Quotes About God

This is the context within which the hilast?rion means what it means: the place where God and his people come together. That place is Jesus himself. And Jesus himself, the focus of belief, invoked in prayer, loved in answer to his own love, is the ultimate answer to the problem of idolatry. "He is the image of God, the invisible one" (Col. 1:15), the reality of which all other "images" are at best distorted parodies.

Israel's god dwelt (in principle; and he would do so again) in the Temple; his tabernacling presence ('Shekinah') functioned as had the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness. He revealed himself and his will through Torah; for some rabbis at least, when one studied Torah it was as though one was in the Temple itself.

Since these are themselves "scriptural" statements, that means that scripture itself points—authoritatively, if it does indeed possess authority!—away from itself and to the fact that final and true authority belongs to God himself, now delegated to Jesus Christ.

When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be "Emmanuel," "God with us," and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be "with them always," alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind.

the human calling to worship God and reflect him into his world.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

The second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God coming back to his people as he had always promised.

So what if it were true after all? What if the Creator, all along, had made the world out of overflowing, generous love, so that the overflowing, self-sacrificial love of the Son going to the cross was indeed the accurate and precise self-expression of the love of God for a world radically out of joint?

And this 'justification', which is, of course, possible only because of the sheer grace and mercy of God acted out in the death and resurrection of his son, is made not on the basis of a new 'personal relationship with God' or some other religious experience but rather on the basis of the belief that Jesus is lord and that God raised him from the dead.

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.

Jesus is the 'Word' of God. Jesus is the Wisdom through which the world was made. Jesus is, in some senses, the new Torah. And, in a move which has stupendous consequences, Jesus is the true Shekinah, the true presence of the one true God, the truth of which the Jerusalem Temple was simply a foretaste.9

We expect God to be, as we might say, 'in charge': taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of 'being in charge' would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples' feet.

your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness. But

It is, in other words, inviting those who read it or pray it to imagine a different world from the one they see all around them—a world with a different Lord, a world in which the One God rules and rescues, a world in which a new sort of wisdom has been unveiled, a world in which there is a different way to be human. "Wisdom" is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians.

Sunday, kept as a commemoration of Easter ever since that event itself (a quite remarkable phenomenon when you come to think about it), is not simply a legacy of Victorian values but a perpetual sign, joyfully renewed week by week, that all time belongs to God and stands under the renewing lordship of Jesus Christ.4

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.

And what if Israel's God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation?

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.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings.

God's intention is not to let death have its way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.4 But

When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.

the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.

Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.