The Reason for God - Quotes

The Reason for God - Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller, (Dutton, 2008)
(See post, 2 June 08, for link to website.)

Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite….

People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak – these things are all perfectly natural. On what basis then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? (p26)

The Bible says that Jesus came on a rescue mission for creation. He had to pay for our sins so that someday he can end evil and suffering without ending us. (p30)

The Biblical view of things is the resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. (p32)

Surely it will have to be ‘one way’, God’s way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God – there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me….
In the most profound way, God has said to us in Christ, ‘I will adjust to you. I will change for you. I’ll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me’. (p49)

Quoting CS Lewis: ‘There are only two kinds of people – those who say “Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, “Thy will be done’.
(p79)

I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles and look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see. (p123)

Stephen Hawkings concludes: ‘The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.’ (p130)

So according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. (p162)

When my own personal grasp of the gospel [grace] was very weak, my self-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards – in academic work, professional achievement, or relationships – I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to people. When I was not living up to standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. (p180)

Sometimes people approach me and say, 'I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian belief, but I don’t think I can accept that part’. I usually respond: ‘If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? (p202)

A man once said to a pastor that he would be happy to believe in Christianity if the cleric could only give him a watertight argument for its truth. The pastor replied, ‘What if God hasn’t given us a watertight argument, but rather a watertight person?’ (p232)

During a dark time in her life, a woman in my congregation complained that she had prayed over and over, “God, help me find you’, but had gotten nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to, ‘God, come and find me. After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the sheep’. She concluded, when she was recounting this to me, ‘The only reason I can tell you this story is – he did.’ (p240)