"If we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that these perplexities are all ultimately due to our having lost our grip on the biblical gospel. Without realising it, we have during the past century bartered that gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar enough in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence our troubles; for the substitute product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty. The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the church." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"In the new gospel the centre of reference is man... Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"The new gospel has in effect reformulated the biblical message in the supposed interests of helpfulness. Accordingly, the themes of man’s natural inability to believe, of God’s free election being the ultimate cause of salvation, and of Christ dying specifically for His sheep, are not preached... the result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel; and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth. Thus, we appeal to men as if they all had the ability to receive Christ at any time; we speak of His redeeming work as if He had done no more by dying than make it possible for us to save ourselves by believing; we speak of God’s love as if it were no more than a general willingness to receive any who will turn and trust; and we depict the Father and the Son, not as sovereignly active in drawing sinners to themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence “at the door of our hearts” for us to let them in... But it needs to be said with emphasis that this set of twisted half-truths is something other than the biblical gospel." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Now, here are two coherent interpretations of the biblical gospel, which stand in evident opposition to each other. The difference between them [Calvinism and Arminianism] is not primarily one of emphasis, but of content. One proclaims a God who saves; the other speaks of a God Who enables man to save himself... The two theologies thus conceive the plan of salvation in quite different terms. One makes salvation depend on the work of God, the other on a work of man; one regards faith as part of God’s gift of salvation, the other as man’s own contribution to salvation; one gives all the glory of saving believers to God, the other divides the praise between God, Who, so to speak, built the machinery of salvation, and man, who by believing operated it." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Calvinism is a unified philosophy of history which sees the whole diversity of processes and events that take place in God’s world as no more, and no less, than the outworking of His great preordained plan for His creatures and His church." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"The real negations are those of Arminianism, which denies that election, redemption and calling are saving acts of God. Calvinism negates these negations in order to assert the positive content of the gospel, for the positive purpose of strengthening faith and building up the church." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"For to Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in the field of soteriology: the point that God saves sinners. God—the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing. Saves—does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"This is the one point of Calvinistic soteriology which the five points are concerned to establish and Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners do not save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory for ever; amen." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Where the Arminian says: 'I owe my election to my faith,' the Calvinist says: 'I owe my faith to my election.'" Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Redemption, according to Arminianism, secured for God a right to make this offer, but did not of itself ensure that anyone would ever accept it; for faith, being a work of man’s own, is not a gift that comes to him from Calvary. Christ’s death created an opportunity for the exercise of saving faith, but that is all it did. Calvinists, however, define redemption as Christ’s actual substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners, through which God was reconciled to them, their liability to punishment was for ever destroyed, and a title to eternal life was secured for them. In consequence of this, they now have in God’s sight a right to the gift of faith, as the means of entry into the enjoyment of their inheritance. Calvary, in other words, not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their salvation made actual. The Cross saves... The former makes the Cross the sine qua non of salvation, the latter sees it as the actual procuring cause of salvation, and traces the source of every spiritual blessing, faith included, back to the great transaction between God and His Son carried through on Calvary’s hill. Clearly, these two concepts of redemption are quite at variance." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Grace proves irresistible just because it destroys the disposition to resist." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"In fact, it is Calvinism that understands the Scriptures in their natural, one would have thought, inescapable meaning; Calvinism that keeps to what they actually say; Calvinism that insists on taking seriously the biblical assertions that God saves, and that He saves those whom He has chosen to save, and that He saves them by grace without works, so that no man may boast, and that Christ is given to them as a perfect Saviour, and that their whole salvation flows to them from the Cross, and that the work of redeeming them was finished on the Cross. It is Calvinism that gives due honour to the Cross." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Christ did not win a hypothetical salvation for hypothetical believers, a mere possibility of salvation for any who might possibly believe, but a real salvation for His own chosen people... Its saving power does not depend on faith being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it. The Cross secured the full salvation of all for whom Christ died." