Quotes from John H. Walton

Since all people are in the image of God, all deserve to be treated with the dignity the image affords.

Our point, however, is not to worship the Bible; we worship the God of the Bible.

Though alien to modern thinking, we need to reckon with the possibility that written forms are not necessarily significantly more enduring or reliable. In other words, it may be wrong to presume that Jesus' words suddenly became more permanent when recorded in written form, as if our textual culture is better at preserving truth than their oral culture.

Palm branches were symbolic of national hope for Jerusalem. The date palm was abundant in Israel and one of the staple products of the economy. Soon after this time, date palms were portrayed on coins stamped by the rebels against Rome. In the early spring in Jerusalem, the branches of palm trees were still small. Cloaks were used to spread in front of a king as early as 2 Kings 9:13.

The evangelical commitment is to take the text at face value while resisting our culture's post-Enlightenment inclination toward skepticism. God must remain free to act in our world in improbable ways. The evangelical task is to assess accurately, with literary and theological sensitivity, what the face value of the text is, even if the result departs from traditional assessments.

Though we cannot expect to be able to think like they thought, or read their minds, or penetrate very deeply into so much that is opaque to us in their culture, we can begin to see that there are other ways of thinking besides our own and begin to identify some of the ways in which we have been presumptuously ethnocentric.

Art that is based on scenes from the Bible is not better than art that is based on scenes from, say, Shakespeare or Homer simply because it is based on the Bible.

Invoked a curse and swore (Matt. 26:74; Mark 14:71). The text does not specify on whom Peter called down curses, though the ESV and other translations include "on himself," implying that he was calling for curses to come upon him if he was lying. Alternatives are that he was cursing the ones who were accusing him of knowing Christ or that he was actually cursing Christ, amplifying his sense of guilt. Certainty is not possible.

We must also remember some of the key lessons of Scripture. In our weakness he is strong. He can use suffering to strengthen our character. He can use evil to accomplish good (precisely the nature of the discussion in the book of Habakkuk). God's sovereignty is demonstrated in that whatever personal or nonpersonal agents do, God takes it and turns it to his purpose.

THE RETRIBUTION PRINCIPLE (RP) is the conviction that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will suffer, both in proportion to their respective righteousness and wickedness. In Israelite theology the principle was integral to the belief in God's justice.

The ancient world assigned a value to divinely approved order similar to the value we assign to human rights.

In response, God appears to Job and compels him to live in mystery, not giving an answer to his suffering but asserting his own wisdom and power. Other

Biblical Context Matthew begins to deal with Jesus' mission in Matthew 14—who Jesus came to and who may come to him. The feeding of the five thousand begins this section and shows that the people came to Jesus with needs, which he met. This contrasts with the end of the section (chapter 19) where the rich young man came with wants and was turned away.

So on day one God created the basis for time; day two the basis for weather; and day three the basis for food. These three great functions—time, weather and food—are the foundation of life. If we desire to see the greatest work of the Creator, it is not to be found in the materials that he brought together—it is that he brought them together in such a way that they work.

Throughout this book I will be presenting what can be understood about the cognitive environment of the ancient Near East and interspersing "Comparative Explorations" to consider specific similarities and differences found in Israel.

Lesson Focus When Jesus demonstrated his power over the water and the storm, his disciples worshiped him as the Son of God. • Jesus has power over nature. • Jesus is the Son of God. Lesson Application Jesus is the Son of God. • We believe that Jesus is the Son of God. • We worship Jesus and have faith in him.

whereas in the rest of the ancient world creation was set up to serve the gods, a theocentric view, in Genesis, creation is not set up for the benefit of God but for the benefit of humanity—an anthropocentric view.

This reading of the biblical text has not been imposed on it by the demands of science, but science has prompted a more careful examination of precisely what the text is claiming.

The point is that all of the known nations and peoples resulted from the blessing God had established from the beginning. National and ethnic diversity was not an aberration. There is no room for the concept that there is one pure race while others are tainted, somehow the result of sin or corruption.

While the Bible has nothing to say about how ethnic distinctions came to be, it does have definitive statements about how we are to regard them: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

Perhaps, however, it will help us to remind ourselves that salvation is more importantly about what we are saved to (renewed access to the presence of God and relationship with him) than what we are saved from. This point is significant because too many Christians find it too easy to think only that they are saved, forgiven and on their way to heaven instead of taking seriously the idea that we are to be in deepening relationship with God day by day here and now.

avoid attempting to identify the parties involved. Instead of linking the bridegroom to God or Jesus, it is preferable to portray the arrival of the bridegroom as the arrival of the kingdom of God, for which some will be prepared and others not.

The principle is that the kingdom has been entrusted to the people of God and they should be faithful stewards who expect to be held accountable.

Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause. . . . It's an illusion of the human mind, a way of saying, 'I don't know why this happened this way, and I have no intention of finding out.