Dear John Piper (Stillbirth in Space)

John Piper wants to put me away
Because I believe in possibilities and that's not okay, (he tells me)
You've got to draw horns on your picture of god
Deliciously capricious and vicious
Don't you spare them the rod

No fate but what we make
Corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace

God goes strolling through the nursery
Playing duck duck goose
Appointing babies for destruction
And they just can't refuse (poor baby)
Sovereign all-controlling God
Who pushed over man
You set the table for our failure
You put the fruit in our hands
It must be lonely when you sort it all out
The sheep from the goats the listing boat of all these questions and doubts
Someone must rise and swell and eclipse the moon
Like so many loathsome spiders skittering to their doom

No fate but what we make
Corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace
No fate but what we make
No divine hand that's behind genocide
No good behind rape

Hail the sovereign Lord
Who turns the world like a toy
He chooses suffering for children
Their agony brings him joy (but only sort of)

All-powerful, so strong
He sends molesters to children
All that he does is true and is good
And no one can resist him
Ever all-controlling
Who sends earthquakes and famine
The author of suffering and death
Who can understand him?
It's best to shut your mouth and hope for the best
Cause even when you catch the worst
It's still kind of like the best

If indeed there was a God whose true nature—whose justice or sovereignty—were revealted in the death of a child or the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell, then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge, and to hate him, and to deny him worship, and to seek a better God than he

John Piper wants to put me away
Because I believe in possibilities and that's not okay