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Calvinism is what the Christian church has always held and taught when its mind has not been distracted by controversy and false traditions from attending to what Scripture actually says; that is the significance of the Patristic testimonies to the teaching of the five points, which can be quoted in abundance... So that really it is most misleading to call this soteriology “Calvinism” at all, for it is not a peculiarity of John Calvin and the divines of Dort, but a part of the revealed truth of God and the catholic Christian faith." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Our minds have been conditioned to think of the Cross as a redemption which does less than redeem, and of Christ as a Saviour who does less than save, and of God’s love as a weak affection which cannot keep anyone from hell without help, and of faith as the human help which God needs for this purpose... The resultant mental muddle deprives God of much of the glory that we should give Him as author and finisher of salvation, and ourselves of much of the comfort we might draw from knowing that God is for us... We want (rightly) to proclaim Christ as Saviour; yet we end up saying that Christ, having made salvation possible, has left us to become our own saviours... What we say comes to this—that Christ saves us with our help; and what that means, when one thinks it out, is this—that we save ourselves with Christ’s help... And let us be clear on what we have done when we have put the matter in this fashion. We have not exalted grace and the Cross; we have cheapened them. We have limited the atonement far more drastically than Calvinism does, for whereas Calvinism asserts that Christ’s death, as such, saves all whom it was meant to save, we have denied that Christ’s death, as such, is sufficient to save any of them." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"It cannot be over-emphasised that we have not seen the full meaning of the Cross till we have seen it as the divines of Dort display it—as the centre of the gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and unconditional election, and on the other by irresistible grace and final preservation." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"The old gospel, certainly, has no room for the cheap sentimentalising which turns God’s free mercy to sinners into a constitutional soft-heartedness on His part which we can take for granted; nor will it countenance the degrading presentation of Christ as the baffled Saviour, balked in what He hoped to do by human unbelief; nor will it indulge in maudlin appeals to the unconverted to let Christ save them out of pity for His disappointment. The pitiable Saviour and the pathetic God of modern pulpits are unknown to the old gospel. The old gospel tells men that they need God, but not that God needs them (a modern falsehood); it does not exhort them to pity Christ, but announces that Christ has pitied them, though pity was the last thing they deserved. It never loses sight of the Divine majesty and sovereign power of the Christ whom it proclaims, but rejects flatly all representations of Him which would obscure His free omnipotence." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"We saw before that the new gospel, by asserting universal redemption and a universal Divine saving purpose, compels itself to cheapen grace and the Cross by denying that the Father and the Son are sovereign in salvation; for it assures us that, after God and Christ have done all that they can, or will, it depends finally on each man’s own choice whether God’s purpose to save him is realised or not... it compels us to misunderstand the significance of the gracious invitations of Christ in the gospel of which we have been speaking; for we now have to read them, not as expressions of the tender patience of a mighty sovereign, but as the pathetic pleadings of impotent desire; and so the enthroned Lord is suddenly metamorphosed into a weak, futile figure tapping forlornly at the door of the human heart, which He is powerless to open. This is a shameful dishonour to the Christ of the New Testament... It can hardly be wondered at that the converts of the new gospel are so often both irreverent and irreligious, for such is the natural tendency of this teaching." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"It is not likely, therefore, that a preacher of the old gospel will be happy to express the application of it in the form of a demand to “decide for Christ,” as the current phrase is. For, on the one hand, this phrase carries the wrong associations. It suggests voting a person into office—an act in which the candidate plays no part beyond offering himself for election, and everything then being settled by the voter’s independent choice. But we do not vote God’s Son into office as our Saviour, nor does He remain passive while preachers campaign on His behalf, whipping up support for His cause... It is not at all obvious that deciding for Christ is the same as coming to Him and resting on Him and turning from sin and self-effort; it sounds like something much less, and is accordingly calculated to instill defective notions of what the gospel really requires of sinners. It is not a very apt phrase from any point of view." Introductory Essay To John Owen's Death Of Death In The Death Of Christ |
"Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God." Knowing God, Preface 1973 |
"Modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligious world, have themselves allowed God to become remote. Clear-sighted persons, seeing this, are tempted to withdraw from the churches in something like disgust to pursue a quest for God on their own. Nor can one wholly blame them, for churchmen who look at God, so to speak, through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy proportions, cannot hope to end up as more than pigmy Christians, and clear-sighted people naturally want something better than this." Knowing God, Preface 1973 |
