An Overview of the Book
While John Piper’s All that Jesus Commanded: The Christian Life according to the Gospels is hot off the press, it is actually a revised, second edition of his earlier work, What Jesus Demands from the World (2006). “The new title,” Piper explains, “is intended to make more clear the relevance of this book for every Christian. It deals with every command Jesus gave and how it relates to Christian living today.”[1] Indeed, the main title is a direct allusion to Jesus’ Great Commission as it appears in Matthew’s Gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (28:19–20).[2]
The book, then, is Piper’s eminently pastoral effort to explain the commands of Jesus to disciples of Jesus in as concise and comprehensible a manner as possible. Now, as the subtitle suggests, Piper “draws out the meaning of these commands from the four Gospels themselves not the rest of the New Testament.”[3] Intriguingly, he believes that his unique approach will demonstrate “the unity of the New Testament” because what he presents will be “so compatible with what the other New Testament writers thought.”[4]
While preparing to write this book, Piper indexed more than five-hundred commands of Jesus from across the four Gospels. He then pared down the number of these five-hundred by identifying repeated commands and grouping them together while also excluding time-constrained commands such as telling the paralytic man to take up his mat.[5] What he ended up with were fifty direct commands of Jesus that form the fifty chapters of the book. To his credit, though, Piper humbly confesses, “I do not claim to have commented on every command. My hope is that enough categories and enough specific commands are handled to give help even for those that I may have passed over.”[6]
A book of this nature could easily devolve into list-based legalism: do this, do not do that, and you will be right with God. But that is not what we find in Piper. From the outset of the book, he stresses the impossibility of obeying Jesus in our own strength.[7] Rather, if we would obey Jesus, a reorienting and enabling work of divine grace is needed. “On the basis of who he was and what he accomplished,” writes Piper, “Jesus gave his commands. The commands cannot be separated from his person and work. The obedience he commands is the fruit of his redeeming work and the display of his personal glory.”[8]
In other words, when we look to Jesus, the one Who walked in perfect obedience to God, we see our own failure to obey, and rejoice in His obedience on our behalf. When we look to Jesus, the one Who died on account of our sins, we see our need for forgiveness and the purchase of it on the cross. When we look to Jesus, risen from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father, we see the one Who has the power to enable our obedience for the glory of God.
Understood in the light of the gospel, the commands of Jesus are not burdensome. Much to the contrary, as Piper puts it, “When the most glorious person in the universe pays all my debts (Matt. 20:28), and then commands that I come to live with him and enter into his joy (Matt. 25:21), there can be no more desirable command imaginable.”[9] The commands of Jesus are not legalistic lists of dos and don’ts but an invitation to a way of life that glorifies God, as Piper is famous for arguing, maximizing our joy in life.[10]
With this backdrop in mind—and he will remind readers of it often—Piper spends the next fifty chapters (409 pages), expositing the fifty commands of Jesus that he identifies in the Gospels. The commands are not listed chronologically as they appear in the Gospels. Instead, Piper arranges them from what he terms “gentler commands toward the more difficult” and from internal (“mind and heart”) commands to commands requiring “external action.” He takes this approach “because the kind of obedience Jesus commands moves from the inside (where the value of Jesus is savored) to the outside (where the value of Jesus is shown).”[11]
Clearly, space will not permit a summary of each chapter, but I will mention two of particular importance: one that is gentler and internal, and one that is more difficult and external. One of the gentler, internal commands that Piper mentions is Jesus’ command to repent, which means more “than mere sorrow for sin or mere improvement of behavior.”[12] Indeed, through a careful analysis of Biblical texts and clearly explained etymology, Piper defines repentance as “a change of mind so that we can see God as true and beautiful and worthy of all our praise and all our obedience.”[13]
A more difficult command requiring external action is “Love Your Enemies—Do Good to Those Who Hate You, Give to the One Who Asks.” In this chapter, Piper draws on key biblical texts (the commands of Jesus and Jesus’ example) to show that “loving our enemy means practical acts of helpfulness in the ordinary things of life. God gives his enemies sunshine and rain. You give your enemies food and water. This and many other practical things are included in the simple phrase ‘do good.’”[14]
Each chapter is replete with biblical references, theological reflection, and practical application. Moreover, Piper does well to cover a myriad of topics including abiding in Jesus, prayer, anxiety, forgiveness, attitude, marriage, taking oaths, the relationship of the Christian to the state, and much more.
A Free Will Baptist Appraisal
John Piper has produced yet another wonderful resource that will glorify God by helping disciples of Jesus learn to obey their Master’s commands. All that Jesus Commanded will doubtlessly draw its readers into a closer relationship with Jesus and transform their walk with him for the better. While the book as a whole is long, the short nature of each chapter makes this a superb supplement for private or family devotions. Alternatively, the fact that the book is fifty chapters long (plus a lengthy introduction and appendix) makes this an excellent choice for a weekly small group’s year-long study. I am hopeful that many Christians will take up this book and read it. However, no book is perfect, and I would like to offer a couple points of criticism and/or caution.
First, Piper is obviously a Calvinist. Unsurprisingly, Free Will Baptists will find some parts of the book that deal with soteriology disagreeable. In fairness to Piper, the vast majority of these discussions are wholly acceptable to Free Will Baptists. Yet he offers some sentences and phrases that are not so acceptable. For instance, he writes,
How then has anyone ever come [to Jesus], since we are all enslaved to sin and spiritually dead . . . ? Jesus’s answer was that God, in his great mercy, overcomes our resistance and draws us: ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him’ (John 6:44). . . . God grants the gift of new birth and repentance, which opens the eyes of the spiritually blind to the truth and beauty of Jesus.[15]
Free Will Baptists wholeheartedly affirm that sinners cannot come to Jesus apart from God’s grace drawing them; we further believe that repentance and the new birth are gifts of God. However, notice how Piper subtly describes irresistible grace (“overcomes our resistance”), places the new birth before repentance in the order of salvation, and assumes that God’s preceding act of grace ensures a response. At other points in the book, Piper argues for a Calvinist understanding of perseverance (i.e., he denies the possibility of apostasy), as well as a supralapsarian doctrine of election.[16] Even so, I do not believe these stray sentences and phrases detract from the overall message of the book.
Second, Piper rightfully devotes a chapter to observing baptism and the Lord’s Supper. However, Free Will Baptists will lament that Piper omits one of the clearest commandments of Jesus: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14–15). The fact that this verse does not receive even a passing citation in a 418-page book about the commands of Jesus is striking, especially when, as Jack W. Stallings explains, “the wording of v. 14 . . . is both literal and emphatic.”[17]
These shortcomings notwithstanding, All that Jesus Commanded is a must read for any believer who desires to take the commands of Jesus seriously. Piper, for his part, certainly does.
[1]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded: The Christian Life according to the Gospels (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), xv.
[2]All Scripture references will be from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
[3]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xv.
[4]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xxiii.
[5]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 417.
[6]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 417.
[7]Cf. Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xv.
[8]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xxi.
[9]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xxiii.
[10]Piper is famous for formulating what he dubs “Christian Hedonism,” or the idea that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Or: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever” (John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals [Nashville: B&H, 2013], 61).
[11]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, xxiii.
[12]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 5.
[13]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 6–7.
[14]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 241.
[15]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 13.
[16]Piper, All that Jesus Commanded, 42, 189.
[17]Jack W. Stallings, The Gospel of John, The Randall House Bible Commentary, ed. Robert E. Picirilli (Nashville: Randall House, 1989), 192.
Recent Comments