Quotes about Victory

The story told by all four gospels is the story of 'how God became king': not by the usual means of military revolution, but by the inauguration of sovereignty during Jesus' public career, and the strange but decisive victory on the cross itself.

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins.

Thus, whether on the large scale — where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel's representative status in God's purposes) for the world — or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either 'victory' or 'substitution'. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.

The victory achieved by Jesus didn't stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching.

Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this.

The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven.

When we see the victory of Jesus in relation to the biblical Passover tradition, reshaped through the Jewish longing for the "forgiveness of sins" as a liberating event within history, we see the early Christian movement not as a "religion" in the modern sense at all, but as a complete new way of being human in the world and for the world.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

Moral effort needs mental effort, and the mental effort needs to be focused on that victory and turned into prayer for the victory to be applied today and tomorrow. The sacraments will help here, but spiritual guidance and counsel will help a great deal too.