Quotes about God

The entire thrust of this season at the end of the church year is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, reality about the human race, reality about God. Something ultimate has entered our world, something or Someone that calls us to attention, calls us out of our daily preoccupations and our routine points of view. That is what this season with its special biblical readings is designed to reveal.

Nothing in the Bible makes any religious sense unless we are people of faith who believe that God's own self speaks to us in this living Word.

The scandalous "word of the cross" is God's own Word. The link between scandal and God is in itself irreligious; this is another aspect of the uniqueness of the Christian message.

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."

The church is not called to be a "change agent"—God is the agent of change. The Lord of the cosmos 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. 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.

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.