Quotes about Corruption

When we say, "Jesus died for our sins" within a message about how to escape this nasty old world and go to heaven, it means one thing. When we say, "Jesus died for our sins" within a message about God the creator rescuing his creation from corruption, decay, and death, and rescuing us to be part of that, it means something significantly different.

Wise Christian worship takes fully into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been so corrupted and spoiled that a great fault line runs right down the middle of it ... worship of God as redeemer, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as creator.

Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.

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.

The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—"forces" within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the Creator.

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.

The corrupting and corrosive lifestyles he describes are not arbitrary, but rather the result, the consequence, of the original idolatry. This doesn't mean that God is not involved in those consequences. God, as Creator, hates the idolatry and dehumanization that deface and damage his beautiful world and his image-bearing creatures. Unless that is so, God is not a good God, but a careless, faceless bureaucrat.

To the Greeks, this was not spiritual progress; it was regress. Why would anyone want to come back to the material world, the realm of evil and corruption? The whole idea was utter foolishness to the Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23 KJV).

Or of the fact that in the United States, where Evangelicals, the people of the good news, are still strong numerically, they have become one of the shallowest, noisiest and most corrupt parts of the Christian Church, bringing down an unprecedented avalanche of disdain on their heads—almost none of which has anything to do with Jesus?

The world you live in is a lot like that broken-down house. Every single room has been dirtied and damaged by sin. Not one part of it shines with anything like the pure glory that was so evident when it was first made. Sin has left this world in a sorry condition. You see it everywhere you look.

It's so easy to have divine wisdom corrupted by human wisdom. It's so easy to breathe in the polluted air of a culture that no longer actually thinks that God is, let alone that he is wise.

We must work the system without allowing the system to corrupt us.