Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, Your faithfulness to the clouds. (Psalm 36.5)
Man’s Idea of God
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. – A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)
A Grand Delusion
It is a most grand delusion to imagine that the doctrines of grace tend to lull the soul to sleep in supine indolence or slothful stupidity. The believer has not so learned Christ. Though he is saved by grace freely, yet he is called to labor diligently. By faith, he looks forward to the fulfillment of awful predictions and precious promises. Hence, we are excited to daily diligence in the performance of duties, the use of means, and the exercise of graces. – William Mason (1719-1791)
On the Atonement
The accomplishment of redemption is concerned with what has been generally called the atonement. No treatment of the atonement can be properly oriented that does not trace its source to the free and sovereign love of God. It is with this perspective that the best-known text in the Bible provides us: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His one-and-only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). Here, we have an ultimate of divine revelation and, therefore, of human thought. Beyond this we cannot and dare not go.
From: Redemption: Accomplished and Applied by John Murray (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1955), p. 9.
The Nature of Human Theological Statements
Formally considered, our theological statements are true in so far as they are faithful responses to the self-communication of the truth of God in the way in which He reveals Himself in and through the witness of Holy Scripture in the historical life of the church, for it is there, in Holy Scripture, that we actually hear God’s Word. A theological statement is truthful only as answer to God’s Word, as a reflex of the truth addressing us as Word and claiming, from us, obedient and faithful response. It does not have its truth in itself but in that to which it is orientated and, therefore, can be truthful only in so far as that truth is heard and received and answered. Here we have to remember the dialogical nature of theology and the nature of the Truth who summons us to dialog with Him. It is precisely in that dialogical relation to the truth that our statements have their truth, while they are emptied and falsified immediately they are divorced from it for, within it alone, are they valid as statements that derive from the truth and are obediently related to the truth in the way the truth comes to us.
Concretely, it is in Christ Himself that our theological statements have their central and supreme term of reference, by which they are to be judged true or false, for He is the basis, the support, the content, the truth of all our theological statements. Some of them repose directly upon Him and some are derived from Him indirectly, but all have their proper place within the frame of reference which He creates and sets up in and through Himself and His life and work, and through which He directs them to the Father.
From: Theological Science: Based on the Hewett Lectures for 1959 by Thomas F. Torrance (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 191-192.
False Teachers
The pathology of false teachers is clear. They deny the truth, and their teaching does not produce godly living. They are arrogant and ignorant of spiritual truth. They spend their time in foolish speculations that lead only to chaos and division. Having forsaken the truth, they face eternal destruction. And, they serve money, not God. The church must take extreme care not to allow these men to spread their deadly disease. The resulting epidemic would be tragic. – John MacArthur (born in 1939). Comment on 1 Timothy 6.5.
The Reality of God
If I may be allowed to speak personally for a moment, I find the presence and being of God bearing upon my experience and thought so powerfully that I cannot but be convinced of His overwhelming reality and rationality. To doubt the existence of God would be an act of sheer irrationality, for it would mean that my reason had become unhinged from its bond with real being. Yet, in knowing God, I am deeply aware that my relation to Him has been damaged, that disorder has resulted in my mind, and that it is I who obstruct knowledge of God by getting in between Him and myself, as it were. But I am also aware that His presence presses unrelentingly upon me through the disorder of my mind, for He will not let Himself be thwarted by it, challenging and repairing it, and requiring me, on my part, to yield my thoughts to His healing and controlling revelation. – Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007), Scottish theologian and author, in 1969.
