Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

P. 325: Every day the Church experiences the fruits ... of Christ's sitting down at the Father's right hand; and the enemies of Christ, including even Satan himself, whether they like it or not, marvel at it, and tremble. For Christ gathers his Church ... while they vainly resist; he preserves it against the tyranny of the whole world and the gates of hell, and he destroys the antichrist by the spirit of his mouth.

P. 179: If God is the center of your life, technology is a great gift. If technology is your savior, you're lost.

This is the basic thesis of this book and captures most of his argument. While undoubtedly having a great deal of truth to it, it is proving underwhelming and disappointing so far. I was hoping for more from Reinke.

P. 137: In his wisdom, God chooses to send the most powerful ideas and innovations into this works mostly through God rejectors ... who hold to some appearance of religion (like Cain did in his offering). But for whatever reason, God has chosen to not she many technological advances through his bride, the church. Spiritual awakening and innovative prowess ... are rarely tied together in the economy of God's plan.

P. 73: The question each of us must answer is: What's the tar for? Do we waterproof as an act of faith in God or as an act of rebellion against him? Noah used tar because he was on a journey to find a future promise. Tar sealed his boat and tightened his faith in God. But the Babelites misapplied the tar, because in unbelief they waterproofed their fire-hardened bricks to construct a permanent utopia of self-glory.

P. 72: I knew that everybody ... read that I was to be taken care of, for I bit. I recollect that I positively began to have a dread of myself, as a kind of wild boy who did bite.

P. 22: There's an emerging challenge on the horizon. Individual technologies that we can use are quickly becoming an ecosystem of technology we cannot escape. We have entered an age in which all of our techno-wonders are becoming so interconnected that they take on biological evolutionary characteristics-- a seventh kingdom in nature, a unified and reinforced ecosystem.. so dense .. it spawned a bit of independence.

P. 263: The immutability of [election] is sufficiently shown by the very nature of God. Someone who changes his plan usually changes it either for a lack of wisdom when he was considering it, or because of a failure to of power when carrying it out -- neither of these defects can be attributed to God without blasphemy.

P. 254: Think much and deeply on our Lord's deadly pangs of the Body ... pierced through and through by the cruel nails... and make a resolution, with prayer, to think of that pain the next time you are tempted to any sin of the flesh. That will be, holding up the Cross for a weapon against foul and evil desire, as Moses held up his rod against the evil ways of Egypt; and be sure the Cross will not be held up in vain

P. 216: You see, our God is light; our Redeemer is light; our scripture is light; the ministers of it are light; all Christian people are children of the light, and have light within them. If so, what obligation is laid upon us, not to walk as if we were in darkness, but to walk uprightly as in the day, shewing the people of this world, that we have a better rule to direct us than they have.

P. 155: The incarnation signifies a nuptial union between Christ and the church, and attests to the fact that the "church shall never be destroyed." If Christ has become "flesh off or flesh" ... he is forever joined to her, linking his own fate to the fate of the church. Sibbes thus reads the incarnation as a figure of Christ's indestructible union with his church, and of the church's inevitable preservation.

P. 133: Donne believed Scripture translates us by carrying us from figure to figure, thereby reinterpreting us ... God ... relies on the ambiguity of double-sided images. Donne points out ... "water" in Scripture variously signifies chaos and ... sin on the one hand; on the other hand, water also variously signifies God's saving and cleansing action. "Water" means both things ... with only a turn of God's phrase.

P. 33: For the nature of God's word is, that whosoever hear it reasoned and disputed before him, it will begin immediately to make him every day better amd better, till he be grown into a perfect man in the knowledge of Christ and the love of the law of God: or else make him worse and worse, till he be hardened that he openly resist the spirit of God.

- William Tyndale

P. 203: But what we must especially fear is that "outside will be all those who serve idols" (Rev. 22:15); that is, they will be barred from the kingdom of heaven (1 Cor. 6:9), and "their lot will be in the lake burning with fire and sulphur, which is the second death" (Rev 21:8). Therefore, "little children, keep yourselfes from idols, Amen." (1 John 5:21).

P. 184: The goal that is most appropriate and closest to God's law is a single one, namely, the love ordained according to God's precepts wherein the conscience rests securely.

P. 178: Then [when glorified] in the mind of man there will shine forth the most perfect knowledge of God and of his will, an integrity of judgment that has no ignorance or doubts. In the will, the heart, the feelings and in all powers, being perfect in every way, and without any oppisition, there will thrive an inclination, a tendency, an eagerness, and a desire to obey God... His will shall be truly free.

P. 142: "Kids may think they want to be in charge of the home and its moods, but in reality the most reassuring thing for them, Burns says, is the reassertion of the rightful order of adult-child relations."

The natural law always finds its way.

P. 165: After the sin has been committed, [believers] do not remain defeated, but through true repentance and grief towards God they rise up once again, and thereupon wage war against the world, their own flesh, and Satan more seriously and steadfastly, as is evident from the examples of those saints whose fall Scripture records for us.

P. 131: For someone to exercise dominion, he must be endowed with the gift of a soul that reasons; but to do so fairly and peaceably, he must certainly be wise, holy, and just. And if he would also put his dominion into practice, he must have a body well-prepared for actions that accord with a soul that is sound. And finally, for the dominion to be perpetual, the man must be immortal.

P. 143: The lizard that the angel had flung to the ground ... becomes a silvery white stallion for the young man to ride up to the Mountains. The ... lizard's metamorphosis is an apt explanation for the similar new energy that Dante's pilgrim describes in his own situation: "Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.

P. 108: "Nevertheless, the permission of [sins] is good. So then, God both wills and directs the permission, and ordains it for some good purpose that is greater than that of which the absence is the evil that is permitted. For since God is good to the highest degree, He would in no way permit there to be anything evil in his workings, unless He were not so almighty that even concerning evil He would still do good."

P. 91: Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed... Therefore, He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficieny that one day they will have to discover.

P. 39: When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one.

This chapter on divine goodness was simply incredible. Too many quotes to capture them all.

P. 32: I might .. have learned from the Poets that Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness ... There is kindness in Love, but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it.

P. 32 - 39 is some of the best Lewis I've ever read.

P. 172: if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World...

P. 98: Augustine speaks about it as follows: "It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause for the creation of things is the goodness of the Creator."

P. 155: "Why is it, as with poor David, a sense congress always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" Dickens put this query to Forster in 1855, referring to the hero of David Copperfield, the most explicitly autobiographical of his novels.

P. 67: The perfection of God consists in all those divine attributes, as of one in whom there are no shortcomings. There is excellence and preeminence above all things, for nothing is similar or equal to him there is glory or majesty, whether inwardly in his personal properties, whereby he enjoys the glory in himself, or outwardly, and unapproachable light. And there is blessedness in which he lacks nothing.