Quotes about God

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.

Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw.

Saying `our father' isn't just the boldness, the sheer cheek, of walking into the presence of the living and almighty God and saying `Hi, Dad.' It is the boldness, the sheer total risk, of saying quietly `Please may I, too, be considered an apprentice son.' It means signing on for the Kingdom of God.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

The Psalter forms the great epic poem of the creator and covenant God who will at the last visit and redeem his people and, with them, his whole creation.

The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

The story Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell is the story of how God became king—in and through Jesus both in his public career and in his death.

In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

Part of John's meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only what happens, purely pragmatically, when God's kingdom challenges Caesar's kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God's kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence rather than by violence, is to win the day.

In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.