Saints in the Arms of a Happy God Quotes

“Christ paints the Father in the most beautiful of hues!  According to Jesus, He is a God who is delighted at the sight of little children, goes out of His way to converse with the marginalized, turns water into wine to keep the party going, and who brushes aside religious laws in the name of showing mercy to sinners.  He pardons the adulterous without being asked, takes tax collectors as His disciples, and dines with scam artists and traitors.  He places His disciples’ wellbeing above the sacred nature of the Sabbath, brings healing to His nation’s foreign occupiers, and assures us that violence is never the way that God solves His problems. ”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“Like the Gadarene demoniac, Jesus heals our demonic visions of God, and presents us instead with a vision of a loving Father, a compassionate Son, and an affirming Holy Spirit.  Yet somehow, people find this safer, more loving vision of God terrifying, and often seek to chase away the Living Word, with His warm smile and open arms, and long for the terrifying comfort of normalcy.  I believe we react this way because we have grown afraid of not being afraid.  Fear has become such a common component in our “relationship” with God that we simply don’t know how to function without it.  When we cannot feel its presence, we panic, and assume we must be on a greased pole to heresy land, as, so we’re taught, being afraid of God is essential to being a Christian.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“The glorious truth is that the Bible does not teach that all men are separated and cut off from God because of sin.  It is a mythical conclusion, arrived at by men philosophizing in accordance with the fallen mind; men who, in their scramble for proof texts, read their preconceived ideas into passages that are irrelevant to their argument.  What the Bible actually teaches is that it was us who separated ourselves from God.  The guilt, shame and fear that accompanied sin caused us to run and hide, but God was right where He’d always been. Remember, man’s mind had become corrupted by the knowledge of good and evil, rendering him incapable of perceiving God rightly.  Over the years, people born with this same inability began viewing their loving Father as someone to be terrified of. ”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. -JOHN 17:3 (Emphasis mine) Notice that Jesus does not say “eternal life” is an endless existence that we step into after death.  No, He speaks of “eternal life” as though it were a certain quality of life that hinges upon our understanding of God’s nature.  This life, however, can be experienced only through a knowledge of Jesus Christ, since He is the Father’s exact representation.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, far from providing a template for an “us and them” brand of theology, actually provides us with the opposite. For the goats found themselves peering into the windows of the Kingdom from the outside, precisely because of their devotion to this “us and them” mindset. They did not perceive Christ in the poor, wandering stranger, or in the condemned man locked behind prison bars! They could not perceive His presence in the least of the least, and it was this inability that landed them on the “goat list”. They could not believe that Christ had “other sheep” from a Gentile flock, and so treated them with contempt and hostility.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come. -ROMANS 5: 14 (Emphasis mine) Paul explains that Adam’s failure opened the door for the alien entities of sin and death to enter and wreak havoc upon the human race. It was Adam alone whose work is blamed, though Eve technically ate first. Paul seems to be laying out Adam’s role as the head of the human race, the gateway through which death and sin passed to the subsequent generations. However, after establishing this truth, Paul turns the tables, telling us that Adam was merely a pattern of a greater One who was to come –Jesus, the last Adam! This word, pattern, is the Greek word typos, which can be translated as “an example”, or a “for instance”. You see, Adam was not plan a., but merely an example. Jesus is, was, and always will be the eternal plan a.! Adam served the eternal purpose of educating the human race on how Christ’s work of redemption would function. Just as the work of one man, Adam, affected the whole, so it would be with Jesus. Adam is given the title of first, but Jesus is given the title of last! He is not merely called the “second Adam”, but the “last Adam”. This means that whatever Christ accomplishes on our behalf will be final. It will never be undone, and serves as the period, capping off and sealing God’s declaration concerning redemption.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“We must always be careful when reading words written to Old Testament Israel , for we are often tempted to believe that we are free to apply scriptures pertaining to them to ourselves. Our situation, however , could not be more different from theirs, as Israel was under an inferior covenant that came with both rewards for obedience, and reprisals for disobedience. So even though there may be Old Testament scriptures seeming to suggest that sin separates us from God, we must keep in mind that these scriptures were written and addressed to national Israel, and not to the whole of humanity. We must also keep in mind that the “separation” we read of in such passages usually has nothing to do with a separation from God’s presence in a relational sense, but is speaking of God apparently allowing certain things to occur to them, and consequently appearing as though He is ignoring their prayers. The separation is not about a lack of warm fuzzies in our personal prayer time, but deals with God not seeming to act when Israel called to Him. It could manifest as Him no longer fighting Israel’s battles for her, or any number of similar things, but has nothing whatsoever to do with how God responds to human sin.