Quotes about Divine

The death of Jesus launched the revolution; it got rid of the roadblock between the divine promises and the nations for whom they were intended. And it opened the way for the Spirit to be poured out to equip God's people for their tasks.

Only in the light of Jesus can he look back and see not only that the God-given Torah had the effect of increasing "Sin," but that this was the divine intention all along.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

It is because God loves the world he has made, and especially his human creatures, that he hates everything that spoils, wrecks, or defaces it.

God loves the world so much that he will not allow it forever to wallow in the corruption and decay into which the rebellious human race has plunged it.

We humans have thus, by abrogating our own vocation, handed our power and authority to nondivine and nonhuman forces, which have then run rampant, spoiling human lives, ravaging the beautiful creation, and doing their best to turn God's world into a hell

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts. Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, "the Messiah's love." And he constantly suffered the grief that went with

Most ancient Jewish apocalypses [127] were decidedly political, offering symbolic narratives about the divine plan which gave coded encouragement to the oppressed, enabling them to see apparently chaotic and horrifying events within a different framework, and predicting the downfall not just of 'cosmic' powers (in the sense of 'suprahuman' entities), but of the actual pagan empires and their rulers.

We expect God to be, as we might say, 'in charge': taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of 'being in charge' would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples' feet.

One central biblical term to refer both to the divine covenant faithfulness and to the status of the covenant member is tsedaqah, in Greek dikaiosyn?, regularly (if potentially misleadingly) translated into English as "righteousness" or "justice.