I love the partnership with Crossway because to have a publisher whose heart beats with what you want to say is for me a hundred times better than to have a massive partner who doesn’t get it. So I love the relationship and I’m glad to be a part of this. Thanks for coming.

Questions About the Significance of the Bible

I sat down yesterday afternoon and I took this book, my Bible, in my hand, and I said, “Now Lord, I’m supposed to talk about this. How should I get at expressing the importance of the Bible?” If somebody said to you, “How important is the Bible?” where would your mind go? What kinds of questions would you ask? I spent about half an hour writing down five questions that I would ask of anything about how important it is, and then I applied them to the Bible. Let me give you those five questions and my personal answers.

1. What Would Happen if the Bible Didn’t Exist?

Question number one: what would happen if it did not exist? That would be one way to ask about the importance of something. My personal answer to that question was that there would be no saving knowledge of God. The Bible says that “the heavens are declaring the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). So if you look outside and you have eyes to see, you will see the glory of God, but you won’t get saved by it because you’re rebellious and you’re a sinner and you suppress the truth in unrighteousness, Paul says (Romans 1:18). And so that knowledge wouldn’t help me. It would only condemn me.

God has ordained that the Holy Spirit, who is the eye-opener, flies in tandem with the jet of the word. Where the word goes, the Holy Spirit goes. God has just set it up that way. Where this book is opened, the Holy Spirit reveals Christ. That’s his job.

The Holy Spirit does not do that with nature. He does not reveal himself, God, or Jesus, with the effect of regeneration through nature. He doesn’t. He does it through the Book. That’s amazing. There would be no saving knowledge illumined by the Holy Spirit without the Book.

2. What Would You Give to Have It?

Question number two: what would you give to have it, or what would you give to keep it? I’ll just give you a sentence. I just sat and thought, probably some of you in this room have access to a lot of money. I don’t know. But let’s say you had access to $500 million and you said to me, “I will give you $500 million not to read this book for a year,” I wouldn’t take it. On my life, I wouldn’t take it. You can keep your money and I will have my Bible. I know nobody would say that, but I’m groping for a way to express to you the preciousness of this book.

3. What Does the Bible Make Possible?

Question number three: what does it make possible? It makes fellowship with the living God possible for me. I do not enjoy communion with God any other way. If that sounds like an overstatement to you, talk to me about it. I don’t mean that I have to have the book open on my desk. I can walk through the day. Why? Because I’ve got hundreds of verses in my head. There are chapters in here. God talks to me no other way. But don’t get this wrong. He talks to me very personally.

I open my Bible in the morning to meet my friend, to meet my Savior, to meet my creator, to meet my sustainer, and I meet him and he talks to me. He said yesterday morning to me, as I was trembling with this prospect of messing up 4,000 people or helping 4,000 people:

I will make with [you] an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to [you]. And I will put the fear of me in [your] hearts, that [you] may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing [you] good, and I will plant [you] in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.

He said that to me yesterday. It happens to be in Jeremiah 32:40–41, but I am in the New Covenant. The blood of Jesus is covering me. The Spirit of Christ is in me. And when God makes a promise to his New Covenant people, saying, “I won’t turn away from doing you good,” he has the eyeballs of John Piper in his sight.

God never does that any other way. I’m not denying Providence, I’m not denying circumstances, and I’m not denying people. I’m just saying the only authoritative communion I have with God, with any certainty, comes through the words of this book. It is precious beyond measure.

4. How Does It Weather Detractors?

Question number four: how does it weather the detractors? How does it survive under opposition and criticism? The Bible has been relentlessly criticized for 4,000 years. The answer is all the hammers that beat against it are worn out. The Bible does not yield. It has lasted. It will last. Everything else goes away.

5. How Much Effort Should Be Given to Spread and Preserve It?

Question number five: how much effort should be given to spread it and preserve it? How much effort should I give to see that this book is in the hands of everyone in the world? How much effort should be given so that people can read, and that people have a faithful translation in their language? That was the hardest one for me to answer. My answer is more. I have other things to do. Or should I quit my job and do Bible translation?

That’s not an easy question for you or me to answer. How much should you do? How much should you spend? How much time should you devote to seeing that this book be preserved and then get into the hearts of people and get into the hands of the people who can’t read or can’t have a version in their understandable language?

I think all of us probably could answer it the way I did: more. No guilt here, just a little more. Just think how that might happen for you. It might be another 10 minutes a day, another prayer, another dollar, another dream, or for some of you, an explosive new life. So those are my five questions, and there are more. You could just go on and on about this book. It is infinitely precious that I have this book in English. It is incredible to me, and I love it.

