This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on June 30, 2026.
Jesus orchestrated the brutal murder of your teenage friend and her mom. So says John Piper in a recent “Ask Pastor John” podcast episode titled, “Sovereignty and My Murdered Friend.”
The podcast begins by acknowledging it’s a “very heavy episode” before asking people to donate to their “Next Generation Vision to aggressively spread great joy in a big God to the next generation.”
Then going with the “next generation” theme, they introduce the story of a 17-year-old girl who asks Piper about God’s role in the brutal murder of two people she cares about deeply.
“A girl who was my close teammate and her mother were recently brutally murdered,” the high school student begins. “People say this was ‘her time’ or ‘God’s will,’ but I don’t understand how this can be true.” So she asks Piper, “How can I reconcile this and turn to the Lord for comfort and understanding in my grief?”
Remember, Piper’s paradigm is to “aggressively spread great joy in a big God.” And in the case of this grieving young girl, that means accusing Jesus of being big enough to murder her friends without being held responsible for it.
God disapproves what God ordains
It should be no surprise that Piper would suggest such abusive drivel. He begins by telling the teenage girl he’s already spent several podcast episodes explaining “whether God can and does will that things happen which are sinful.”
“It should be no surprise that Piper would suggest such abusive drivel.”
As I noted in a previous piece about Piper’s war on lament: “In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, which Piper edited, Mark Talbot claims God ‘… brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Nadar and even the sexual abuse of a young child.’”
Then Piper suggests: “God disapproves of some of what he ordains to happen. That is, he forbids some of the things he brings about.”
In Don’t Waste Your Cancer, Piper says God gives kids cancer as a “gift” and a “purifying pathway to heaven” in order to “destroy the appetite for sin” through a “golden opportunity to show that (Christ) is worth more than life.”
So of course Piper’s God would decree the brutal murder of a teenage girl and her mom. If Piper’s God already causes sexual assault and cancer, why would murder be any different?
It’s a mystery
Piper points the girl to such verses as Proverbs 16:33, which says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Or James 4:15, which says, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”