Grace and Glory Quotes

“The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“Man belongs to two spheres. And Scripture not only teaches that these two spheres are distinct, it also teaches what estimate of relative importance ought to be placed upon them. Heaven is the primordial, earth the secondary creation. In heaven are the supreme realities; what surrounds us here below is a copy and shadow of the celestial things. Because the relation between the two spheres is positive, and not negative, not mutually repulsive, heavenly-mindedness can never give rise to neglect of the duties pertaining to the present life. It is the ordinance and will of God, that not apart from, but on the basis of, and in contact with, the earthly sphere man shall work out his heavenly destiny.
Still the lower may never supplant the higher in our affections. In the heart of man time calls for eternity, earth for heaven. He must, if normal, seek the things above, as the flower's face is attracted by the sun, and the water-courses are drawn to the ocean. Heavenly-mindedness, so far from blunting or killing the natural desires, produces in the believer a finer organization, with more delicate sensibilities, larger capacities, a stronger pulse of life. It does not spell impoverishment, but enrichment of nature. The spirit of the entire Epistle shows this. The use of the words "city" and "country" is evidence of it. These are terms that stand for the accumulation, the efflorescence, the intensive enjoyment of values. Nor should we overlook the social note in the representation. A perfect communion in a perfect society is promised. In the city of the living God believers are joined to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and mingle with the spirits of just men made perfect. And all this faith recognizes. It does not first need the storms and stress that invade to quicken its desire for such things. Being the sum and substance of all the positive gifts of God to us in their highest form, heaven is of itself able to evoke in our hearts positive love, such absorbing love as can render us at times forgetful of the earthly strife. In such moments the transcendent beauty of the other shore and the irresistible current of our deepest life lift us above every regard of wind or wave. We know that through weather fair or foul our ship is bound straight for its eternal port.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’ God had mercy upon us because he
saw us leading a life without hope. And therefore by a new birth he radically changed our world for us so as to make it a world of hope. The peculiar way in which the apostle
expresses this fact ought to be carefully noted. He might have said, ‘God gave us a new hope,’ or, ‘God brought us into a new hope.’ But what he says is, ‘God begat us again unto a living hope.’ Undoubtedly this representation is chosen in order to emphasize the comprehensiveness and persuasiveness of the hope which the Christian obtains. It means a change as great as the crisis of birth, a transition from not being to living, when the hope of the gospel breaks upon our vision. The change is not partial. It does not affect our life in merely one or the other of its aspects. It revolutionizes our whole life at every point. What this means is a total regeneration of our consciousness, a regeneration of our way of thinking, a reversal of our outlook upon things in their entirety.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“The necessary consequence of this life of the Christian in hope is that he learns to consider the present earthly life as a journey, a pilgrimage, something necessary for the sake
of the end but which does not have any independent value or attraction in itself. This is a thought which pervades and colours the entire epistle. Peter in the very opening words addresses the readers as sojourners of the dispersion – two terms which strikingly express that they are away from home, a colony with regard to heaven, scattered in a strange world as truly as the scattered Jews were a diaspora to the holy land and Jerusalem. He tells them to gird up the loins of their minds as befits a traveller journeying through. And again he says: ‘Pass the time of your sojourning in fear’ (1:17). Once more: ‘Beloved, I beseech you as sojourners and pilgrims to abstain from fleshly lusts which
war against the soul’ (2:11). Without a certain detachment from this world, other-worldliness is not possible. Hope cannot flourish where the heart is in the present life.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“Finally, the living hope of which the apostle speaks has this for its peculiarity: that it possesses a personal centre in Christ and God. All through the epistle this is strikingly
brought out. That which controls and attracts the believer in this hope is not a confused mass of expectation, not a medley of fantastic dreams. There is a unifying idea in it;
it is, in the last analysis, the certainty that there is a state in store for us which shall bring us face to face with God and Christ. The Christian is a sojourner here and must live in the future because he knows full well that under the present conditions he can never attain to that full possession of God and his Saviour for which in his best moments his heart and flesh cry out. The veil of sense lies between; the barrier of sin lies between. Even though he may lay hold of God as Moses did – seeing the invisible – there is something that lies beyond his reach, that eludes his grasp. And the believer knows, moreover, that as long as he cannot fully possess God, God cannot fully possess him nor be completely glorified in him. This sentiment lies at the basis of all genuine God-born Christian hope – the sentiment which enabled even the psalmist under the old covenant to transcend the darkness and mystery of death and then say, ‘Thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is fulness of joy; in thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore. …As for me I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness’
(Psa. 16:11; 17:15).”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“Now in this sense also, I take it, Peter affirms that believers have been begotten again unto a living hope. In all probability the representation, while applicable to all believers, was influenced to some extent by the apostle’s memory of his own experience. There had been a moment in his previous life when all at once, in the twinkling of an eye as it were, he had been translated from a world of despair into a world of hope. It was when the fact of the resurrection of Christ flashed upon him. Under the two-fold bitterness of his denial of the Lord and of the tragedy of the cross, utter darkness had settled down upon his soul. Everything he expected from the future in connection with Jesus had been completely blotted out. Perhaps he had even been in danger of losing the old hope which as a pious Israelite he cherished before he knew the Lord. And then suddenly, the whole aspect of things had been changed. The risen
Christ appeared to him and by his appearance wrought the resurrection of everything that had gone down with him into the grave. No, there was far more here for Peter than a mere resurrection of what he had hoped in before. It was the birth of something new that now, for the first time, disclosed itself to his perception. His hope was not given back to him in its old form. It was regenerated in the act of restoration. Previously it had been dim, undefined, subject to fluctuations; sometimes eager and enthusiastic, sometimes cast down and languishing; in many respects earthly, carnal and incompletely spiritualized. Apart from all of these defects, his previous hope had been a bare one, which could only sustain itself by projection into the future, but which lacked that vital support and nourishment in a present substantial reality without which no religious hope can permanently subsist.

