The Supremacy of God

in the Life of the Mind

Northwestern College Chapel | Minneapolis

 Resource by
John Piper

 Topic: Life of the Mind

I come to you today with a burden for the supremacy of God in the life of the mind. I
speak to you as people who are called for a season of your life to engage in the work
of the mind. I speak to students and faculty and administration concerning this
tremendously crucial matter, because I believe it's your calling in this community to
cultivate in each other the ability and the habit and the desire to read with
understanding, and think with accuracy, and observe with discernment, and research
with thoroughness, and evaluate with fairness, and memorize with discipline, and
write with clarity, and speak with cogency, and perform with excellence, and hate
what is evil, and love what is good, and feel with fitting passions all the beauty and
goodness and truth of our great God and his amazing world.

I believe that this is your calling in these days. My burden is that in all of this—in all
the life of the mind—the supremacy of God would be manifest at Northwestern
College and in your individual labors.

I have no particular indictment to make on this point. I don't know what goes on here
from day to day in any detail. I only know that I sense in general in evangelical higher
education that the manifest supremacy of God in the life of the mind is not apriority,
just like it is not a priority in preaching, and church growth, and missions, and social
work, and entertainment, and almost every other sphere of life.

I sense that in the humanities and the natural sciences and social sciences and the arts
God and his Word are often taken for granted. If someone queries why concrete
biblical truth is not more explicitly wrestled with in relation to the tenets of literature
or sociology or history or economics or psychology or speech or math or chemistry or
physics or theater or physical education or political science—if someone queries why
the biblical vision of reality has such a low profile, the answer is too often, "We take
that for granted. That's our working assumption while we deal with the world of
contemporary thought and practice. That's the foundation on which we build."

Making God Explicit in Your Life

What I want to say this morning is that God does not like to be taken for granted. God
does not want to be a silent assumption. Speaking of God as the foundation for the life
of the mind is a wholly inadequate metaphor. That he is! O, yes, and a great and deep
and unshakable foundation he is. But foundations are invisible, and are seldom
thought about in the daily life of the house. They are taken for granted. They are
silently assumed.

But God wills not only to be the massive, silent, unseen foundation beneath the walls
of our academic lives; he also wills to be the visible cap stone adorning the top and
the brightness of the glory that fills the house for all to see.
I want to plead with you this morning—students and faculty and administration—that
you not imprison God in the silent basement of your busy academic houses by taking
him for granted and calling him merely the Foundation for your labor.

There is a more radical, more pervasive way that God wills to be honored in your
academic work. I call it the supremacy of God in the life of the mind.

A Foundation for the Supremacy of God

Let me give a biblical foundation—an explicit, manifest foundation—for this
supremacy from the story of the Exodus. What we see in this story above all else is
that God does not like to be taken for granted. He does not like to be a silent
assumption. He has an almost unbelievable passion to be central and supreme and
celebrated.

The contest with Pharaoh begins and things at first go very badly for the Israelites.
But God comes to Moses and says,

Say therefore to the people of Israel, 'I am the LORD . . . and I will redeem you with
an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment . . . and you shall know that I am
the LORD your God. (Exodus 6:6–7)

God wills to be known among his people as a great and powerful deliverer.

But not only among his people. He wills to be known as the Lord among the
Egyptians as well. He sends Moses back to Pharaoh with these words:
I will lay my hand upon Egypt and bring forth my . . . people . . . out of the land of
Egypt by great acts of judgment. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD."
(Exodus 7:4–5)

He does not want to be the silent assumption of the Israelites; he wants to be

acknowledged as supreme Lord over the Egyptians.

The Terrible Power of God

Then begin the ten plagues. And in this narrative Moses gives us a litany of God's
words about his will to be supreme in all the world—one trumpet blast after the other
calling all the world to marvel at the supremacy of God over all the powers of the
universe.

Exodus 8:9–10, "[Tomorrow] the frogs will be destroyed from you and your houses . . .

that you may know that there is no one like the LORD our God."
Exodus 9:15–16, "By now I could have put forth my hand . . . and you would have been

cut off from the earth: but for this purpose have I let you live, to show you my power,
so that my name may be declared throughout all the earth."

So we can see that God wills for his power to be known and marveled at not just in
Israel and not just among the Egyptians, but in all the earth. God is jealous for his
reputation in all the universe—that he be known and celebrated as central and
supreme everywhere.

Exodus 9:29, "As soon as I [Moses] have gone out of the city, I will stretch out my

hands to the LORD; the thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, that you
may know that the earth is the LORD's."
God wants the to world know not only his power, but also his Creator rights over all
the earth—over every discipline in the academy and over every sphere of culture: he
owns everything. This is not a doctrine he wants tucked away in a book, not a silent
assumption, but a daily conscious sense that controls the way we handle all things and
all truth.

Exodus 10:1–2, "Go in to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his

servants, in order that I may show these signs of mine among them, and that you may
tell in the hearing of your son and of your son's son how I have made sport of the
Egyptians and what signs I have done among them; that you may know that I am the
LORD."