"For more than three centuries the naturalistic leaven in the Renaissance outlook has been working like a cancer in Western thought. Seventeenth-century Arminians and deists, like sixteenth-century Socinians, came to deny, as against Reformation theology, that God's control of his world was either direct or complete, and theology, philosophy and science have for the most part combined to maintain that denial ever since... The uncertainty and confusion about God which mark our day are worse than anything since Gnostic theosophy tried to swallow Christianity in the second century." Knowing God, Preface 1973 |
"Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives... Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"God has spoken to man, and the Bible is his Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation... Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"God is Lord and King over his world; he rules all things for his own glory, displaying his perfections in all that he does, in order that men and angels may worship and adore him." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"God is triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it and the Spirit applying it." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God's attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. As he is the subject of our study, and our helper in it, so he must himself be the end of it. We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God." Knowing God, The Study Of God |
"A little knowledge OF God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge ABOUT him." Knowing God, The People Who Know Their God |
"People who know their God are before anything else people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God's glory come to expression is in their prayers." Knowing God, The People Who Know Their God |
"The God of Israel is King of kings and Lord of lords... He know, and foreknows, all things, and his foreknowledge is foreordination; he, therefore, will have the last word, both in world history and in the destiny of every man; his kingdom and righteousness will triumph in the end, for neither men nor angels shall be able to thwart him." Knowing God, The People Who Know Their God |
"It is those who have sought the Lord Jesus till they have found him -- for the promise is that when we seek him with all our hearts, we shall surely find him -- who can stand before the world to testify that they have known God." Knowing God, The People Who Know Their God |
"Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord... What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance; and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?" Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"The action of God in taking Joseph from prison to become Pharaoh's prime minister is a picture of what he does to every Christian: from being Satan's prisoner, you find yourself transferred to a position of trust in the service of God. At once life is transformed." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"Now, when the New Testament tells us that Jesus Christ is risen, one of things it means is that the victim of Calvary is now, so to speak, loose and at large, so that anyone anywhere can enjoy the same kind of relationship with him as the disciples had in the days of his flesh." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"Jesus' way of speaking to us now is not by uttering fresh words, but rather by applying to our consciences those words of his that are recorded in the Gospels, together with the rest of the biblical testimony to himself." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"The Jesus who walks through the gospel story walks with Christians now, and knowing him involves going with him, now as then." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"You can have all the right notions in your head without ever tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer; and a simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Saviour than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"The emotional side of knowing God is often played down these days, for fear of encouraging a maudlin self-absorption. It is true that there is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion, and that it is constantly needful to stress that God does not exist for our comfort or happiness or satisfaction, or to provide us with religious experiences, as if these were the most interesting and important things in life... But, for all this, we must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relation between persons were it not so. The believer is, and must be, emotionally involved in the victories and vicissitudes of God's cause in the world... Believers rejoice when their God is honored and vindicated and feel the acutest distress when they see God flouted... This the emotional and experiential side of friendship with God. Ignorance of it argues that, however true a person's thoughts of God may be, he does not yet know the God of whom he is thinking." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"We do not make friends with God; God makes friends with us, bringing us to know him by making his love known to us... The word know, when used of God in this way, is a sovereign-grace word, pointing to God's initiative in loving, choosing, redeeming, calling and preserving." Knowing God, Knowing And Being Known |
"It needs to be said with the greatest possible emphasis that those who hold themselves free to think of God as they like are breaking the second commandment." Knowing God, The Only True God |
"To follow the imagination of one's heart in the realm of theology is the way to remain ignorant of God, and to become an idol-worshipper -- the idol in this case being a false mental image of God, made by one's own speculation and imagination." Knowing God, The Only True God |
"The mind that takes up with images is a mind that has not yet learned to love and attend to God's Word." Knowing God, The Only True God |
"The really staggering Christian claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man -- that the second person of the Godhead became the second man, determining human destiny, the second representative head of the race, and that he took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as he was human." Knowing God, God Incarnate |
"The Word of God is thus God at work." Knowing God, God Incarnate |
