Quotes About God

the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king. We have, partly deliberately and partly accidentally, forgotten this massive claim almost entirely. Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous

the death of Jesus, reconciling people to God, generates the renewal of their human vocation.

The "goal" is not "heaven," but a renewed human vocation within God's renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross.

truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed.

For John, the cross reveals God's glory; for Paul, God's "righteousness"; for both, God's love.

Whenever God does something new, he involves people – often unlikely people, frequently surprised and alarmed people. He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it's going to work out.

the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world. It is the moment when a great old door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him. The dark power that stood in the way of this kingdom vision has been defeated, overthrown, rendered null and void. Its

to see evangelism in terms of the announcement of God's kingdom, of Jesus's lordship and of the consequent new creation, avoids from the start any suggestion that the main or central thing that has happened is that the new Christian has entered into a private relationship with God or with Jesus and that this relationship is the main or only thing that matters.

The whole truth is that Jesus himself, in his risen physical body, is the beginning of God's new creation.

But there is no such thing as a small errand in the kingdom of God.

In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all. This

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature;

Romans 5–8 is, from one point of view, all about hope: the solid, sure hope that all those who belong to God through faith in his action in Jesus are assured of final salvation.

the principle that God's kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings.

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This

henceforth the victories of God over all the forces in the universe which are resistant to his will are to be won, not by the thunderbolts of coercive might, but by the persuasive constraints of self-sacrificing love.

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

We too have swapped the ancient Israelite vision of God and the world (focused on the Temple and thence the new creation and brought into expression in Passover and the other great gatherings, such as the Day of Atonement) for the assumed "goal" of a Platonized "heaven," the assumed human vocation of virtue or good behavior, and the dangerously paganized vision of how humans who have failed to attain that vocation might nevertheless gain that goal.

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.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God's glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the "glory" spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God's world on his behalf.