Creation, such an implication is not correct. God created not out of need but of an abundance of love. Our existence adds nothing to the infinite life of the Trinity. He wants us to glorify Him, I think, for our sake, not His. But from our perspective, of course, we are to glorify Him because He is worthy of it.)

What Jesus Demands from the World is strong drink indeed. In chapter after chapter, Piper serves his readers the rich red wine of the Lord's recorded sayings, full-strength, undiluted, no added sweeteners; and he insists that they taste both the gracious beauty and the loving severity of God the Son incarnate.