Quotes about God

You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress and ordain a priest.

These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress.

I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.

Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.

We miss what the biblical writers were after if we think of belief and faith as "correct thinking" words. They are deep and hard words, more than we might have been led to expect. And they are beautiful words that move us deeper into the presence of God.

If we toss about the idea of "God in the flesh" as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John's opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks.

I have come to think, as have so many others in the course of history, that the goal of Christian faith is the experience of God, not the comprehension of God.

Being "in" with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be. Being obsessed with making sure we have all our thoughts about God properly arranged and defended isn't faith. How trusting we are of God day to day and how Godlike we live among those around us day to day is.

as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.

We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our God is much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for. It is we who sometimes wish to keep him small by controlling what can or cannot come into the conversation.

But this ungodlike God of the Bible gets at the very heart of both Jewish and Christian beliefs about God. This God doesn't keep his distance but embraces human experience