Jonathan Miller

In summary, this is madness. Throughout this entire “book” Piper says the same thing over and over, “God is good. God is in control of everything. So everything is meant for good.” He spends quite a lot of time explaining how God is in control of every little spec of this universe, but doesn’t grasp how that could make him one iota responsible for the suffering he creates or infringe on his perfect “goodness” in any way. He doesn’t explain how all of the horrors of history are working for good because that’s part of God’s mystery, and more importantly because he can’t. He doesn’t explain how this pandemic specifically is working for good either, he just repeats his crude transitive statement in a myriad of deceptive and baiting ways, hoping to ensnare the fearful and emotionally weak with a promise of a “rock”. Worshiping a God who has personally orchestrated every death in human history is vile and ridiculous. This absurd philosophy which lets him off the hook simply because a few people get to spend eternity with him, while countless others are tortured to satisfy his wicked sense of “justice”, is utterly reprehensible. There is no excuse for a perfect God to create a fallen world. There is no excuse to punish creation for “sin”, when the only reason said “sin” entered the world is God’s plan. Most of all there is no excuse for this farce to continue for thousands upon thousands of years while God takes his sweet time watching his story play out. It is this rank absurdity that made me reject Christianity. You can work your way around historical or scientific flaws if there is still a core philosophical truth to a system of beliefs, but the center of Judeo Christian belief is so utterly rotten, self-defeating, and devoid of reason that there can be no truth to it. Yaweh is supposedly perfect and devoid of the smallest sin, yet he creates an entire universe, introduces evil and lets it fester for millennia, just so he can swoop in and save a chosen few from it, and doom the rest to eternal torture. The God of the Bible is such a purely villainous, vain, and wretched character, personally responsible for every evil that he claims to be the perfect opposition to. I pity John Piper’s wasted life. He seems a man of character who could teach many people many things, but the “rock” he has anchored his life to is nothing more than a millstone of absurdity. If Piper could set aside his most basic assumption, that God is good and anything God does is automatically good, he need not even stray from the study of scripture to see the end of Christianity. The most cursory examination of Genesis will leave the reader with dozens of supremely cruel actions the creator took. The drowning of millions in the flood, the fragmentation of humanity at Babel, the thousands of dead children in Sodom and Gomorrah, slain because their parents were naughty etc. If you take away the core assumption that “because God does it, it is good”, God is not good. Piper’s wasted life is the perfect example of why “the unexamined life is not worth living.”