Can We Know Truth with Complete Certainty?

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Arguments, logic, and careful analysis may give us 99 percent certainty for some doctrine or truth claim. But what about the remaining 1 percent?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, suffering has always been a major theme of our podcast with about 1,800 mentions of the word suffering alone, just the word suffering, 1,800 mentions in our podcast history.
0:14.3	You can find a digest of all the ways that this has been addressed in the Ask Pastor John book on pages 365 to 394. And we've recently concentrated
0:22.8	our attention on this theme more than normal, I would say. Suffering as we saw distinguishes
0:28.7	true ministry from the prosperity gospel preachers. We saw that in ABJ 2087. Then we looked at how
0:35.9	not to respond to suffering in APJ 2094, looking at Job's wife.
0:41.7	We looked at the pain of a woman who has been sorely mistreated and how she should respond in
0:46.2	APJ 2095. And last time we looked at how to press on in ministry even after God takes your
0:51.8	beloved wife away. That was in APJ, 2096. In this heavy season,
0:58.5	a grieving dad writes, and to ask us about his struggle with doubt in this anonymous email. Dear
1:03.1	Pastor John, my wife and I are grateful for your ministry and for this podcast and for the
1:06.5	impact you have had on our lives. In January of this year, my wife gave birth to our firstborn baby boy.
1:13.5	He was beautiful. My heart grew ten times. I've never seen my wife so happy. The Lord seemed to
1:19.5	answer all of our prayers of anxiety and worry, general and specific, with a regularity, which
1:25.5	frankly stunned me. These seemed to be gentle signs for my wife,
1:29.9	particularly, of his tender care and goodness to us. I sensed from this that despite our fears
1:35.8	about pregnancy and the health of our baby, the Lord's hand was with us, as I know it is.
1:41.2	Two weeks later, we woke up and our baby had suffocated. I did CPR for 10 minutes as the
1:47.3	paramedics arrived and took him. I prayed for God to make him breathe again. I prayed at the
1:53.2	hospital for the same thing, but he was gone. A situation which seemed too good to be true, so
1:59.4	quickly turned into a situation was seemed too terrible to be real.
2:04.6	Before this, I never processed deeply what happens when a child dies in infancy.
2:08.8	Given our situation, I've thought about this a lot over the last several weeks, including APJ episodes,
	...

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