Quotes about God

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.

Somehow, these scenes suggest, the big issues of human life are to be resolved by being put into a quite different frame from the normal one. It is the frame we could summarize in Jesus's own agenda—the coming of God's kingdom—and in his words: "Follow me!

The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This

henceforth the victories of God over all the forces in the universe which are resistant to his will are to be won, not by the thunderbolts of coercive might, but by the persuasive constraints of self-sacrificing love.

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he'd always promised

The statement that in the gospel events God has unveiled and displayed his dikaiosyn? is most naturally to be taken as the statement that the promise has been fulfilled and the purpose accomplished.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God's glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the "glory" spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God's world on his behalf.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love.

God's creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.