Quotes about Restoration

expelled from the garden.

that God's call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.

we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness—for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last;

Hence too the promise that those who receive the abundance of divine grace will "reign in life" (v. 17). Here again is the goal of salvation, the restoration of the truly human destiny, of the covenant of vocation in which humans are called as the royal priesthood. The passage is dense, but when we take it slowly it all makes sense—within this framework. The Adam project, for humans to share in God's rule over creation, is back on track.

Paul is not simply invoking a "cultic metaphor" alongside a "law court" metaphor, on the one hand, and a "slave market" metaphor, on the other. He is thinking of the restoration of true cult, true worship: the one God cleansing people from defilement so that the true meeting, the heart of the covenant, may take place at last.

These assumptions will not let us down. The covenant is indeed the context; the restoration of true worship is indeed the goal. The passage is indeed about God's dealing with sin. But the way God does this is, first, by fulfilling his ancient covenant promises and, second, by thereby addressing idolatry, the underlying problem of all human faithlessness. In other words, God is unveiling his "righteousness" through the faithfulness to death of Israel's Messiah, Jesus.

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 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 early Christians believed, on the authority of Jesus himself, that the original vision for creation, and for Human within it, had been recaptured and restored through Jesus's inauguration of God's sovereign rule. What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

It is because God loves the world he has made, and especially his human creatures, that he hates everything that spoils, wrecks, or defaces it.

God loves the world so much that he will not allow it forever to wallow in the corruption and decay into which the rebellious human race has plunged it.

Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God's plan to put his whole world right. That