Measuring the Ultimate Measure of Truth (John Piper)

Kirk E. Miller

We pursue some thoughts triggered by Psalm 36:9: ‘In your light do we see light.’ And these thoughts are provoked further by the catalyst of a famous quote from C. S. Lewis: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’

Ordinarily when we seek to have a well-grounded conviction about some claim to truth in this world, we bring all our experience to bear on the claim and try to make sense out of it. What we know from experience before we hear the claim, we apply to the claim to see if it measures up. Does it cohere with what we know to be true? Does it make sense in the light of what we already know? What we know from experience is the standard, the arbiter, the measure of truth.

But what happens when we encounter a claim that says, “I am the Standard, the Arbiter, the Truth”? This claim is unique. It is not like other claims to truth in this world. When the ultimate Measure of all reality speaks, you don’t subject this Measure to the measure of your mind or your experience of the world. He created all that. When the ultimate Standard of all truth and beauty appears, he is not put in the dock to be judged by the prior perceptions of truth and beauty that we bring to the courtroom.

The eternal, absolute original is seen as true and beautiful not because he coheres with what we know but because all the truth and beauty we know coheres in him. It is measured by him, and it is seen flowing from him. He does not make sense, and thus have plausibility, in the light of this world. He brings sense to the world. He is sense. The light that we have in the world does not shine on him and reveal his truth. He is the light of the world, and in his light we see light.

—John Piper, A Peculiar Glory, 158-159

Love One Another (1 John 3:11-18)

Kirk E. Miller

Love One Another (1 John 3:11-18)
CrossWay Community Church
September 20th, 2020

Podcast link.

Critiquing God by the Standard of His Own Morality?

Kirk E. Miller

My daughter, nearing 3-years-old, has entered the stage where she’s beginning to take the moral instructions I’ve given her (e.g., rules about how we are to behave) and to apply them to me, in ways that seem to make sense to her… but don’t actually make sense.

I’ll make up an example. Say I tell her, “You need to eat all your vegetables.” Now whether or not she always follows it, she’s absorbed that “moral code.” So let’s say she sees me discarding a rotten carrot from my plate. She objects, “No, daddy! You have to eat all your vegetables!”

It’s cute. She’s not trying to be defiant. Her inherent sense of moral order is showing. In fact, she’s using my own moral code that I myself gave her to instruct me on moral order.

Now, in this case she’s wrong. And I can tell her, “No, we don’t eat rotten vegetables.” But she nonetheless insists in demanding of me adherence to this “moral order” that she’s been taught, forgetting all the while that I’m the one who taught it to her in the first place and so probably knows otherwise. She borrows from my own moral code in order to critique my moral code.

It got me thinking: Isn’t this so much like the objections we make to the supposed immorality of God? We critique God for (as far as we see it) acting unjustly or immorally. “That was wrong of God! I don’t want to worship a God who does that!” All the while, where did we even get this standard of morality to begin with? We have to first believe in a God of morality to even begin critiquing the morality of God. It’s self-defeating.

We can attempt to critique the morality of God. But from where do we get such morality? Who are we to say what is right and wrong? Where do we get the authority to say, “He is wrong”? By what standard? Our own? And from where have we learned such things except from him?