Quotes About Fulfillment

These assumptions will not let us down. The covenant is indeed the context; the restoration of true worship is indeed the goal. The passage is indeed about God's dealing with sin. But the way God does this is, first, by fulfilling his ancient covenant promises and, second, by thereby addressing idolatry, the underlying problem of all human faithlessness. In other words, God is unveiling his "righteousness" through the faithfulness to death of Israel's Messiah, Jesus.

Our present experience, even our present Christian experience, is incomplete. But in Christ we have heard the complete tune; we know now what it sounds like and that we shall one day sing it in tune with him. Our present experience, with all its incompleteness, is meant to point us to the fact that we will one day wake up and arise from sleep. That, after all, is what resurrection is all about. It

And all this "works" because Jesus is Israel's Messiah, representing his people, so that what is true of him is true of them.

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he'd always promised

The statement that in the gospel events God has unveiled and displayed his dikaiosyn? is most naturally to be taken as the statement that the promise has been fulfilled and the purpose accomplished.

And all of this can be summed up in the phrase "forgiveness of sins." None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

That's part of the complex task the gospel writers are accomplishing: describing something as both the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel and divine judgment on the mess and the muddle that Israel's story had become. Matthew, then, is telling his story in such a way as to say: "This is it! This is what we've been waiting for—even though we would never have thought it would be like this!

I believe, as I said before, that this could result in a revolution—a revolution in the way in which Christians approach the whole question of "how to think about what to do," and also, out beyond that, a revolution in the way human beings in general approach the question of what it means to live a fulfilled, genuinely human life.

And John, like all the early Jesus followers, is clear that this is the story about how the ancient divine intention was fulfilled at last and about how, through these events, a justice-filled world comes to birth. Now at last the possibility of setting things right comes into view.

the world is beautiful not just because it hauntingly reminds us of its creator but also because it is pointing forward: it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God, as a chalice is beautiful not least because of what we know it is designed to contain or as a violin is beautiful not least because we know the music of which it is capable.

The "covenant of vocation"—Israel's vocation to be the light of the world—was fulfilled.

The divine rescuing purposes and Israel's vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event.

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel's God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel's scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

Israel's hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel's long-awaited Messiah.

humans finding themselves called to play a vital role in the larger purposes of the creator for the creation.

But of course you can only do what you're meant to do with a baseball bat when you're playing with other people. And salvation only does what it's meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

The purpose of forgiving sin, there as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God's world, already now, completely in the age to come.

either you obey rules imposed from the outside, or you discover the deepest longings of your own heart and try to go with them. Most of us wobble about between the two, obeying at least some of the rules either because we think God wants us to or because of social convention, but reverting to pursuing our own dreams, our own fulfillment, when given the chance.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled.

When God goes to work-- when Jesus becomes king-- human beings are not downgraded, reduced to being pawns or ciphers. In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule.

The resurrection isn't just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else. It is the point at which all the old promises come true at last: the promises of David's unshakable kingdom; the promises of Israel's return from the greatest exile of them all; and behind that again, quite explicit in Matthew, Luke, and John, the promise that all the nations will now be blessed through the seed of Abraham.

First and foremost, you've got to make yourself happy. Essentially being who you are is the most important thing. When you're after truth, happiness always comes.