Quotes about Meaning

Life sometimes hurts like hell but I've discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn't actually help. It merely removes all meaning and morality from the mess, and all real hope from the future

To be a Christian is to live positively and not destructively, to make ugly things beautiful, and to make chaos meaningful.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story—in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all

The deeper problem here is the unspoken need for our thinking about God to be right in order to have a joyful, freeing, healing, and meaningful faith. The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than trusting God.

The Bible's diversity is the key to uncovering the Bible's true purpose for us.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

Forty is a go-to number symbolizing a complete or "right" period of time, and "480" is twelve times forty—twelve likely symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel. The number is symbolic. It draws on ancient conventions of the symbolic value of round numbers to mark off a sacred moment.