The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

by D.A. Carson

The Christian claim, however, is that this Bible discloses the God who is there.

the God of the Bible in the very first chapter is not some abstract “unmoved mover,” some spirit impossible to define, some ground of all beings, some mystical experience. He has personality and dares to disclose himself in words that human beings understand.

God displays himself not only as the God who will punish sinners but as the one who is “full of grace and truth” and forgives.

But where new birth takes place, there is a change of direction, of origin. There is a cleaning up in the life. There is a transformation. There is the beginning of life from God himself that shapes our existence in a new direction.

By his death we have life. By his crucifixion on a pole, we begin eternal life. The new birth is grounded in Jesus’s death. That is what Jesus is saying. You and I receive the benefit of this not by trying harder or by being ultra-religious but by believing in Jesus.