Quotes About God

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.

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.

The New Testament, with the story of Jesus's crucifixion at its center, is about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

His larger position is what we might call messianic eschatology: if Jesus is Israel's Messiah, then Israel's God is regrouping his people around Jesus, just as other first-century messianic movements tried to corral loyal Jews around their central figure.

If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the "you" you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being—who will be much more truly "you" than you've ever been before.

The non-Jewish nations were supposed to look at Israel and praise Israel's God. Instead, they looked at Israel and blasphemed his name. The vocation had turned sour.

The cross stands at the heart of John's kingdom theology, which in this stunning passage is revealed as the heart of John's redemption theology, the vision of the love of God revealed in saving action in the death of his Son, the Lamb, the Messiah.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

is simply a reminder of what the greatest systematic theologians have always known and recognized – that theology is a matter of loving God with our minds and that loving does not mean merely admiring or 'being intellectually interested in'.

The myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God's no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation.

The living God comes into his world in the person of Israel's representative, to do for Israel and the world what they could not do for themselves, to be the place of meeting between the Creator and his human creatures.

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.

in the Bible we are saved not simply so we can go to heaven and enjoy fellowship with God but so that we can be his truly human royal priesthood in his world.

Ultimately, the so-called 'gnostic gospels' would be a denial of what Jesus and the church believed about God himself and what the canonical gospels are inviting the rest of the world, ourselves included, to believe about God. The canonical gospels are saying, in form and overall substance, that the word 'God' properly belongs to the creator God, the God of Israel, the God who has kept his promises to creation and to Israel and has done so in this way.

the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God's one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus's followers.

The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God's new world.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale.

Jesus sticks to scripture, which they can hardly fault. But in doing so he demonstrates that he is speaking from a world in which God, becoming king on earth as in heaven, is transforming the very hearts of human beings as part of his project of new creation. Jesus's hearers, thinking from within a world where the legislation for the hard-hearted still applies, cannot even recognize the kingdom when it is breaking in right there in their midst.

God's ultimate intention was to 'save' only disembodied 'souls', that wouldn't be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. 'Salvation' regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of 'rescue' within the present life: being 'saved' from this potential disaster, here and now.

If God's ultimate intention was to 'save' only disembodied 'souls', that wouldn't be rescue from death. It would simply allow the death of the body to have the last word. 'Salvation' regularly refers constantly, not least in Luke and Acts, to specific acts of 'rescue' within the present life: being 'saved' from this potential disaster, here and now.

To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.

It is of course only through imagery, through metaphor and symbol, that we can imagine the new world that God intends to make. That is right and proper. All our language about the future, as I have said, is like a set of signposts pointing into a bright mist. The signpost doesn't provide a photograph of what we will find when we arrive but offers instead a true indication of the direction we should be traveling in. What

The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God's sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God's image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control. Reflecting

This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament.