by John Piper
How Does Compassion for People Relate to Passion for God?
Here is the main question I am pursuing: What is the relationship between our passion for the supremacy of God—the glory of God, the honor of God and of his Son among the nations—and our compassion for perishing sinners whose end is everlasting misery if they do not hear the gospel and believe? I wonder if you’ve ever experienced a tension in your own soul between these two motives. I have. That’s why this question matters so much to me. I want to be utterly devoted to the cause of world evangelization, and I want it to be from God-exalting, person-loving motives. And these two do not always feel emotionally compatible. Are they? How are they? Does Jonathan Edwards provide a key? I will try to unfold the answer in five steps:
1. Compassion pursues the rescue of perishing sinners. Compassion moves us to work for the rescue of unbelievers from the coming wrath of God in hell (1 Thess. 1:10). The biggest problem in the world for every human being—from the poorest to the richest, from the sickest to the healthiest—is the same: how to escape the wrath of God that hangs over all humans because of our sin. Love demands that we work to rescue people from the wrath of God.
2. Fear of hell by itself saves nobody. Edwards never tired of warning people to flee from the wrath to come.13 But he knew that mere fear of the consequences of sin is not a saving fear. People who love sin fear and sometimes weep over the consequences of sin.14 It is natural to hate pain. It is supernatural to hate sin. It is natural to love sin and supernatural to love Christ.
What this implies is that you can scare people toward heaven, but you can’t scare anybody into heaven. Saving faith means receiving Christ as your treasure, not just as a deliverer from pain. It is possible to claim faith in Christ as merely a rescuer from hell. Such faith saves no one. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). Saving faith is a coming to Jesus for the satisfaction of your soul thirst.15
Until your soul has a thirst for Christ as the bread of life and the living water, you will use Christ for what your soul thirsts after. Many people who claim to have saving faith simply use Christ to get what they really want, which is not Christ but his gifts (escape from hell, peace of mind, health of body, a better marriage, a social network, etc.). We are saved by coming to Christ not only as our deliverer but also as our treasure—coming for all that God is for us in Jesus. Test yourself: Would you want to go to heaven if Christ were not there? Is he or his gifts your treasure?
3. Therefore, compassion must not merely warn people about the pains of going to hell but must also lure people to the pleasures of knowing Christ. The only way to get to heaven is by wanting to be with Christ and by trusting his work to get you there. Wanting to avoid hell is not the same as wanting to be with Christ. And so it would not be compassionate merely to warn people about hell. We must display to them the beauties of Christ. Compassion does not merely warn people; it woos people. Compassion aims to awaken in people a delight in Christ, not just a dread of hell. No one goes to heaven who does not love Christ. Paul said, “If any one does not love the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Cor. 16:22 NASB). Compassion seeks, with prayer and preaching and serving in the power of the Holy Spirit, to create joy in who Christ is. Compassion stirs up satisfaction in Christ. At its heart, that is what saving faith is: being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.
4. The key from Jonathan Edwards: It is precisely this satisfaction in Christ himself that magnifies Christ and glorifies God. The key to the coherence between passion for God’s glory and compassion for perishing humans is that rejoicing in God himself, through Christ, glorifies God. The pleasure you take in God is the measure of the treasure you find in him. You make much of him and show him to be great when you find your joy in him, especially when the taste and lure of this joy enables you to leave comforts and risk your life in the cause of missions. Here is the key quotation from Edwards:
So God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to . . . their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself. . . . God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God’s glory [doesn’t] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it.16
My way of saying this is, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”17
With this profound insight from Jonathan Edwards into God’s purpose in creation and redemption, we see the unity of our two motives in missions:
5. The aim of compassion to rescue sinners from everlasting pain and the aim of passion to see God honored are not in conflict. Sinners escape hell and honor God with the same act: treasuring all that God is for them in Christ, being satisfied with all that God is for them in Christ. God does not get the honor he should, and man does not escape the pain he would, if Christ himself is not our treasure. But if, by the mercy of God, Christ becomes the treasure of the nations and God becomes their delight, then he is honored and we are saved.
And that’s the goal of missions. Therefore, the twofold motive of missions, mercy for man and glory for God, is one coherent goal. So let us take up our cross and, for the joy set before us, be willing to lay down our lives to make the nations glad in God.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.
