Book Details
- Author: John Piper
- Publisher: Multnomah (2003)
- Category: Christian Living
Discerning Reader Editorial Review
Reviewed 09/18/2007 by Mark Tubbs.
Recommended. A valuable devotional that constantly sends the reader back to Scripture.
We are conditioned to imagine devotionals as warm, comforting volumes filled with wise snippets on how to live a more restful and pious Christian life. In recent years devotionals have become the Christian publishing industry’s best friend. A ghostwriter can excerpt the ‘best of’ any given top seller, reformat its contents, dress it up in consoling cover art, label it ‘a devotional based on the bestselling book,’ and send it back up the charts again.
John Piper’s Pierced by the Word is not this type of devotional. Not too many warm, comforting feelings are evoked by its title. Not too many bookshelf browsers will be consoled by the ominous storm clouds and forked lightning gracing its cover. And if the cover art doesn’t scare away a casual browser, the blurb on the back cover might do it. This is how Piper intends it. Rather than be mollycoddled by oozing sentiment, Piper desires his readers to experience what he calls ‘sweet trembling’, based on Isaiah 66:2. His prayer is that these meditations “penetrate to the deep places of your soul.”
Of Piper, Mark Dever recently mused thusly at the 9Marks blog: “John has a Puritan-like ability to stare at an idea unflinchingly, watch it, and then watch it some more, interrogate it, and then draw implications out of it that are both convincing and surprising, and maybe even startling!” Nowhere is this more evident than in his devotions, which exemplify a condensed version of the process Dever describes above.
Originally written as occasional meditations for Bethlehem Baptist Church and called ‘Taste and See’ articles, these meditations range across many subjects, unified around the theme of Scripture’s impact on every aspect of life. Piper illustrates his points using historical tidbits, struggles facing his congregation, and samples from other writers, but does his best work when unpacking the applications and implications of any given verse of Scripture. In this volume, Piper has provided thirty-one days of such unpacking, and there are no throwaway thoughts, no frivolous filler.
What infuriates many people about Piper is how high he sets the bar of belief. Indeed, he classifies any unbiblical behaviour as a function of unbelief. Thus, he will often refer to ‘the unbelief of lust’, ‘the unbelief of covetousness’, and believe it or not, ‘the unbelief of impatience.’ That every unbiblical attitude and/or behaviour exhibits a corresponding type of unbelief is Piper’s frequent refrain, and in Pierced By the Word he extends the net even wider. For example, the reason(s) we want to go to heaven can be idolatrous in themselves. Or: how we ought to conduct breakfast biblically. Or: we are always either one step away from heaven or hell. And other such provocative and tremble-inducing teaching.
Readers not familiar with John Piper or Jonathan Edwards or Sam Storms or any of the new breed of Christian Hedonists might be somewhat stunned by the seeming jumpiness of a devotional like this one. But Piper has a bigger vision in mind: that his readers not come away thinking about what a lucid, challenging and organized writer John Piper is, but how piercing and convicting and hope-giving the Word of God is. If this devotional drives its readers back to their Bibles, it will have done its job, and for that reason I highly recommend Pierced By the Word.