"The impression of Jesus which the Gospels give is not that he was wholly bereft of divine knowledge and power, but that he drew on both intermittently, while being content for much of the time not to do so. The impression, ino other words, is not so much one of deity reduced as of divine capacities restrained." Knowing God, God Incarnate |
"It is our shame and disgrace today that so many Christians -- I will be more specific: so many of the soundest and most orthodox Christians -- go through this world in the spirit of the priest and the Levite in our Lord's parable, seeing human needs all around them, but (after a pious wish, and perhaps a prayer, that God might meet those needs) averting their eyes and passing by on the other side. That is not the Christmas spirit. Nor is it the spirit of those Christians -- alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the submiddle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves." Knowing God, God Incarnate |
"The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor -- spending and being spent -- to enrich their fellow humans, giving time, trouble, care and concern, to do good to others -- and not just their own friends -- in whatever way there seems need." Knowing God, God Incarnate |
"The heart of the Christian faith in God is the revealed mystery of the Trinity." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"John sets this mystery of one God in two persons at the head of his Gospel because he know that nobody can make head or tail of the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth till he has grasped the fact that this Jesus is in truth God the Son." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"Christian people are not in doubt as to the work that Christ did; they know that he redeemed us by his atoning death, even if they differ among themselves as to what exactly this involved. but the average Christian, deep down, is in a complete fog as to what work the Holy spirit does." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"It is an extraordinary thing that those who profess to care so much about Christ should know and care so little about the Holy Spirit... Is it not a hollow fraud to say that we honor Christ when we ignore, and by ignoring dishonor, the One whom Christ has sent to us as his deputy, to take his place and care for us on his behalf? Ought we not to concern ourselves more about the Holy Spirit than we do?" Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"Were it not for the work of the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel, no faith, no church, no Christianity in the world at all." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"Without the Holy Spirit there would be no faith and no new birth -- in short, no Christians." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ's Spirit to convince men's consciences of the truth of Christ's gospel; and Christ's human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit." Knowing God, He Shall Testify |
"The character of God is today, and always will be, exactly what it was in Bible times." Knowing God, God Unchanging |
"When we read our Bibles, therefore, we need to remember that God still stands behind all the promises, and demands, and statements of purpose, and words of warning, that are there addressed to New Testament believers. These are not relics of a bygone age, but an eternally valid revelation of the mind of God toward his people in all generations, so long as this world lasts." Knowing God, God Unchanging |
"God's ways do not change... Still he shows his freedom and lordship by discriminating between sinners, causing some to hear the gospel while others do not hear it, and moving some of those who hear it to repentance while leaving others in their unbelief, thus teaching his saints that hew owes mercy to none and that it is entirely of his grace, not at all through their own effort, that they themselves have found life." Knowing God, God Unchanging |
"What God does in time, he planned from eternity. And all that he planned in eternity he carries out in time. And all that he has in his Word committed to do will infallibly be done." Knowing God, God Unchanging |
"If our God is the same as the God of New Testament believers, how can we justify ourselves in resting content with an experience of communion with him, and a level of Christian conduct, that falls so far below theirs? If god is the same, this is not an issue that any one of us can evade." Knowing God, God Unchanging |
"The Christian's instincts of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God. But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack: and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby... When a person in the church, let alone the person in the street, uses the word God, the thought is rarely of divine majesty." Knowing God, The Majesty Of God |
"Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator." Knowing God, The Majesty Of God |
"The world dwarfs us all, but God dwarfs the world. Knowing God, The Majesty Of God |
"God has not abandoned us any more than he abandoned Job. He never abandons anyone on whom he has set his love; nor does Christ, the good shepherd, ever lose track of his sheep." Knowing God, The Majesty Of God |
"God is never other than wise in anything that he does." Knowing God, God Only Wise |
"God's wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable." Knowing God, God Only Wise |
"Though we have fallen, God has not abandoned his first purpose. Still he plans that a great host of humankind should come to love and honor him... His immediate objectives are to draw individual men and women into a relationship of faith, hope, and love toward himself, delivering them from sin and showing forth in their lives the power of his grace; to defend his people against the forces of evil; and to spread throughout the world the gospel by means of which he saves. In the fulfillment of each part of this purpose the Lord Jesus Christ is central, for God has set him forth both as Saviour from sin, whom we must trust, and as Lord of the church, whom we must obey." Knowing God, God Only Wise |
