Miscellaneous Quotes (103)

quotes“Denominations are good, not bad, because they allow each church to follow Jesus according to conscience, and they keep strife between Christians of different convictions at bay… Keep clear fences but keep them low, and shake hands over them often.” – Mark Dever

“If you are drawn into a controversy, use very hard arguments and very soft words.” – C.H. Spurgeon

“On every university campus I visit, somebody stands up and says that God is an evil God to allow all this evil into our world. This person typically says, ‘A plane crashes: Thirty people die, and twenty people live. What kind of a God would arbitrarily choose some to live and some to die?’”
I continued, “but when we play God and determine whether a child within a mother’s womb should live, we argue for that as a moral right. So when human beings are given the privilege of playing God, it’s called a moral right. When God plays God, we call it an immoral act. Can you justify this for me?”
That was the end of the conversation.” – Ravi Zacharias

“I am convinced that God saved me by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. I did nothing to merit this salvation. There is nothing in me that turned God’s eye in my direction. There is no vestige of goodness that compelled him to look my way. I was not seeking him when he began seeking me. It was all of his grace without even the smallest bit of my merit. I added nothing to my salvation but the sin that made it necessary.” – Tim Challies

“Are you too bad to receive grace? How could you be too bad to receive what is for the bad?” – David Powlison

“To my “non-radical” Muslim friends—and I have a few—please, gentlemen, where are the full, documented, compelling articles not only condemning, but demonstrating with devastating insight the non-Islamic nature, of the actions of ISIS and Boko Haram? If these acts of terror, murder, and simply Satanic evil, were being purpetrated in the name of Christianity, the web would be full of condemnations along with strong biblical argumentation demonstrating the inconsistency of the actions with fundamental Biblical norms. I think this is fulfilling one of my constant observations of the current situation within worldwide Islam: the various groups appeal to an inherently insufficient core of revelation/law/documents to decide these debates. The Qur’an is too obtuse, too lacking in historical and cultural context, to speak with any level of clarity to all but a small number of issues; the hadith can be understood to teach almost anything, depending on which hadith traditions you emphasize and how you interpret them. So we are left with the unabashed face of evil in the men of ISIS and Boko Haram, men acting at a level beneath that of animals, demonically inspired promoters of evil, screaming the name of Allah as they shed blood, rape, and pillage, and yet we do not see other Islamic nations stepping in to protect those who are suffering so terribly at the hands of those they would say, in some settings, are acting “unIslamically.”” – Dr. James White Continue reading

God’s Two Books

Deuteronomy 29:29 – The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever that we may do all the words of this law.

Things Revealed vs. Secret Things

David Murray writes:

God’s Private Book contains the things that He has decreed will happen or not happen from beginning to end of time. They include all the events of tomorrow, when and how we will die, the end of the world, the names of the saved, and so on. As its name suggests, this is a private book for God’s eyes only. He has not revealed the contents, will not reveal them, and we must not enquire into them either. God keeps that book behind the counter and forbids us from trying to look into it.

God’s Public Book is what He has revealed in the Bible, which, as Moses said, is all we need to know, believe, and do. It’s on the counter, open, and available for study.

In God’s Public Book, God often expresses a desire for certain things to happen that do not actually happen because He has not written them in His Private Book. For example, God desires all people keep His moral law which does not actually happen.

God also forbids things in His Public Book which He has decreed to happen in His Private Book. For example, in the Bible God forbids betrayal and murder and expresses His desire that no one be a victim of this. Yet, in His Private Book He ordained that His Son be betrayed and murdered (Acts 2:23)… His Public will is “thwarted,” but His Private will never is.

Between Two Thieves

like its blessed Master, is always crucified between two thieves—legalists of all sorts on the one hand and Antinomians on the other; the former robbing the Savior of the glory of his work for us, and the other robbing him of the glory of his work within us.” – J.H. Thornwell, ‘Antinomianism’ in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1871) p. 386