Quotes about God

there has never been a satisfactory account of the origin of evil, and there will be none on this side of the consummation of the kingdom of God. Evil is a vast excrescence, a monstrous contradiction that cannot be explained but can only be denounced and resisted wherever it appears.64

In other words, God's righteousness involves not only a great reversal ("the first will be last") but also an actual transformation and re-creation.

Begin to see that when we say God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force — hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit." God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.

it should now be generally agreed that any concept of hilasterion in the sense of placating, appeasing, deflecting the anger of, or satisfying the wrath of, is inadmissible. The more important, and truly radical, reason for firmly rejecting this understanding of propitiation is that it envisions God as the object, whereas in the Scriptures, God is the acting subject. This is especially noticeable in Romans 3.

Here is what Isaiah says: Verily thou art a God who hides thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior (45:15). God is still active, still living, still in charge, still the subject of the verb: God hides himself.' God is active even when hidden, even when seemingly absent.

Only God can execute a regime change in which the tyrannical Powers are displaced and overthrown. This is the story of the purpose of God, "which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10).

The central idea in the concept of justification (dikaios). The righteousness of God is the same as his power to make righteous — to rectify what is wrong.

There is no more important calling for the church in our time than claiming the self-identification of the God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The unique feature of the Christian proclamation is the shocking claim that God is fully acting, not only in Jesus' resurrected life, but especially in Jesus' death on the cross. To say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable. What is remarkable is that the Creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death.

The Christ event derives its meaning from the fact that the three-personed God is directly acting as one throughout the entire sequence from incarnation to ascension to Last Judgment.

As Placher well knew, there is no analogy from the side of the fallen creation that "works." None of the symbols, images, motifs, and themes "work" in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross.

Fathers are the first image of who God is!