Well, if I haven’t thoroughly outed myself as a “Piperite”, two posts in one day featuring my favorite pastor should do the trick.
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I read Piper’s 1974 essay on Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth this morning, and could not pass on the opportunity to forward it along.
Since reading Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind and witnessing the ensuing marketing phenomenon more than a decade ago, I have been uncomfortable with the assurance, and often the stridency, with which some adhere to the Premillennial/Dispensational eschatological system.
I occasionally listen to a weekend radio program on the local Christian AM station that deals exclusively with this topic. While I do not doubt the sincerity of the host’s faith, I am often disturbed at the passion attached to such a tangential issue (the precise outworking of Biblical prophecy in current events). I am more disturbed by the passion with which this host often criticizes her brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t subscribe to this particular eschatological system (a system that has no history in the Church predating the 19th Century).
Piper writes:
This is the most important: among those who calculate about the time and sequence of the coming events and who try to give detailed descriptions of how it will be, there is, I think, a fundamentally wrong focus, a dislocation of our “blessed hope.” Throughout the New Testament the all-important focus of our hope is personal fellowship with God and our Lord Jesus Christ…
… But for the calculator of the end times this all-important personal focus of our hope gets blurred in a mass of secondary (often speculative) details.
Amen! This is my chief concern with so many Christian ministries wandering into various aberrant teachings. Dispensational end-times speculation, fixations on mystical experience and supernatural charismata, the Prosperity Gospel, the Megachurch self-improvement progams, and a myriad of other modern errors all have this in common: They are all a giant distraction from the main thing - Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
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I completely agree! John Piper reminds us that our “blessed hope” - from eternity past and to eternity future - points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is only in Him that we have hope at all.
I believe it is an escapist point of view, this concentration on prosperity, prophetic mysticism, signs and wonders, and end times fantasies that has become such a large part of Christian genre in recent years.
So many people are not given the meat of the gospel in their churches any more, nor is the consistent assurance of the faithfulness of God passed on as much from generation to generation in families.
Rather than modeling for folks truly Godly methods of dealing effectively with the harsh realities of this inconsistent world, much of religion seems to be grasping at straws itself - needing a security blanket of signs and wonders, rapture fantasises, material blessings and the like to have proof itself that Christ is real any more.
Jim, What is John Piper’s eschatalogical stance? He doesn’t seem to talk about it much, but I’m curious. I heard a sermon he did on Israel a while back, like years ago, In it he sounded a little pre-mill. At least in his interpretation of God’s plan for Israel.
Therefore just curious.
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TopicIndex/29_End_Times__Return_of_Christ/603_Questions_on_the_Second_Coming/
Pastor John rarely ever preaches on end-times (at least not in the last three years we’ve been attending). I like that. While the topic certainly shouldn’t be completely avoided (if Scripture speaks to it, it’s important), I think the American evangelical Church in my lifetime has spent WAY too much time obsessing over it. I think obsessive end-times speculation tends to appeal to something unholy in us, and - as Piper states in the above link - distracts us from Christ and His Gospel.
I believe Piper is a historic premillennialist. That is, he believes the millennium is in the future, but is not a dispensationalist and is therefore post-tribulational.
Personally, I am uncommitted, but bounce between Piper’s view and amillennialism.