"It is often the case, as all the saints know, that fellowship with the Father and the Son is most vivid and sweet, and Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest." Knowing God, God Only Wise |
"The moral qualities which belonged to the divine image were lost at the Fall; God's image in man has been universally defaced, for all of humankind has in one way or another lapsed into ungodliness." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"Wisdom is divinely wrought in those, and those only, who apply themselves to God's revelation... How are we of the twentieth century to do this? By soaking ourselves in the Scriptures." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it. Rarely does it appear that there is a rational power behind it at all. Often what is worthless survives, while what is valuable perishes. Be realistic, says the preacher; face these facts; see life as it is. You will have no true wisdom till you do." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"We can be sure that the God who made this marvelously complex world order, and who compassed the great redemption from Egypt, and who later compassed the even greater redemption from sin and Satan, knows what he is doing, and doeth all things well, even if for the moment we cannot discern his path." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"The kind of wisdom that God waits to give to those who ask him is a wisdom that will bind us to himself, a wisdom that will find expression in a spirit of faith and a life of faithfulness." Knowing God, God's Wisdom And Ours |
"Two facts about the triune Jehovah are assumed, if not actually stated, in every single biblical passage. The first is that he is king -- absolute monarch of the universe, ordering all its affairs, working out his will in all that happens within it. The second fact is that he speaks -- uttering words that express his will in order to cause it to be done." Knowing God, Thy Word Is Truth |
"Though God is a great king, it is not his wish to live at a distance from his subjects. Rather the reverse: He made us with the intention that he and we might walk together forever in a love relationship." Knowing God, Thy Word Is Truth |
"True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God. They submit without reserve to the word of God written in the Book of Truth, believing the teaching, trusting the promises, following the commands. Their eyes are upon the God of the Bible as their Father and the Christ of the Bible as their Saviour." Knowing God, Thy Word Is Truth |
"Christians know that in addition to the word of God spoken directly to them in the Scriptures, God's word has also gone forth to create, and control, and order things around them; but since the Scripture tells them that all things work together for their good,, the thought of God's ordering their circumstances brings them only joy." Knowing God, Thy Word Is Truth |
"Revival means the work of God restoring to a moribund church, in a manner out of the ordinary those standards of Christian life and experience which the New Testament sets forth as being entirely ordinary; and a right-minded concern for revival will express itself not in a hankering after tongues (ultimately it is of no importance whether we speak in tongues or not), but rather in a longing that the Spirit may shed God's love abroad in our hearts with greater power." Knowing God, The Love Of God |
"It is not possible to argue that a God who is love cannot also be a God who condemns and punishes the disobedient." Knowing God, The Love Of God |
"God's love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved. Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love we may look to him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness, or to shield his loved ones from trouble when he knows that they need trouble to further their sanctification." Knowing God, The Love Of God |
"God's love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners whereby, having identified himself with their welfare, he has given his Son to be their Saviour, and now brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation." Knowing God, The Love Of God |
"God's purpose of love, formed before creation, involved, first, the choice and selection of those whom he would bless and, second, the appointment of the benefits to be given them and the means whereby these benefits would be procured and enjoyed. All this was made sure from the start." Knowing God, The Love Of God |
"It is a staple diet in the Sunday school that grace is God's Riches At Christ's Expense." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"To be sure, there have always been some who have found the thought of grace so overwhelmingly wonderful that they could never get over it... But many church people are not like this. They may pay lip service to the idea of grace, but there they stop. Their conception of grace is not so much debased as nonexistent. The thought means nothing to them; it does not touch their experience at all." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"The Bible insists throughout that this world which God in his goodness has made is a moral world, one in which retribution is as basic a fact as breathing." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"God is not true to himself unless he punishes sin. And unless one knows and feels the truth of this fact, that wrongdoers have no natural hope of anything from God but retributive judgment, one can never share the biblical faith in divine grace." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God's favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God's grace." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"The God of the Bible does not depend on his human creatures for his well-being, nor, now that we have sinned, is he bound to show us favour." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"Grace is free, in the sense of being self-originated and of proceeding from One who was free not to be gracious. Only when it is seen that what decides each individual's destiny is whether or not God resolves to save him from his sins, and that this is a decision which God need not make in any single case, can one begin to grasp the biblical view of grace." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"Justification is free to us, but it was costly to God, for its price was the atoning death of God's Son." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"As grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end. Faith, both in its origin and continuance, is a gift of grace." Knowing God, The Grace Of God |