Psalm 67:3–4
1. Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World is published in its entirety in John Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton: Crossway, 1998).
2. Ibid., 242.
3. Ibid., 183–251.
4. Ibid., 140 (italics in original).
5. Emphasis added. Most modern versions translate this verse so that “for himself” is rendered “for its own purpose”: “The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (NASB). But this is a contextual judgment call, not a necessary grammatical feature of the text. The Hebrew lamma‘anehu can be properly translated “for himself.”
6. Some of these are gathered in chapter 1 of this book.
7. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 10.
8. See my response to this abandonment in chapter 4.
9. Quoted in John Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 75.
10. For a fuller treatment of Edwards’s argument about the justice of hell, see chapter 4, note 19.
11. Jonathan Edwards, “Charity and Its Fruits,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 185.
12. Ibid., 207–8. Daniel 12:3 says, “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”
13. Gerstner, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell. See page 51 for a 1747 sermon in which he comments on how frequently he warned his people about the dangers of hell.
14. Note the contrast in 2 Corinthians 7:10 between “godly grief” and “worldly grief”: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”
15. For an extended exposition of this sentence, see John Piper, The Purifying Power of Living by Faith in Future Grace (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 1995).
16. Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscell
anies,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Schafer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 495, emphasis added. Miscellany #448; see also #87, 251–52; #332, 410; #679 (not in the New Haven volume).
17. For an exposition of this statement, see John Piper, Desiring God: Mediations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 1996); and John Piper, The Dangerous Duty of Delight: The Glorified God and the Satisfied Soul (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2001).
7
The Inner Simplicity and Outer
Freedom of Worldwide Worship
I write this final chapter1 to clarify the first two sentences of chapter 1: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is.” I want to clarify what I mean by “worship,” lest any take me to mean merely the gathering of Christians for corporate worship or (still more limiting) that part of the gathering for singing songs and hymns. I love those times and meet God powerfully in them. But to say that missions exists for that would be too narrow and far from my meaning. I mean something much more radical and soul-gripping and life-encompassing when I speak of worship as the goal of missions.
A Stunning Degree of Indifference to Outward Form
My thesis is that worship in the New Testament moved toward something radically simple and inward, with manifold external expressions in life and liturgy. One of the reasons for this is that the New Testament is a vision for missions that is usable across thousands of cultures and therefore could not be laden with externals. I would even dare to claim (not that every reader will be as excited about this as I am) that this radical simplification and internalization is in line with the Reformed tradition. In short, what we find in the New Testament is an utterly stunning degree of indifference to worship as an outward form and an utterly radical intensification of worship as an inward experience of the heart.
Little Explicit Teaching in the New Testament about Corporate Worship Let’s begin with a startling fact, namely, that the epistles of the New Testament contain very little instruction that deals explicitly with corporate worship—what we call worship services. Not that there were no corporate gatherings for worship. First Corinthians 14:23 speaks of “the whole church” assembling together, Acts 2:46 speaks of the early church “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes,” and Hebrews 10:25 speaks of “not neglecting to meet together.” But this is not much, and the remarkable thing is that even when the gatherings are in view, the apostles do not speak of them explicitly as worship.
Let me illustrate this so we can feel its full force. In the Old Testament, the most common word for worship is the Hebrew word hishtahavah (or a related form of that word). Its basic meaning is “bow down,” with the sense of reverence, respect, and honor. It occurs 171 times. In the Greek Old Testament, 164 of those instances of this Hebrew word are translated by the Greek proskyneo. In the Greek New Testament, this is the main word for worship. But when we look at its use, we notice something astonishing.2 It is common in the Gospels (twenty-six times)—people would often bow down worshipfully before Jesus. And it is common in the Book of Revelation (twenty-one times) because the angels and elders in heaven often bow down before God. But in the epistles of Paul, it occurs only once, namely, in 1 Corinthians 14:25, where the unbeliever falls down at the power of prophecy and confesses that God is in the assembly. And it doesn’t occur at all in the letters of Peter, James, or John.
This is remarkable. The main word for worship in the Old Testament is virtually absent from the letters of the New Testament.3 Why is this?
Why are the very epistles that were written to help the church be what it ought to be in this age almost totally devoid of this word and of explicit teaching on the specifics of corporate worship?
