Seeing the Rising Sun by John Piper

Seeing the Rising Sun By John Piper

Editor’s Note: I recently was sent John Piper’s new book Providence by the publisher Crossway. In reading the introduction of the book, he describes seeing the rising sun as part of the God-entranced world. This is one of four invitations he to understand providence in the introduction. Although I have just begun this long book, I am using part of this introduction chapter to encourage you today as it served as a great encouragement to me as well. In this section, he refers to seeing the rising sun as part of God’s daily providence which should encourage us.

Seeing the Rising Sun

I will never cease to be thankful that in my college days, Clyde Kilby was one of my literature professors. He gave a lecture once on the awakening of amazement at the strange glory of ordinary things. He closed the lecture with ten resolutions for what he called “mental health.”[4] Here are two of them:

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what [C. S.] Lewis calls their “divine, magical terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

Because of Kilby’s eye-opening influence, and because of what I now see in the Bible as an all-embracing, all-pervasive providence, I live more consciously in a God-entranced world. I see reality differently. For example, I used to look at sunrises when I was jogging and think that God has created a beautiful world. Then it became less general and more specific, more personal. I said, “Every morning God paints a different sunrise.” He never gets tired of doing it again and again. But then it struck me. No, he doesn’t do it again and again. He never stops doing it. The sun is always rising somewhere in the world. God guides the sun twenty-four hours every day and paints sunrises at every moment, century after century without one second of respite, and never grows weary or less thrilled with the work of his hands. Even when cloud cover keeps man from seeing it, God is painting spectacular sunrises above the clouds.

God does not intend for us to look at the world he has made and feel nothing. When the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1), he does not mean this only for the clarification of our theology. He means it for the exultation of our souls. We know this because of what follows:

In [the heavens] he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. (Ps 19:4-5)

What is the point of saying this? When we look at the handiwork of God in creation, we are to be drawn into bridegroom-like joy and into the joy of an Eric Liddell running with head back, elbows pumping, smile bursting in Chariots of Fire, basking in the very pleasure of God.

I am inviting you into a God-entranced world. No, we are not naïve about the miseries every sunrise meets. You will, perhaps, be shocked at the implications of God’s pervasive providence in the suffering and death of this world. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away (Job 1:21). And the exulting sun dawns on 150,000 new corpses every morning. That’s how many people die every day. In a world with this much God-entranced beauty, and this much God-governed horror, the biblical command to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Rom 12:15) means that we will continually be “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10).

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