Quotes about Redemption

The good news is bigger, better, fuller than you ever imagined.

The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God's new world.

As we have seen throughout this book, the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.

First, Jesus was going to take us to be with him in heaven. There are different ways people have imagined this happening, but the message is still the same. Somehow, the good news in the past (what Jesus did two thousand years ago) points forward to one particular piece of good news about the future (he will take us to heaven). This completes the new relationship with God that is for many the sole focus of the good news. And this is seriously misleading.

I did mind and it did matter, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to forgive at all

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.

we should be in no doubt that, for the gospel writers themselves, there was never a kingdom message without a cross

God's faithfulness to the covenant with Israel, even granted the large-scale failure of Israel as a whole, will result in the rescue of the whole sinful world.

For far too long now Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it hooked up not with the story of Israel, but simply with the story of human sin as in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.

Jesus and his first followers, as Second Temple Jews, believed as well in an eschatology of new creation. This did not involve the abolition of the present world and its replacement with a totally different on. Nor did it imply the steady evolution-from-within of the Stoics, let alone the escapist 'eschatology' of the heading-for-heaven Platonists. They believed in the redemptive transformation of the present world into a new one.