"There are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God's work as Judge." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background. But if we examine the New Testament, even in the most cursory way, we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God's action as Judge, far from being reduced, is actually intensified." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"The Jesus of the New Testament, who is the world's Saviour, is its Judge as well." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"The character of God is the guarantee that all wrongs will be righted someday." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"Moral indifference would be an imperfection in God, not a perfection... The final proof that God is a perfect moral Being, not indifferent to questions of right and wrong, is the fact that he has committed himself to judge the world." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"It must be emphasized that the doctrine of divine judgment, and particularly of the final judgment, is not to be thought of primarily as a bogey with which to frighten men into an outward form of conventional righteousness. It has its frightening implications for godless men, it is true; but its main thrust is as a revelation of the moral character of God, and an imparting of moral significance to human life." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"It is not always realized that the main New Testament authority on final judgment, just as on heaven and hell, is the Lord Jesus Christ himself... For Jesus constantly affirmed that in the day when all appear before God's throne to receive the abiding and eternal consequences of the life they have lived, he himself will be the Father's agent in judgment, and his word of acceptance or rejection will be decisive." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"God's own appointment has made Jesus Christ inescapable. He stands at the end of life's road for everyone without exception... And we can be sure that he who is true God and perfect man will make a perfectly just judge." Knowing God, God The Judge |
"To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God's kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment... The fact is that the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter." Knowing God, The Wrath Of God |
"One cannot imagine that talk of divine judgment was every every popular, yet the biblical writers engage in it constantly. One of the most striking things about the Bible is the vigor with which both Testaments emphasize the reality and terror God's wrath... The Bible labors the point that just as God is good to those who trust him, so he is terrible to those who do not." Knowing God, The Wrath Of God |
"If it is asked, can disobedience to our Creator really deserve great and grievous punishment? Anyone who has ever been convicted of sin knows beyond any shadow of doubt that the answer is yes, and knows too that those whose consciences have not yet been awakened to consider, as Anselm put it, "how weighty is sin" are not yet qualified to give an opinion." Knowing God, The Wrath Of God |
"God's wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves. Before hell is an experience inflicted by God, it is a state for which a person himself opts by retreating from the light which God shines in his heart to lead him to himself.. In the last analysis, all that God does subsequently in judicial action toward the unbeliever, whether in this life or beyond it, is to show him, and lead him into, the full implications of the choice he has made." Knowing God, The Wrath Of God |
"Modern muddle-headedness and confusion as to the meaning of faith in God are almost beyond description. People say they believe in God, but they have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in him may make." Knowing God, Goodness And Severity |
"God's jealousy over his people, as we have seen, presupposes his covenant love; and this love is no transitory affection, accidental and aimless, but is the expression of a sovereign purpose. The goal of the covenant love of God is that he should have a people on earth as long as history lasts, and after that should have all his faithful ones of every age with him in glory. Covenant love is the heart of God's plan for his world." Knowing God, The Jealous God |
"The idea of propitiation -- that is, of averting God's anger by an offering -- runs right through the Bible." Knowing God, The Heart Of The Gospel |
"Has the word propitiation any place in the your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central... and any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards." Knowing God, The Heart Of The Gospel |
"A gospel without propitiation at its heart is another gospel than that which Paul preached." Knowing God, The Heart Of The Gospel |
"The wrath of God is as personal, and as potent, as his love, and just as the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus was the direct manifesting of his Father's love toward us, so it was the direct averting of his Father's wrath against us." Knowing God, The Heart Of The Gospel |
"One of the great ironies of our time is that whereas liberal and radical theologians believe themselves to be restating the gospel for today, they have for the most part rejected the categories of wrath, guilt, condemnation, and the enmity of God, and so have made it impossible for themselves ever to present the gospel at all, for they cannot now state the basic problem which the gospel of peace solves." Knowing God, The Heart Of The Gospel |
"The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere." Knowing God, Sons Of God |
"The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again." Knowing God, Sons Of God |
"Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be ADOPTION THROUGH PROPITIATION, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that." Knowing God, Sons Of God |