Welcome to Thursday Backpack Quotes!
This Week's Curious Meanderings: Chesterton, Butterfield, Newbigin and Bird
This Week's Blurb Review: Echoes of Exodus
Quotes of the Week:
The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. —G.K. Chesterton (Miller's Book Review Newsletter)
If God has a predilection, it is to be perpetually late. And not just a wee bit tardy, but ridiculously, almost laughably late. Just ask Sarah or her daughter-in-law, Rebekah. (Chad Bird, Limping with God: Jacob & the Old Testament Guide to Messy Discipleship, p. 3)
To forgive is to die to the people we would become, and often do become, when we breed bitterness, conceive resentment, and nurse the desire for a pound or three of flesh from those who have hurt us...To forgive is to kill the ungod within us for whom absolution is anathema and redemption reprehensible. (Chad Bird, Limping with God: Jacob & the Old Testament Guide to Messy Discipleship, p. 24)
To be prepared to face a sceptical scrutiny is the necessary mark of any belief which is belief in what is real. But scepticism is not the active principle in the advance of knowledge. The active principle is the willingness to go out beyond what is certain, to listen to what is not yet clear, to search for what is hardly visible, to venture the affirmation which may prove to be wrong, but which may also prove to be the starting-point for new conquests of the mind. In the traditional language of Christianity the name for the active principle is faith....What is true of all knowing is supremely true of the knowledge of another person, that one must believe in order to know. (Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, p. 24, 26)
As we turn the pages of our hearts over against the pages of the Bible each morning, we ought to ask, "Is it I?" These three words reveal the heart of true believers, who know that that they are capable of any imaginable sin and that it is only Christ's saving grace indwelling them that reveals the truth about them and their desires. (Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p. 139)
Recommendations and Reviews
If you take great interest in the Big, Beautiful, Bible Story and how it all unfolds, then you will want to pick up Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption in Scripture by Alastair J. Roberts and Andrew Wilson. This book presented so many connections in Scripture that I had previously overlooked. It is an incredibly helpful book in understanding one of the chief paradigms of Biblical thought, namely, the exodus. (5 Stars!)
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