A Hunger For God

Author:John Piper
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FASTING AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY

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When they fast, I am not going to listen to their cry; and when they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I am not going to accept them. Rather I am going to make an end of them by the sword, famine and pestilence.

—Jeremiah 14:12

Say to all the people of the land and to the priests, “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months these seventy years, was it actually for Me that you fasted?”

—Zechariah 7:5

“Why have we fasted and Thou dost not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and Thou dost not notice?” Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire, and drive hard all your workers.

—Isaiah 58:3

The Ambiguity of Fasting

All of these passages are designed to caution us not to elevate any outward ritual, like fasting, to the level of a sure key to unlock revival. God is free to send revival with or without fasting. Jonathan Edwards longed for revival as much as anyone, and he called for prayer and fasting loud and clear. Yet he also discov- ered something profound in his own experience about the free- dom of God’s sovereignty. He wrote,

How often we have mocked God with hypocritical pretenses of humiliation, as in our annual days of public fasting and other things, while instead of reforming, we only grew worse and worse; how dead a time it was everywhere before this work began. If we consider these things, we shall be most stupidly ungrateful, if we don’t acknowledge God’s visiting of us as he has done, as an instance of the glorious triumph of free and sovereign grace.13

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