God not only wills that the Egyptians and the Israelites and all the nations hear and
know of his mighty power and creator rights over all things; but he also has a view to
the coming generations—"I am doing these things now in Egypt so that all
generations may know and marvel at my power and right, even the 20th century."

Remembering the Power of God

So he establishes the Passover tradition as a part of the ten plagues—the tradition that
we now continue in the form of the Lord's Supper. Why? God answers,

In the time to come, when your son asks you, "What does this [Passover] mean?" you
shall say to him, "By strength of hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the
house of bondage." (Exodus 13:14)

The Passover means that the hand of the Lord is mighty to save. The Passover means
that all generations should remember that the Lord is God and that he did unspeakably
great wonders in Egypt for his people. The Passover memorializes the supremacy of
God over all other powers.

Then came the night of death angel and God said,

Not a dog will growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast; that you
may know that the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel
(Exodus 11:7).

Persistent Revelation
The litany is unmistakable: that you may know . . . that you may know . . . that you
may know . . . the supremacy of God in all the universe.

And when the people are almost out of Egypt, God commands Moses to turn them
back from the simple land route, and sends them into a trap between Migdol and the
sea (Exodus 14:2). Why did God do that? So that neither they nor we would miss the
point of what God has been doing for all these ten plagues—and is still doing. He
explains to Moses,
Because Pharaoh will say . . . "They are entangled in the land; the wilderness has shut
them in." And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he will pursue them and I will get
glory over Pharaoh and all his host; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the
LORD. (Exodus 14:3–4)

The Glory of God is the Point

The aim of the whole great conflict with rebellious Pharaoh is that God might get
glory—that he might be shown and known as the Lord over all kings and over all
gods, and as owner of all the earth, and that his supremacy in all the universe might be
marveled at by his people and his enemies and all the coming generations, even today,
including the students and faculty and administration of Northwestern College.

God does not like to be taken for granted. God wills to be central and supreme and
celebrated in all of life, including the life of the mind.

I think what I am pleading for here is very hard for people to grasp because our age is
so utterly and thoroughly God-ignoring, which is probably worse than God-despising.
We get all worked up when Hugh Downs puts people like James Dobson in the same
category with Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan because they all claimed Christian
sanction for their "family values" crusades. But we swallow hook, line, and sinker the
utter absence of God as normal. Aggression against God offends us: but omission of
God escapes us.

We get anesthetized to the unspeakable and appalling insult rendered to God day in
and day out by his being ignored. It starts to feel normal—the way it's normal not to
think about air or a solid earth under our feet.

Seeing God in All of Life

For example, God owns the land under Cowles Media Building where the offices of
the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are housed. He owns the building. He also supplies all
the paper used in production from his own trees. He also gives life to every custodian,
manager, reporter, editor, and publisher. He holds them and their computers in being
every second of the day. He designed their brains for marvelous use. He preserves
order in society so that their business can prosper. He governs and controls all events
that they report, and he himself is the most interesting, powerful, intelligent Person in
the universe.

And what is the response of the newspaper to this reality? Sports get an entire section
in the paper and God gets not one column. Now test your numbness to blasphemy.
Has that shocked you? If it does not, then you may be unable to recognize when God
is not supreme in the life of the mind. Which is why I am delivering this message.

But I fear that we preachers are a great part of the problem. The absence of God's
supremacy is not unique to academia or the media. Albert Einstein gave a devastating
indictment of preaching fifty years ago that may be more true today. Charles Misner, a
scientific specialist in general relativity theory, was quoted like this:

[The design of the universe] is very magnificent and shouldn't be taken for granted. In
fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he
strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the
preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much
more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the
real thing.1

When God is taken for granted, and functions as a silent assumption, while we talk
about other good things, his majesty is abased and his glory is obscured and his
supremacy in the life of the mind vanishes. And people may well say, "I wonder if
they have seen the real thing."

My Hope for You

 May it not be said of any course at Northwestern College that the students and the
faculty in state universities have seen more mystery, or more wonder, or more majesty
than we have seen—we who know the One from whom and through whom and for
whom all things exist and hold together.

I am not pleading for anything superficial—just another prayer at the beginning of

class, just another Bible verse quoted. I am pleading for the deep, earnest, thorough
engagement with God and his Word and his ways at every level of research and
analysis and interpretation and reflection and creation. All things—every academic
discipline—were made by God and for God. His fingerprints are everywhere. The
main meaning of all things derives from their relation to God. Not to seek that
meaning with all our heart and mind and soul is to be superficial, no matter what
grades we make, no matter what articles we publish.

My closing prayer: may the supremacy of God in the life of the mind be the title over
this academic chapter of your life.

1. Quoted in First Things, Dec. 1991, No. 18, p. 63 (italics added). ↩

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem
College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church,
Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations
of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Why I Love the Apostle Paul: 30 Reasons.