Quotes about World

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

Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

If you want to know what it means to talk about God being 'in charge of' the world, or being 'in control', or being 'sovereign', then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of 'kingdom', 'control' and 'sovereignty' themselves, around his death on the cross.

God called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world, so that he might himself alone rescue the world by becoming Israel in the person of its representative Messiah. This

that God's call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.

Like many other Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.

The hope of Israel, expressed variously in the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, was not for a rescue operation that would snatch Israel (or humans or the faithful) from the world, but for a rescue operation that would be for the world, an operation through which redeemed humans would play once more the role for which they were designed.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The living God comes into his world in the person of Israel's representative, to do for Israel and the world what they could not do for themselves, to be the place of meeting between the Creator and his human creatures.

Acts, with its many tales of confrontation, persecution, and martyrdom, takes forward exactly this agenda. This is what it looks like, Luke is saying, when Jesus is enthroned as Lord of the world, and his followers go out to put his royal rule into effect, ending up in Rome announcing God's kingdom and Jesus as Lord "with all boldness, and with no one stopping them" (28:31).

The creator God has announced the verdict; the world has been put right; the trees in the field will clap their hands. A new world has been launched, even in the midst of the present old, corrupt and decaying world.

in the Bible we are saved not simply so we can go to heaven and enjoy fellowship with God but so that we can be his truly human royal priesthood in his world.