Quotes About Heaven-and-earth

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

Heaven and earth are not to be split apart; they are to be brought together; and the spirit is the sign and means in the present by which that future becomes real in advance. The spirit is the powerful breath of that new creation, bringing signs and foretastes of the heaven-and-earth reality to birth here and now.