excerpts from Piper's 1985 biographical sketch on
Jonathan Edwards, The Pastor as Theologian
http://www.desiringgod.org/Search/?search=jonathan+edwards&submit.x=12&submit.y=5&submit=submit
One of my
seminary professors suggested to us back in 1970 that we find one great and
godly teacher in the history of the church and make him a lifelong companion.
That's what Edwards has become for me.
Since
Edwards, American evangelicals have not thought about life from the ground up
as Christians because their entire culture has ceased to do so. Edwards's piety
continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in
academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced
world-view or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of
Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy.
And our people need to
hear God-entranced preaching. God himself needs to be the subject matter of our
preaching, in his majesty and holiness and righteousness and faithfulness and
sovereignty and grace. And by that I don't mean we shouldn't preach about
nitty-gritty practical things like parenthood, and divorce and AIDS and
gluttony and television and sex…What I mean is that every one of those
things should be swept right up into the holy presence of God and laid bare to
the roots of its Godwardness or godlessness.
What our people need is
not nice little moral or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the
world. They need to see that everything, absolutely everything – from garage
sales and garbage recycling to death and demons have to do with God in all his
infinite greatness. Most of our people have no one, no one in the world to
placard the majesty of God for them. Therefore most of them are starved for
the infinite God-entranced vision of Jonathan Edwards and they don't even
know it.
They are like people who
have grown up in a room with an 8-foot flat white plaster ceiling and no
windows. They have never seen the broad blue sky, or the sun blazing in midday
glory, or the million stars of a clear country night or some trillion-ton
mountain. And so they can't explain the sense of littleness and triviality and
pettiness and insignificance in their souls. But it's because there is no
grandeur. What our people need is the God-entranced vision of reality that
Jonathan Edwards saw.
About five years ago
during our January prayer week, I decided to preach on the holiness of God from
Isaiah 6. And I resolved on the first Sunday of the year to take the first four
verses of that chapter and unfold the vision of God's holiness.
In
the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting
upon a throne, high an lifted up; and his train filled
the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he
covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And
one called to another said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole
earth is full of his glory. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the
voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
So I preached
on the holiness of God and did my best to display the majesty and glory of such
an unapproachably holy God. I gave not one word of application to the
lives of our people. Little did I know that in the week prior to this message
one of the young families of our church discovered that their child was being
sexually abused for over a year by a close relative. It was incredibly
devastating. There was police involvement - Social workers, Psychiatrists,
Doctors. They were there that Sunday morning and sat under that message.
I wonder how many
advisers to us pastors today would have said, Piper, can't you see your people
are hurting? Can't you come down out of your ivory tower of theology and get
practical? Don't you realize what kind of people sit in front of you on
Sunday?
Several months later the
sad details began to come out. And the husband came to me one Sunday after a
service and took me aside, and said, "John, these have been the hardest
months of our lives. You know what has gotten me through? The vision of the
greatness of God's holiness that you gave me the first week of January has been
the rock we could stand on."