The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the divine plan that balances justice and mercy in religious belief.
John Piper's quote encapsulates a profound theological concept where God's wisdom orchestrates a means of salvation that embodies love, all while maintaining His righteousness. This delicate balance suggests that the act of delivering sinners from divine wrath does not undermine God's justice, but rather fulfills it through the redemptive act of love.
In practice
During a sermon about divine justice and mercy, this quote can clarify the concept of salvation.
God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.
You donβt have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.
Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.
Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.
The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.
One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
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