Inspirational Quotes by D.A. Carson

“Yet God’s coming wrath is also victorious, being linked to his righteous judgment and the day of Yahweh, “the day of God’s wrath” (Rom 2:5). As such, the coming wrath answers (not raises) ultimate questions related to the justice of God. Through the coming wrath, judgment, and hell, God’s ultimate victory is displayed over evil, and his righteousness is vindicated (Rev 6:16–17; 11:18; 14:6–20; 15:1—16:21; 19:11–21). There is a “comfort” to wrath and hell. That God will one day avenge his people points to his covenant faithfulness and urges patience, hope, perseverance, and worship (Rom 9:22–23; 12:19; 2 Thess. 1:5–11; Jas 5:1–11; Rev 11:15–19; 15:3–4; 16:5–7; 19:1–10). God will judge everyone, the weak and the powerful (Rev 20:11–15). He and his people will win in the end, and he will ensure that justice prevails. Through his righteous judgment and ultimate victory, God will glorify himself, displaying his greatness and receiving the worship he is due.”

“The essence of all critical thought, in the best sense of that abused expression, is the justification of opinions. A critical interpretation of Scripture is one that has adequate justification—lexical, grammatical, cultural, theological, historical, geographical, or other justification.”

“sin. Israel’s most pressing need (v. 9; 32:32). wickedness, rebellion and sin. The use of the three major OT words for sin emphasizes that God is willing to forgive all kinds of sin/sinners. Yet . . . unpunished. God’s forgiveness is never at the expense of his justice; the guilty cannot simply be acquitted. punishes . . . generation. See note on 20:5. There is no such thing as sin without consequences, which here, as in 20:5, impacts successive generations. The implicit tensions of vv. 6–7 are only partially resolved by the various judgments of Israel’s sin that culminated with the exile; but they are fully resolved in the death of Jesus, which was both the ultimate expression of God’s love and a full expression of God’s wrath (Rom 3:25–26).”

“the remaining debates among those who hold a high view of Scripture will be exegetical and hermeneutical, nothing else.”

“do not want you to become lazy, but to imitates those who through faith and patiencet inherit what has been promised.u”

“but one that demands that we learn to move toward unanimity in the crucial business of thinking God’s thoughts after him. This, surely, is part of the discipline of loving God with our minds.”

“So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in4 Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.p”

“Since this is God’s universe there can be no higher “blessing” than to be approved by God. We must ask ourselves whose blessing we diligently seek. If God’s blessing means more to us than the approval of loved ones no matter how cherished, or of colleagues no matter how influential, then the beatitudes will speak to us very personally and deeply.”

“holy brothers and sisters,a who share in the heavenly calling,b fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledgec as our apostle and high priest.”

“I state that exegesis is concerned with actually interpreting the text, whereas hermeneutics is concerned with the nature of the interpretative process.”

“This does not mean real knowledge is impossible. Rather, it means that real knowledge is close to impossible if we fail to recognize our own assumptions, questions, interests, and biases; but if we recognize them and, in dialogue with the text, seek to make allowances for them, we will be better able to avoid confusing our own world-views with those of the biblical writers.”

“I am simply saying that the meaning of a word cannot be reliably determined by etymology, or that a root, once discovered, always projects a certain semantic load onto any word that incorporates that root.”

“my point is that we cannot responsibly assume that etymology is related to meaning. We can only test the point by discovering the meaning of a word inductively.”

“In short, words change their meaning over time.”

“we should be a trifle suspicious when any piece of exegesis tries to establish the meaning of a word by appealing first of all to its usage in classical Greek rather than to its usage in Hellenistic Greek.”

“But one should be suspicious of all statements about the nature of “the Hebrew mind” or “the Greek mind” if those statements are based on observations about the semantic limitations of words of the language in question.”

“False assumptions about technical meaning In this fallacy, an interpreter falsely assumes that a word always or nearly always has a certain technical meaning—a meaning usually derived either from a subset of the evidence or from the interpreter’s personal systematic theology.”

“That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake here is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution. It makes me god and thus de-gods God.”

“But the heart of the issue is that semantics, meaning, is more than the meaning of words.”

“Granted that most of us know some individuals who are remarkable prayer warriors, is it not nevertheless true that by and large we are better at organizing than agonizing?”