The God Who Is There Quotes

“At the end of the day, prime allegiance must be to God himself, to God alone.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel. “What a work of art,” says Shakespeare of humanity. “We are very dangerous,” says Arthur Miller in After the Fall. “We meet . . . not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies East of Eden, but after the Fall, after many, many deaths.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“So when we face the ravages of uncertainty, when there is suffering and agony in our lives or in the world, and we wonder what God is doing and we have no answers and we reread the book of Job (that piece of wisdom literature we saw in chapter 6) and we hear God saying through four chapters of rhetorical questions, “Be still, Job; there are many things you do not understand at all,” we can now actually add something more that we do understand: But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. You can trust a God who not only is sovereign but bleeds for you. Sometimes when there are no other answers for your guilt or your fears or your uncertainties or your anguish, there is one immovable place on which to stand. It is the ground right in front of the cross.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“But Matthew knows, and God knows, and the readers know, that it is by staying on that cross that he saves others. Strictly speaking, he cannot save himself and save others. If he saves himself, he will not be able to save others. When they say, “He can’t save himself,” they mean that he is so attached to the cross, so nailed to the cross, that physically he cannot get down. But Matthew knows that he could get down. He could still call his twelve legions of angels. But he cannot save himself if he is to save others because the very purpose of his hanging on that cross is to bear my sin in his own body on the tree. If he does save himself, I am damned. It is only by not saving himself that he saves me.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“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.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“When we feel in our hearts and minds, as we grow older, that there has to be something more—there has to be something more satisfying, there has to be something bigger—we are right to listen to that brooding voice, because we were made for God and our souls will be restless until we know him.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“What gives sin its most horrendous odor, its most heinous aspect, is precisely that it is defiance of the God who made us and who judges us on the last day.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Listen: The God who is there, the God who has named himself supremely in Jesus, gathers and transforms his people. Without this transformation so-called Christianity is no Christianity at all. For this God gathers and transforms his people.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”[4]”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Instead of focusing primarily on one short passage or chapter from the Bible, I shall cite a handful of passages at length and offer some brief comments along the way so that you can hear Paul’s argument with slightly different emphases, emphases that insist that the Good News about Christ and his cross, what the Bible calls “the gospel,” calls out people, gathers them together, and transforms them. Any so-called Christianity that does not incorporate this reality into its vision is not worthy of the name it carries.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Do you want to know where God’s justice is most powerfully demonstrated? On the cross. Do you want to know where God’s love is most powerfully demonstrated? On the cross. There Jesus, the God-man, bore hell itself, and God did this both to be just and to be the one who declares just those who have faith in him.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The point is that the temple in the Old Testament was the great meeting place between God and human beings, as we have seen. It was the place of sacrifice. Now Jesus, referring to his own body, says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” He means that by the destruction of his own life and its resurrection, he becomes the great meeting place between God and human beings. By rising again after his death, he becomes the great temple with all the power that is required to bring someone back from the dead.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“There is a wonderful chapter, John 17, that is sometimes called “Jesus’s high priestly prayer,” where there is a kind of extended meditation on the fact that in eternity past the Father loved the Son in a perfection of love. And in return, the Son loved the Father in a perfection of love, past our wildest, most generous imaginations.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The Bible’s storyline, we have discovered, has, from the opening chapters of Genesis, set up a massive tension—cosmic in scope but descending all the way down to the level of the individual. The tension is grounded in the fact that God made everything good. God himself, the Creator, is different from the creation, but all that he made was initially God-centered and good. The nature of evil is tied to revolution against this God. In Genesis 3, we saw how this is depicted as obsessive desire to challenge God—to become God ourselves, to usurp to ourselves the prerogatives that belong only to the Creator. Out of this idolatry come all of the social evils, the horizontal evils that we know. With everybody wanting to be at the center of the universe, there can only be strife.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The most spectacular display of God’s glory is in a bloody instrument of torture because that is where God’s goodness was most displayed. It is good to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” but we must also sing, “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame”—because there God displayed his glory in Christ Jesus, who thus became our tabernacle, our temple, the meeting place between God and human beings.