Quotes about Future

What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

What matters is eschatological duality (the present age and the age to come), not ontological dualism (an evil "earth" and a good "heaven").

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

Our confidence in the future restorative justice of God may even give us confidence to do justice ourselves in the present. We are called then, to stretch out the arms of our minds and hearts and to find ourselves Christ shaped, cross shaped, at the intersection of the past present and future of God's time and our own time. This is a place of intense pain and intense joy, the sort that perhaps only music or poetry can express or embody.

That vision of the future—an ultimate glory that has left behind the present world of space, time, and matter—sets the context for what, as we shall see, is a basically paganized vision of how one might attain such a future: a transaction in which God's wrath was poured out against his son rather than against sinful humans.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still.

God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again.25

So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann's route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.