Quotes About Divine

First-century Jews looked forward to a public event … in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all … The early Christians … looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel's god had done exactly that.

United worship here and now, rather than disunited church life in the present and a distant "heaven" after death, was always, as far as Paul was concerned, the divinely intended goal of the Messiah's death.

Transcending "Revelation" All this alerts us to the fact that scripture is more than simply

Of course, there is a much older notion of "revelation," according to which God is continually revealing himself to and within the world he

There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return.

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

Romans 2:17–3:9 is concerned, first, with the worldwide purpose of Israel's divine vocation (2:17–20); second, with Israel's covenantal failure (2:21–24; 3:2–4); and third, with the problem that this poses for God's dikaiosyn?, his "righteousness" (3:5). How is God to be faithful to the covenant—to rescue and bless the world through the Jews—if Israel is faithless?

The divine purpose through Israel for the world is the subject of the passages both before and after 3:21–26. There is every reason, therefore, for taking "God's righteousness" in 3:21 in its normal biblical sense of "covenant faithfulness.

God called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world, so that he might himself alone rescue the world by becoming Israel in the person of its representative Messiah. This

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we knew better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

Everything possible had to be done to stamp out a movement that would impede the true purposes of the One God of Israel, whose divine plans Saul and his friends believed were at last on the verge of a glorious fulfillment—until, on the Damascus Road, Saul came to believe that these plans had indeed been gloriously fulfilled, but in a way he had never imagined.

Idolatry and immorality went together, as they always did. Israel was supposed to be the One Bride of the One God, in an unbreakable marriage bond. Breaking human marriage bonds was a sign and symptom of the breaking of the divine covenant.

The question Paul faces in 3:21–26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other.

Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king.

His intention was to bring his creation forward from its beginnings to be the glorious place he always intended and to do so through this human family.

The reason we commit "sins" is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order. When we do that, we are abdicating our responsibilities, handing to the "powers" in question the genuine human authority that ought to be ours.

Israel's hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God's glory. It

God creates "that which is not God" out of generous love in order that he may then, in the end, fill it, flood it, drench it, with his love and his glory.

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

For the death of Jesus to be an expression—the ultimate expression—of the divine love, that covenant love that as we saw lay at the heart of so many ancient Israelite expressions of hope for covenant rescue and renewal, we would need to say, and Paul does say, that in the sending of the son the creator and covenant God is sending his own very self.

Did Paul think that Jesus was the Messiah? Of course. Did recognizing someone as Messiah imply that God's people were regrouped around him? Naturally. Was that a non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish thing to suggest? Of course not. The point, anyway, is that for Paul the Messiah's people are both a 'new creation' and the fulfilment of the divine intention for 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!

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.