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The fear in view is not the kind of cringing fear that a whipped dog has when you pick up a newspaper, knowing that you are an arbitrary and cruel master who extracts cheap glee out of scaring the poor little thing to death. This is the fear of God that recognizes that he is matchlessly holy, righteous, and just—and we are not. God is our judge as well as our only hope. There lies the beginning of wisdom. This is the opposite of what we found in Psalm 14:1: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” A right sense of how to live under the sun must begin with God and his self-disclosure. There is the beginning of wisdom.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“This is the God who is there, who has named himself and disclosed himself. In his mercy he has come back again and again to save his people, and he keeps promising an even greater deliverance to come. He insists that the reason people do not see this reality is that this side of the fall we human beings suffer from such a deep moral and spiritual corruption that we are blind to the obvious. It is the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Wisdom literature clarifies the polarity between holiness and unholiness, between righteousness and unrighteousness. But although it clarifies, it cannot save us. If all we had were wisdom literature, it would tend to puff us up when we are doing well and drive us to despair when we are not.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The old Day of Atonement, once held every year in accordance with the Mosaic covenant, has been superseded, because we have the ultimate sacrifice for sin: Jesus himself, who shed his blood on our behalf, a perfect moral sacrifice. He offers up his life, takes our death, and bears our sin away in a fashion that no animal ever could. The law pointed forward to that sole means of God reconciling rebels to himself and brings together in Jesus the poles of Exodus 34: God abounds “in love and faithfulness” (34:6), and he forgives “wickedness, rebellion and sin” (34:7), not because he leaves the guilty unpunished but because another bears their punishment. Here is the God who legislates, and even in his legislation he points us to Jesus.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“For all the failures in Abraham’s life and in your life and mine, God provides the sacrificial lamb. The stories and the accounts begin to multiply through the Old Testament pages in anticipation of the time when God would provide a sacrifice that far exceeds the value of some ram caught in a thicket.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“No, there is only one way you are going to have a relationship with this kind of God, and that is if he displays sovereign grace to you. We have nothing with which to barter.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“There is no way back to innocence. In the Bible, there is only a way forward—to the cross.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“We should not think that the serpent’s temptation is nothing more than an invitation to break a rule, arbitrary or otherwise. That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution. It makes me god and thus de-gods God.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“If God makes image-bearers and pronounces what is good and what is evil, if he orders the whole system, then to come along at any point and say, “No, I will declare my own good. What you declare to be evil, I will declare to be good. What you say is good, I will declare to be evil”—this is why the tree bearing this fruit is said to be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What is crucial is not the tree but the rebellion. What is so wretchedly tragic is God’s image-bearer standing over against God. This is the de-god-ing of God so that I can be my own god. This, in short, is idolatry.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“The first doctrine to be denied, according to the Bible, is the doctrine of judgment. In many disputes about God and religion, this pattern often repeats itself, because if you can get rid of that one teaching, then rebellion has no adverse consequences, and so you are free to do anything.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“Are you out of your skull? Look around! This is Eden; this is paradise! God knows exactly what he is doing. He made everything; he even made me. My husband loves me and I love him—and we are both intoxicated with the joy and holiness of our beloved Maker. My very being resonates with the desire to reflect something of his spectacular glory back to him. How could I possibly question his wisdom and love? He knows, in a way I never can, exactly what is best—and I trust him absolutely. And you want me to doubt him or question the purity of his motives and character? How idiotic is that? Besides, what possible good can come of a creature defying his Creator and Sovereign? Are you out of your skull?”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“irreducible complexity,” that is, structures in nature and in the human being that are so complex that it is statistically impossible that they could have come to be by chance. To appeal to a chance mutation, or to the mere selection of the fittest, or to any of the other appeals on offer in the various heritages that spring from Darwinism, simply makes no sense. Living systems have an irreducible complexity to them that makes it statistically impossible that all of the necessary but highly improbable steps were taken at the same time—and without such statistically impossible simultaneity, life could not be. What this suggests, it is argued, is the need for a designer.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution. It makes me god and thus de-gods God.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“You cannot cut yourself off from the God of the Bible without consequences.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story

“...porque fomos criados para Deus, e nossa alma não tem descanso enquanto não o conhecemos.”
― D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God's Story