Piper - Reinke - Ask Pastor John

Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024. – 536 p.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-8126-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8129-8

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8127-4

 

This book tells the story of one podcast—Ask Pastor John (APJ). Every day our audience sends us hard questions about life. I read the questions, select a few, and ask them to longtime author and pastor John Piper. We call him Pastor John. And we ask him about everything—smartphones, shopping, sex, self-pity, swearing, Satan, and salvation. Nothing is off-limits. He takes his answers from the Bible.

 

I submitted this book to the publisher in the first week of 2023, just a few days after we broadcasted our final episode of 2022—the bookend to our first decade. We have released 1,881 episodes, which have now been played over 230 million times, or about 125,000 times each. In the story of the universe these numbers are trivial, but in the story of this podcast they are remarkable reminders of God’s kindness to us.

 

The stats give a sense of the number of lives impacted over the years. Five years into the podcast, Pastor John began to notice that “of a constellation of influences people receive from Desiring God, APJ is one that people mention to me as much as any other—from moms shuttling their kids to school and playing the podcast on the way, to lawyers building it into their early morning exercise routines, to high school students taking a break from homework, to eighty-somethings whose eyes won’t read anymore.”1 The podcast’s rise has drawn other notice. As I was wrapping up this book, I heard Kevin DeYoung publicly celebrate Desiring God’s many valuable labors. Then he singled out the podcast as “chief among their media content.”2 So it’s no surprise that when he now travels, Pastor John is thanked for the podcast more than anything else he does. In conference venues, the most common badge of affiliation and appreciation he hears is from people who approach him simply to say, “I listen to APJ every week!”3

 

The podcast serves a steady diet of content to a growing audience that’s becoming increasingly diverse and international. It gathers older listeners, church leaders, and young adults, many of whom were raised in nominal or non-Christian homes and are now trying to navigate life as new believers. Across the generations, Pastor John’s voice is that of a (nearly eighty-year-old) mentor. One regular listener, a wife and mother, called APJ an “audible daily moment of gospel-centered encouragement, like a quick coffee with a dear friend who stirs my affections for Christ.”4 It is the unique power of persistent, steady, audio podcasting over the years to forge deep connections with listeners.5 So it’s also not a surprise when listeners tell us that Pastor John’s voice is like heeding the voice of a father, grandfather, mentor, or friend.

 

* * *

 

How does sex glorify God?

 

Animals mate through instincts and rituals, “amazing” revelations of the Creator’s glory. “So it is with human sexuality. We have instincts and desires and understandings that cause us to make love and reproduce the race. But without eyes to see the goodness and the glory of God in our sexuality, we are more like animals than we are like God.” So we open the Bible to be “thrown into a world of divine glory,” a world only visible to reborn eyes (1 Cor. 2:14). “Without spiritual life, without the awakening of our spirit by the Spirit of God, the reality of God, the glory of God in all things, we may have intense feelings and poetic thoughts about sex—even far above the animals—but we will never see the goodness and the glory that God reveals of himself in and through our sexuality.” Without spiritual vision, we will never see that sex “has to do with the glorious reality for which we are made, Jesus Christ.”

 

Three texts demonstrate these divine glories. (1) Sex demonstrates Christ’s relationship to his bride (Eph. 5:25–27). “The whole drama of marriage, including sex, is a drama about the glories of Christ’s covenant relation to his bride, the church. None of this reality is visible or enjoyable for the person without spiritual discernment.” (2) The married couple’s one-flesh sexual union illustrates our union to Christ (1 Cor. 6:15–17). Only Paul could weave together “the most nitty-gritty physical reality, like prostitution, with the most spiritual reality of our oneness with Christ.” Prostitution is a prostitution of our union with Christ. (3) The sexual union is how God binds a couple, in heaven, in a lifelong covenant (Mark 10:7–9). Thus “the goodness and the glory of sexuality is for those with eyes to see.”7

 

Without new eyes, we mishandle precious texts like the Song of Solomon. Blind to the beauty of allegorical realities, readers “stomp all over this beautiful poem,” like with spikes on, not slippers. This book “is not for men and women for whom sexual intercourse is merely a one-dimensional flight of passion” but for those who see in covenant sex a glorious “parable” about Christ and his church. The “literary sex” in Solomon’s song is allegorical. So too is the “real sex” in the marriage bedroom. Indeed, all physical life “points to something spiritual.” Glorifying God in sex requires spiritual eyes to make this connection. Our new eyes don’t make our physical lives less physical. They properly connect physical joys to eternal glories, our physical joys to our joy in Christ.8 So Solomon speaks of sexual pleasure “with such remarkable graphicness” because God is setting the stage for us to understand the union of Christ to his bride. If such connections embarrass us, our eyes need adjusting.9