Quotes from John N. Oswalt

But the idea that this world is not self-explanatory and that revelation from beyond it is necessary to understand it is profoundly distasteful to us humans. It means that we are not in control of our own destiny or able to make our own disposition of things for our own benefit. This thought, the thought that we cannot supply our ultimate needs for ourselves, that we are dependent on someone or something utterly beyond us, is deeply troublesome.

God's presence is the one inescapable fact of human life. We will encounter him in one way or another. Those who make a place for him find him to be the glue that holds everything together. Those who ignore him find their lives to be askew and cannot understand why. They have left out the most crucial factor in the equation of their lives, so that everything will always be unbalanced. The Lord God is either a sanctuary to dwell in or a stone to stumble over.

The fact is, God is not too concerned whether we are happy or not. But he is very concerned over whether we are holy.

True trust always involves an element of waiting. It means believing in results that we cannot see. A determination to have the results I want now is a major sign of an inability to trust.

People who have made God in their own image are in the darkness, and they desperately need the light that streams from the Cross and the empty tomb.

The great danger of maturation is calcification.

God is strong enough to overcome his enemies by becoming vulnerable, transparent, and humble—the only hope, in fact, for turning enmity into friendship.

God never intends for our lives to be shaped by conformity to a list of abstract rules. Rather, he intends for them to be shaped by a joyous pursuit of greater and greater likeness to the character of our covenant Lord, our Father.

group of people who had received the gospel but had then succumbed to a dilution of it so that they had departed from the basic Christian

Rather, they are interwoven in artful ways that suggest the symphonic art that appeared in musical style two millennia after Isaiah. Motifs appear, disappear, and reappear in ways that keep the thoughtful reader involved in an active dialogue with the writer.

Thus the only hope was to avoid judgment. To all of this Isaiah said a resounding no. The promises of God would only be realized through fire. Just as the unclean lips of the man Isaiah could only be used to proclaim the holiness of God to his people after they had been purged with fire (Isa. 6), so the unclean lips of the nation were going to have to be purged with the cleansing fires of judgment if the nation could ever proclaim those promises of God to the nations of the world.

Such a being cannot be manipulated by means of any created thing; to even think of it is laughable. So how do we acquire his power so that we can meet our needs? That is just it: We cannot. We must entrust the satisfaction of our needs into his hands, believing that he really is true and good and that we are precious to him.

Is God really with us? The answer to the question is "yes." God has come to take up residence with us as one of us. How has that fact been accomplished? By giving him a human mother but no human father.