The Quality of the ESV

There’s one or two other things I want to say. The ESV Bible has been published by Crossway and I like it. That’s what this is that I’m holding. When it came out, I got it because, in 1966, bought my first RSV at Wheaton College and used the RSV for Bible memorization for over 30 years. It went out of print. You couldn’t get an RSV. The NRSV replaced it and I think the NRSV is unusable for reasons that we don’t need to go into. That didn’t help me.

So I switched over to the NASB for preaching because it’s nice and literal, though it’s a little bit difficult to read in places. And when, through wonderful circumstances, Crossway was able to get the copyright for the RSV and then assemble the team of faithful scholars to render it even better, which is what this is, I was thrilled.

My Bible is back and I got it and I’ve preached from it, used it, and asked my church to make it the church for memorizing and liturgy and children’s ministries, and that’s what it is. So it was thrilling to me that when the expositors met here in February in Cairo to study Ephesians together the question was, “What version will we have on that piece of paper that you unfolded?” And there was no agenda for anybody. We just kind of did a little survey I think, and they did it by email so that we didn’t know what others were voting for. And we all sent out our passion for whatever we wanted, and the ESV emerged and I’m thankful for that.

It’s not the only translation, and it’s not a perfect translation. There aren’t any perfect translations, but I love it because of its combination. I wrote down four continuums where I think it gets the right balance:

• Readability versus strict formal equivalences
• Contemporary idiom versus historic phraseology
• Simplicity versus technical religious terms (including the ones that I think are really important)
• Preserving clarity versus original ambiguity

That last one is a really tricky one and it basically gets the right balance. So from my sense of how the Bible can be broadly useful from youth ministry to evangelism, to corporate worship, to memorizing to meditation to serious study, no version is perfect for all of those, but the ESV is really helpful in covering the whole ground.

Father of All Good Gifts

Let me close this regarding thinking and loving. When I put that phrase in the title that I gave Lane, here’s what I had in mind. I’m going to give you a few verses from Matthew 7 and then draw out what I mean by thinking and loving and I’ll stop. You know these words.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Now just stop there. That’s Matthew 7:7–11. That’s spectacular news. We have a Father who never gives us a stone when we ask for bread. Never. He may not give you the bread you want. It doesn’t say he gives the precise slice of bread you want at the precise moment, in the precise way that you ask. He just says, “He doesn’t give you a stone.” You don’t get every fish you want, but you don’t get snakes from your Father, ever. Cancer is not a snake. The point of those verses is that God is better than any father on earth. And he always gives good things.

We know that for those who love God all things work together for good . . . (Romans 8:28).

My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).

No good thing does he withhold
     from those who walk uprightly (Psalm 84:11).

Goodness and mercy shall follow me
     all the days of my life . . . (Psalm 23:6).

God does only good to his children. Never does he abuse his children. Never does he hold his children in contempt. This is spectacular. He’s the creator of the universe. He’s omnipotent and he’s always, always, always 100 percent for you. Of course he spanks us. That’s what Hebrews 12:3–7 says:

You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

He loves you, and he’s going to spank you. But he’s never holding you in contempt. He’s never giving you anything bad for you. Now that’s what I mean by loving God. What a God worthy to be loved.

Thinking for the Sake of Love

Now here’s the thinking part. The next word in Matthew 7:12 is therefore. He says:

Therefore whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

That’s the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It connects Matthew 7:7–11 by the word therefore. Why? Because loving other people like you would like to be loved is the hardest work in the world. It’s impossible, in fact, unless you believe you have a Father like that. If you believe that you have a Father who always meets your needs, who always cares for you — that wherever you are in the world, he is totally in charge and totally on your side and will only let what is good for you happen to you — you are the freest, most radical, most risk-taking person in the world to love other people. You don’t need anything from them. You have God for them. So you have to think about the therefores. That’s where thinking comes in. The importance of the Bible for thinking is that the Bible is full of glorious sentences connected with logical connectors.

A String of Pearls or a Chain of Steel?

I used to think when I was growing up that the Bible was like a string of pearls, and I would get a pearl in the morning and carry it all day long. I still do that. I memorize a verse in the morning and I take it with me all day. This morning it was:

There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish . . .

The little boy gave them to Jesus, and Jesus fed 5,000. When I read that I said, “Okay, good. There’ll be 50 or 60 people there this morning and I have a loaf and maybe God will feed them all.” So I still take these pearls. But now I see it’s not just a chain of pearls; it’s a chain of steel. And there are links to this and they can’t be broken. There are these therefore’s, and now that I see that I’m called to love, not just out of nowhere.

I’m told to love you as I would like to be loved because he said, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knocking the door will open. He’ll never give you a stone. He’ll never give you a snake” (Matthew 7:7–11). He is saying, “Go love people. Just go. I’m going to take care of you.” This book is very precious. We love people. We love him because we think with the illumination of the Holy Spirit about this book. And I hope that you love it. I’m sure you do, so I hope that you love it more.