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“The Law was given so that there would be a standard to break in the first place, and man, becoming convinced of his inability to lead a righteous life, would be convinced of a deeper problem. His eyes would be opened to the harsh realities of the fall, and of his own internalization of sin. Then, at just the right moment, when he was fully convinced of his powerlessness against the corruption of sin, Jesus Christ, being too pure and noble to simply watch this evil unfold, exploded onto the scene as savior, giving Grace to all. The Law gave us a grid for understanding what we needed saving from, and Christ’s coming revealed the amazing depth of God’s love in saving us from it.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“The “wrath” and the “punishment” are not the results of God pressing some big, red wrath button in the heavens, but are things inherent in the choices that we make when living lives that are in disharmony with His nature. Regarding the Romans 1: 18 brand of “wrath”, Paul said that people, “… received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” (Romans 1: 27), which is to say that the “penalty” is contained within the choice to live in a disharmonious way. The action itself becomes its own punishment. God is not actively tormenting anyone, it is the choice of the individual that becomes the penalty. The wrath that “remains” on the one who rejects Christ’s offer of eternal life is, I believe, precisely that. They will continue to live a life in disharmony with the Spirit, and continue to reap the consequences of such a life, but it is not that God is angrily sending calamities and misfortune their way, and it most certainly isn’t that God is angry at them simply for being born with an evil nature.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“God’s wrath often gets spoken of as though it were only one specific thing. Our definition of it has become very narrow, and we tend to look at it as dealing with either an eternity in hell, or God’s angry responses to human sin via natural disasters or other calamities. However, the two Greek words translated as wrath in the New Testament, orge and thymos, simply speak of displeasure or powerful emotion . For this reason, whatever this thing called God’s wrath is, it is something that can be manifested in a variety of ways, and should not be viewed through the narrow lens of Western theology. Wrath is not a euphemism for hell or for cataclysmic events that God conjures up in His anger, but describes a powerful emotion that sometimes arises as a result of displeasure, and can manifest in a variety of ways.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“In conclusion, the death of Christ was not about God the Father needing to vent His rage and fury upon a sacrificial victim in order to appease Himself. It was not about the Father needing to crush someone in the place of humanity so that, on the other side of the crushing He could be pleased with, and relational towards us. It was not about a sacrificial system which God originally instituted, but later decided was incapable of satisfying His needs. It was about the entire Trinity destroying and putting to death the alien entity of sin, the “devil’s work”(1 John 3: 18), in order to save us from its corrupting influence. It was done so that on the other side of the Cross, we would see and understand what man had lost sight of after partaking of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was to reveal to us that our God is not a cosmic Santa Claus who is making a list, checking it twice, and who will ultimately repay both the naughty and the nice. Our God is Love, and has only ever been seeking to reveal that love to us. He was never out to “get us”, but to rescue us from the consequences of our own decisions. Sin did not change God, and the Cross was not the means by which He reset Himself back to His factory settings. Sin changed us, and it therefore needed to be destroyed so that we could behold the unchangeable nature of our God of love. The Cross was the ultimate, climactic demonstration of the Godhead’s love for the human race, not the crude display of a deified version of human justice. It was Eternal Love Himself, stepping into our problem, absorbing it into Himself and dying in order to put it to death. It was heroic, self-giving, sacrificial justice.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“Allow me to ask a question: if something, in this case, sin, has the power to change God, would it not stand to reason that this “something” must also be a God? And would not this God, by necessity, need to be at least the equal of the God that it was able to change? To take it a step further, if one God has the power to change another God, it would actually stand to reason that, beyond being His equal, the one with the ability to change the other would be the greater of the two. If this be true, then sin would not only be a God (yes, with a capitol “G”), but a God greater than man’s creator!”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“Because of the knowledge of good and evil, the inherent goodness of Adam and Eve’s design now appeared evil to them, causing them to feel the need to improve upon it by adding to it their own accomplishments. This is birthplace of the ubiquitous religious impulse resident within all human beings, to sacrifice and work in order to please and satisfy their “gods”.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“In man’s original mind there were no lines of distinction between good and bad, or sacred and secular. God was all in all, and Adam and Eve enjoyed life in the context of His presence, without a consciousness or understanding of sin. God was not the judge, the rule master or the dispenser of fines and penalties for moral infractions. He was simply Father, and above all He was Love.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it.”  33 -John G. Lake (1870-1935)”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“The ultimate temptation that one can face is to doubt the goodness and nearness of the Father in the midst of suffering.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God

“If that’s all that reading this book does for you – causes you to ask the hard questions –then it’ll have done its job.  So long as we remain stuck in an apathetic certainty we’ll continue to stagnate.  Some people are only one or two questions away from freedom, and had I been willing to think for myself and poke holes in the “holy”, I may have not spent so many years in a religious fog.”
― Jeff Turner, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God