Echoes in Eternity

John Piper, that is. One could learn a lot about humble and transparent leadership from his post on his return.

Doug Wilson has a good post on differentiating between false teachers and the practical problems it can pose.

Now let's sort this out. Or, rather, let's have a go at sorting it out, because it is not as easy as it looks.

Tullian Tchividjian is the pastor of Coral Ridge, which oversees Knox Seminary, which just hired Bruce Waltke, the theistic evolutionist, because he resigned from RTS, because his position on evolution was very similar to that of C.S. Lewis, who is everybody's hero, including mine, and the aforementioned RTS employs John Frame, who is a stalwart of the faith, but has views on worship styles that I find discordant with mine, but he had to leave Westminster West, which has an R2K thing going, and Scott Clark there at Westminster West is on a jag against me because I deny justification by faith alone, which I don't, but that's another discussion, and even though he is in the URC he is very concerned about this frenetic virus (FV) spreading in the PCA, whose major rock star right now is Tim Keller, who is okay with women deacons, which I oppose, but John Piper is willing to work with Keller, which shouldn't be surprising, because he was also willing to work with me, even though I met Mark Driscoll once when he was in college at Washington State University. Still with me?

The problem is a thorny one, and it is an enormously practical problem.

I'm getting ready to go downtown to hear John Piper speak at a luncheon centered around the topic of making much of Christ in the workplace. It should be fun; I've never heard him speak in person before.

Evil exists so that He might be demeaned and insulted, so that the depth of His love and sacrifice could be expressed as much as is possible in the small frame of history.

- N.D. Wilson in Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl

As Dinesh D'Souza says, the problem of evil is a much bigger one for atheists than Christians. Atheists have to explain how natural evolution could produce humans who waste time and energy on torturing other people instead of killing them outright. Such inefficiency is highly problematic from a "survival of the fittest" view. It makes no sense that humanity is the one species that seems capable of intentional evil. Sure, all animals are capable of killing and mistreating other animals, but they only do so out of their need to survive.

I find great comfort in the Christian explanation for evil, which N.D. Wilson summarized so beautifully above. It gives even something as terrible as pure evil a meaning, and an ultimate conclusion. It's not something we need to flinch at and explain away. That's probably part of the reason why I enjoy (if that quite is the word) reading and learning about the terrors in world history (like the Gulag and Rwandan genocide) as well as occasionally favor films with dark themes; I prefer to see the question of evil wrestled with rather than ignored. And it's something I want my kids to wrestle with as well, which is why I'm not in favor of shying away from dark realities when I read to my five-year-old daughter. As Russell Moore says, "kids know—they instinctively know—that they’re living in a universe in which something’s gone awry. It’s not our job—as parents, or as Sunday school teachers—to disengage that. It’s our job to come in an to provide an answer to that. Yeah, you’re living in an enchanted world. Yeah, you’re living in a haunted world. You’re living in a world haunted by demonic powers. That’s exactly right—what you deeply fear is indeed the case… Your worrying about the monster under the bed isn’t unreasonable; there’s a monster under the fabric of the cosmos. Instead, we give them a story that provides the only comfort that really is lasting comfort; it’s a comfort that the enemies have been defeated."

If you're interested in a thorough fleshing out of the reason for evil, John Piper's written some good stuff on the topic, particularly this. And N.T. Wright's Evil and the Justice of God has some good things to say (though not without some problem areas). I'd also recommend an excellent recent sermon from my own church. All of these are great resources for dealing with the question: "how can God be good and allow evil to exist?"

And NO, this was not some veiled, subtle attempt at explaining Obama. :)

Piper has a great exhortation this week (I've added the verses myself).

The Gospel gets bigger when, in your heart,

• grace gets bigger (Romans 5:15);
• Christ gets greater (John 3:30);
• his death gets more wonderful (Hebrews 12:2-3);
• his resurrection gets more astonishing (Acts 2:24);
• the work of the Spirit gets mightier (Romans 15:13);
• the power of the gospel gets more pervasive (1 Corith.
  1:18);
• its global extent gets wider (2 Corinth. 2:14);
• your own sin gets uglier (Psalm 11:5);
• the devil gets more evil (Ephesians 6:12);
• the gospel's roots in eternity go deeper (Ephesians
  3:8-11);
• its connections with everything in the Bible and in the world get stronger
  (Colossians 1:15-17);
• and the magnitude of its celebration in eternity gets louder (Rev. 5:6-14).

Piper reminded his readers this week of the 15 pro-life truths which Christians can speak to others.