Quotes about Divine

Passover takes precedence—it was, after all, the ultimate divine rescue operation and the ultimate revelation of God in action

Romans 2:17—3:9 is concerned, first, with the worldwide purpose of Israel's divine vocation (2:17—20); second, with Israel's covenantal failure (2:21—24; 3:2—4); and third, with the problem that this poses for God's dikaiosyn?, his "righteousness" (3:5). How is God to be faithful to the covenant—to rescue and bless the world through the Jews—if Israel is faithless?

The divine purpose through Israel for the world is the subject of the passages both before and after 3:21—26. There is every reason, therefore, for taking "God's righteousness" in 3:21 in its normal biblical sense of "covenant faithfulness.

In the Lord, your labour is not in vain: what you do here in faith will stand, will last.

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

Idolatry and immorality went together, as they always did. Israel was supposed to be the One Bride of the One God, in an unbreakable marriage bond. Breaking human marriage bonds was a sign and symptom of the breaking of the divine covenant.

The question Paul faces in 3:21—26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other.

Reading backward in the light of the subsequent events, they interpreted the crucifixion as part of the strange, dark divine plan in which the shame and horror were part of the intended meaning. Jesus, they believed, had gone to the lowest point possible for a human being, never mind a Jew, never mind one whose followers had hoped he was the coming king.

His intention was to bring his creation forward from its beginnings to be the glorious place he always intended and to do so through this human family.

God creates "that which is not God" out of generous love in order that he may then, in the end, fill it, flood it, drench it, with his love and his glory.

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

For the death of Jesus to be an expression—the ultimate expression—of the divine love, that covenant love that as we saw lay at the heart of so many ancient Israelite expressions of hope for covenant rescue and renewal, we would need to say, and Paul does say, that in the sending of the son the creator and covenant God is sending his own very self.