A Book About Glory and Truth
If you want to learn more about your predisposition for glory and your hunger for truth, you need to pick up John Piper’s newest resource, A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness. In a masterful way, Piper weaves the concepts of glory and truth together in the pages of this book.
At some point, every Christian is confronted with this question: Is the Bible—the books that make up the Old and New Testaments—completely true? It’s a question of faith that cannot be circumvented. It must be finally answered if your searching heart is ever going to find rest.
But there’s something deeper that every Christian must also recognize: This quest for truth is actually a quest for glory.
Piper powerfully depicts how our predisposition for glory and our hunger for the truth intersect on the pages of God’s holy Word. In expert fashion, he teaches how the glory of God in Scripture demonstrates its truthfulness. He says, “We know Scriptures to be true, not because our light shows them to be so, but because their divine light shines with its own unique, all-enlightening, all-exposing glory.”
To say that the Bible is true is not a guess, a wager or a leap, because the glory of God in and through his written Word is a real, objective and self-authenticating reality. This is the Bible’s purpose—to display that glory—and the capability of Scripture to do this reveals the handiwork of the glory of God for which every human heart longs, whether they know it or not.
There’s one more game changing observation that Piper makes: The glory that is revealed in Scripture which authenticates its truthfulness is not a general glory, but a specific self-authenticating glory.
The Bible is trustworthy, not just because of its ability to deeply impress and dazzle us, and not just because of the preponderance of the glory it reveals to us, but because it presents to us a specific and divine glory: “the utterly unique glory of Jesus Christ.”
Our hunger for the truth is actually a hunger for glory, and our hunger for glory is actually a hunger for the glory that is Jesus. Scripture is trustworthy because it alone is able to display that Jesus-glory and satisfy our hunger once and for all.
I Love This Book
I loved reading A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness. I so appreciate the impact it had, and will continue to have, on both my love for Scripture and my worship of my Savior. I am deeply grateful for John Piper and the journey he leads readers on through the pages of this wonderful book—a masterful statement for the unique truthfulness of God’s Word.
But this book is more. In it, you’ll be confronted with the devastating damage that sin has on all of us. In it, you’ll be encouraged by the grace of the rescue in the illumining power of the Spirit. In it, the eyes of your heart will see the heart-changing, life-altering glory of God in the person and work of Jesus once again.
Yes, this is a book about the truthfulness of Scripture—and it accomplishes that task thoroughly—but it’s so much more. So go out and buy this book even if you don’t have harbor doubts about the Old and New Testaments.
Take the journey with the knowledgeable and seasoned guide that John Piper is. Like me, you’ll be so glad you did.
Watch author John Piper talk about his new book, A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness.