Through the resurrection of Christ, all these faults were corrected; all these deficiencies supplied. For Peter looked upon the risen Christ as the beginning, the firstfruits of that
new world of God in which the believer’s hope is anchored. Jesus did not rise as he had been before, but transformed, glorified, eternalized, the possessor and author of a transcendent heavenly life at one and the same time, the revealer, the sample and the pledge of the future realization of the true kingdom of God. No prolonged course of training could have been more effective for purifying and spiritualizing the apostle’s hope than this single, instantaneous experience; this bursting upon him of a new form of eternal life, concrete and yet all-comprehensive in its prophetic significance. Well might the apostle say that he himself had been begotten again unto a new hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead. And, of course, what was true of him was even more emphatically true of the readers of his epistle, who, if they were believers from the Gentiles, before their conversion had lived entirely without hope and without God in the world.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“If we are true believers, though we ourselves
should sometimes forget, the world will not fail to remind us of the difference between it and us. And, on the other hand, if we at any time feel perfectly at home in the world, if our consciousness of its necessary antagonism to us is entirely in abeyance, then there is abundant reason for us to examine ourselves. And the probability is that we have been backward in cultivating our hope upon God and the world to come.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“The love of heaven must drive out the inordinate love of what is earthly.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“And of ancient paganism Paul already summed up the whole sad story in the double statement that it was without hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12), an exile from what is the noblest birthright of humanity. Now if this is so, how imperative becomes the duty of every true believer in the present age to cultivate the grace of hope; to make himself remember and to make others feel, not so much by direct
affirmation but rather by the tone of life, that the future belongs to us and that we belong to the future; that we are children of the world to come and that even now we allow that world to mould and rule and transform us in our thoughts, desires and feelings. If we could only learn again what Peter calls ‘to hope perfectly’ (1:13), what a witness of the reality of the Christian religion, what a powerfully attractive influence might proceed from this one manifestation of our spiritual life! People without such hope would feel the difference between themselves and us, and their regret at not having it might in many instances offer the first inducement to regain an interest in Christianity and inquire about it.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“The law in the hands of Jesus becomes alive with God's own personality. Majestic and authoritative, he is present in every commandment, so absolute in his demands, so observant of our conduct, so intent upon the outcome, that the thought of giving him less than heart and soul and mind and strength in the product of our moral life ceases to be tolerable to ourselves.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory

“we are not received by Jesus into a school of ethics but into a kingdom of redemption.”
― Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory