Quotes About God

The scandalous "word of the cross" is not a human word. It is the Spirit-empowered presence of God in the preaching of the crucified One.

The case being tried involves a question of ultimate truth — the question of who God is and where he stands; and for just that reason, it is God who will inevitably do the judging.

It is God's new creative act, his great reclamation project that is even greater than the creation itself, because whereas we are "wonderfully created," we are "yet more wonderfully restored."30

The church is not called to be a "change agent"—God is the agent of change. The Lord of the kosmos has already wrought the Great Exchange in his cross and resurrection, and the life of the people of God is sustained by that mighty enterprise.26 The calling of the church is to place itself where God is already at work.

the wrath of God is always exercised in the service of God's good purposes. It is the unconditional love of God manifested against anything that would frustrate or destroy the designs of his love. A

In the present time, God's "wording" (logizomai) of his new creation proceeds largely in a hidden way. The invincible transforming power of God's coming future is acting simultaneously in and through the deeply flawed realities of the present human situation.

New Testament presents us with not two but three agencies: God, the human being, and an Enemy

All the references to judgment in the Bible should be understood in the context of God's righteousness—not just his being righteous (noun) but his "making right" (verb) all that has been wrong.

one foundational truth that I have learned from apocalyptic theology, it is this: God is the subject of the verb. God doesn't need us to help him make his "dream" come true; God is on the march far ahead of us, bringing his purposes to pass

there has never been a satisfactory account of the origin of evil, and there will be none on this side of the consummation of the kingdom of God. Evil is a vast excrescence, a monstrous contradiction that cannot be explained but can only be denounced and resisted wherever it appears.64

In other words, God's righteousness involves not only a great reversal ("the first will be last") but also an actual transformation and re-creation.

begin to see that when we say God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force — hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit." God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.

it should now be generally agreed that any concept of hilasterion in the sense of placating, appeasing, deflecting the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of, is inadmissible. The more important, and truly radical, reason for firmly rejecting this understanding of propitiation is that it envisions God as the object, whereas in the Scriptures, God is the acting subject.99 This is especially noticeable in Romans 3

101 God's justification of sinners is not a forgetting, nor is it simply forgiveness. It is a definitive, wholesale, final assault upon and defeat of Sin, understood as a Power, and the creation of a new humanity.

Here is what Isaiah says: Verily thou art a God who hidest thyself, 0 God of Israel, the Savior (45:15). God is still active, still living, still in charge, still the subject of the verb: God hides himself.' God is active even when hidden, even when seemingly absent.

Only God can execute a regime change in which the tyrannical Powers are displaced and overthrown. This is the story of the purpose of God, "which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10).

the central idea in the concept of justification (dikaios). The righteousness of God is the same as his power to make righteous — to rectify what is wrong.

There is no more important calling for the church in our time than claiming the self-identification of the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus' resurrected life, but especially in Jesus' death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

As Placher well knew, there is no analogy from the side of the fallen creation that "works." None of the symbols, images, motifs, and themes "work" in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross.

Call it fate, call it God, I call it God, but I think that I found what I was comfortable in this world with doing.

Fathers are the first image of who God is!

If God made the body, and the body is dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.