Jesus Is the New “Place” of Worship
I think the reason is found in the way Jesus treated worship in his life and teaching. His main statement is found in John 4:20–24. But before we look at this text, consider a few other things he said. For example, his attitude toward the temple, the main place of Jewish worship, was not at all what the Jewish leaders thought it should be.
When he wove a whip and drove out the moneychangers, he said he did so not for the sake of proper sacrifices but for the sake of prayer—in fact, prayer for all the nations. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations” (Mark 11:17). In other words, he focused attention away from the outward acts of Jewish sacrifices to the personal act of communion with God for all peoples.
Then he said two other things about the temple that pointed to a radically altered view of worship. He said, “Something greater than the temple is here,” referring to himself (Matt. 12:6), and, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). This attitude toward the temple got not only him killed (Mark 14:58; 15:29) but also Stephen (Acts 6:14). That’s how important it was.
Jesus identified himself as the true temple. “Something greater than the temple is here.” In himself he would fulfill everything the temple stood for, especially the “place” where believers meet God. He diverted attention away from worship as a localized activity with outward forms and pointed toward a personal, spiritual experience with himself at the center. Worship does not have to have a building, a priesthood, and a sacrificial system. It has to have the risen Jesus.
Jesus Loosens Worship from Place and Form
What Jesus did to worship in the way he related to the temple is made explicit in John 4:20–24. Here he uses the word proskyneo—the dominant Old Testament word for worship—and shows that it is laden with outward and localized meaning. Then he transforms it into a concept that is mainly inward rather than outward and mainly pervasive rather than localized.
The woman at the well said:
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” [The word for worship used here is the common Old Testament word proskyneo. Note the localized emphasis in her mind.] Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, an hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.”
John 4:20–21
Here Jesus loosens worship from its outward and localized connotations. Place is not the issue: “neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” He goes on:
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
John 4:23–24
Here is the key sentence: True worship, which was anticipated for the age to come, has arrived: “The hour is coming [in the age to come] and is now here [in me!].” What marks this true future worship, which has broken into the present from the glorious age to come, is that it is not bound by localized place or outward form. Instead of being on this mountain or in Jerusalem, it is “in spirit and truth.”4
Jesus strips proskyneo of its last vestiges of localized and outward connotations.5 It will not be wrong for worship to be in a place or to use outward forms, but he makes explicit and central that this is not what makes worship worship. What makes worship worship is what happens “in spirit and truth”—with or without a place and with or without outward forms.
What do those two phrases mean: “in spirit” and “in truth”?
I take “in spirit” to mean that this true worship is carried along by the Holy Spirit and is happening mainly as an inward, spiritual event, not mainly as an outward, bodily event. And I take “in truth” to mean that this true worship is a response to true views of God and is shaped and guided by true views of God.6
Jesus, therefore, broke decisively any necessary connection between worship and its outward and localized associations. It is mainly something inward and free from locality. This is what he meant when he said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me” (Matt. 15:8–9). When the heart is far from
God, worship is vain, empty, nonexistent. The experience of the heart is the defining, vital, indispensable essence of worship.
Why Is the Main Old Testament Word for Worship Boycotted?
Let’s go back to our earlier question: Why is the central Old Testament word for worship, proskyneo, virtually boycotted by Peter, James, John, and Paul in the letters they write to the churches?7 I think the reason is that the word did not make clear enough the inward, spiritual nature of true worship. It carried significant connotations of place and form. The word was associated with bodily bowing down and with the actual presence of a visible manifestation to bow down before.
In the Gospels, Jesus was present in visible form to fall before, so the word proskyneo is used often. In the Book of Revelation, the act of bowing down usually happens before God’s manifestation in heaven or before false gods on the earth. Therefore, the word proskyneo is widely used in Revelation too. But in the epistles something very different is happening. Jesus is not present in visible glory to fall before. As a result, the tendency of the early church was to deal with worship as primarily inward and spiritual rather than outward and bodily, and primarily pervasive rather than localized.
Unlocalizing and Unformalizing Words for Worship
To confirm this and to see even more clearly how radically non-place and non-event oriented the New Testament view of worship is, consider what Paul does to some of the other words related to Old Testament worship. For example, the next most frequent word for worship in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (after proskyneo) is the word latreuo8 (over ninety times, almost always translating the Hebrew ‘abad), which is usually rendered “serve,” as in Exodus 23:24: “You shall not bow to their gods or serve [latreuses] them.”