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A Hunger for God - desiring God through fasting and prayer
A hunger for God:
desiring God through fasting and prayer
By John Piper
IVP. 240 pages. £7.99
Anyone who reads the history of church life in the 18th and early part of the 19th centuries and compares it with evangelical life today will notice a marked difference. Whereas fasting, whether individual or communal, was frequent then, today it is largely absent. Now, when church life is at a low ebb, we send for an evangelist; then our forebears called for a time of humiliation and fasting.
On his own confession John Piper's hero in theology is Jonathan Edwards, a theologian whose dominant theme is glorifying God. Dr. Piper has given a new twist to Edwards in arguing (I believe legitimately) that God is most glorified when believers most delight in him. This new book is part of an exploration of this insight, an exploration begun in his first book Desiring God.
The author tells us why he wrote this book. 'My aim and prayer in writing this book is that it might awaken a hunger for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. Fasting proves the presence, and fans the flame, of that hunger. It is an intensifier of spiritual desire. It is a faithful enemy of fatal bondage to innocent things. It is the physical exclamation point at the end of the sentence. 'This much, O God, I long for you and for the manifestation of your glory in the world!' (p.22).
Fasting is not to be confined to the era of the old covenant, but practised under the new covenant, as Piper convincingly shows in his exegesis of Matthew 9.14-17. There is a newness about Christian fasting. The newness is this: its intensity comes not because we have never tasted the wine of Christ's presence, but because we have tasted it so wonderfully by his Spirit, and cannot now be satisfied until the consummation of joy arrives' (p.42).
Fasting is for the reward of the Father, not in any manipulative sense, but for God himself: 'The supremacy of God in all things is the great reward we long for in fasting' (p.78). Fasting is also for the coming of the King. It is the church's 'Maranatha!' 'Come, Lord Jesus!' - an expression of our longing to see his face. Yet it is not a pacifist withdrawal from the world, but an engagement with its hurts and injustices as Isaiah 58 so clearly shows. Those who fast for the poor and the helpless will be most active in fighting for their cause.
Personally, I found the last chapter of the book the most challenging. It is addressed to the issue of fasting to change false worldviews, a concept unfamiliar to most of us, I suspect, but which is profoundly biblical. Piper pinpoints abortion as an appalling expression of a false worldview. Francis Schaeffer realised this: 'Compassion . . . is being undermined'. And it is not only the babies who are being killed; it is humanness which the humanist worldview is beating to death' (quoted p.162). Fasting for the little ones is something our complacent evangelical churches need seriously to consider. In public worship I never hear prayer offered for the removal of legislation which allows for the daily slaughter of the innocent unless I offer it myself. When will the churches of our land wake up to this evil as once they woke up to the evil of slavery?
I have one criticism of Dr. Piper's fine book, which I urge every serious-minded Christian to buy, ponder and act upon. It needs an additional chapter on fasting for the removal of God's wrath. Here Joel 2 and related passages need exposition and application. When we recover the idea that God out of holy jealousy can be angry with his people, we shall be less likely to send for an evangelist, and more likely to fast and pray for his return to us in power and glory.
David Kingdon
© Evangelicals Now - September 1998
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