Biblical Proportions Quotes

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

How can the world end in a giant fury of biblical proportions yet still leave room for embarrassment?

It was cold. Really cold. And there was an awful scurrying noise that definitely belong to a small, four-legged creature.Or even worse, a large, four-legged creature. Or to be more precise, a large version of a small, four-legged creature. Rats. "Oh,God," Sophie moaned. She didn't often take the Lord's name in vain, but now seemed as good a time as any to start. Maybe He would hear, and maybe He would smite the rats. Yes, that would do very nicely.A big jolt of lightning. Huge. Of biblical proportions. It could hit the earth, spread little electrical tentacles around the globe, and sizzle all the rats dead. It was a lovely dream. Right up there with the ones in which she found herself living happily ever after as Mrs. Benedict Bridgerton. Sophie took a quick gasp as a sudden stab of pain pierced her heart. Of the two dreams, she feared that the genocide of the rats might be the more likely to come true.

Polio has been virtually forgotten by now, but in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a plague of almost biblical proportions. Tens of thousands of innocent children and young adults were killed, crippled, or paralyzed. Polio, a powerful form of viral meningitis, cut a wide and ruthless swath through an entire generation of Americans. Carol

There's a famine on the horizon of Biblical proportions. In fact, it will be so terrible that it has duck farmers all across my property salivating at the profits soon to be reaped.

Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horsemen.

Even as social justice ideology elevates “micro” injustices beyond all sense of proportion, it ignores or downplays major injustices. Abortion, the most serious injustice of our generation, has legally eliminated more than 60 million unborn human beings since 1973. Yet it is widely held to be a positive moral good.

So important is the Bible as the primary means of grace that God gives to his people that Charles Hodge reminds us that throughout history true Christianity has flourished “just in proportion to the degree in which the Bible is known, and its truths are diffused among the people.

...I did not know that I could ever feel what I have felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it NOW and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live your life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you will never get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

There had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Religion offered no basis for a response at all. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of God, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.

I have come to believe that our culture’s popular understanding of these difficult doctrines is often a caricature of what the Bible actually teaches and what mature Christian theology has historically proclaimed. To Laugh At, To Live By What do I mean by a caricature? A caricature is a cartoonlike drawing of a real person, place, or thing. You’ve probably seen them at street fairs, drawings of popular figures like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Caricatures exaggerate some features, distort some features, and oversimplify some features. The result is a humorous cartoon. In one sense, a caricature bears a striking resemblance to the real thing. That picture really does look like President Obama, Marilyn Monroe, or your aunt Cindy. Features unique to the real person are included and even emphasized, so you can tell it’s a cartoon of that person and not someone else. But in another sense, the caricature looks nothing like the real thing. Salient features have been distorted, oversimplified, or blown way out of proportion. President Obama’s ears are way too big. Aunt Cindy’s grin is way too wide. And Marilyn Monroe . . . well, you get the picture. A caricature would never pass for a photograph. If you were to take your driver’s license, remove the photo, and replace it with a caricature, the police officer pulling you over would either laugh . . . or arrest you. Placed next to a photograph, a caricature looks like a humorous, or even hideous, distortion of the real thing. Similarly, our popular caricatures of these tough doctrines do include features of the original. One doesn’t have to look too far in the biblical story to find that hell has flames, holy war has fighting, and judgment brings us face-to-face with God. But in the caricatures, these features are severely exaggerated, distorted, and oversimplified, resulting in a not-so-humorous cartoon that looks nothing like the original. All we have to do is start asking questions: Where do the flames come from, and what are they doing? Who is doing the fighting, and how are they winning? Why does God judge the world, and what basis does he use for judgment? Questions like these help us quickly realize that our popular caricatures of tough biblical doctrines are like cartoons: good for us to laugh at, but not to live by. But the caricature does help us with something important: it draws our attention to parts of God’s story where our understanding is off. If the caricature makes God look like a sadistic torturer, a coldhearted judge, or a greedy génocidaire, it probably means there are details we need to take a closer look at. The caricatures can alert us to parts of the picture where our vision is distorted.

scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology that is so painfully current in the present age. It is vain to shut your eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity today that you cannot declare positively unsound, but which, nevertheless, is not quite accurate or biblical. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably something about Christ, something about grace, something about faith, something about repentance, and something about holiness, but it is not the real thing as it is in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion.

human tragedy of potentially biblical proportions.” He added: “The challenge we face is how to act with sufficient strength and speed to prevent the recession from morphing into a prolonged depression,

Goats. This was once thought to be an antidote for North Korea’s economic ills. The terrain in the northern portion of the peninsula is mountainous and not suitable for farming. There are no green plots of grass for grazing cows, and therefore no source of dairy products or meat. So, in 1996, the North Koreans started a campaign to breed goats. These mountain animals are a good source of milk and meat; moreover, they feed on the shrubs tucked away high in the rocky terrain. The goat-breeding campaign led to a doubling of the goat population almost overnight, and tripled it within two years. This solved a short-term problem, but it had long-term consequences that were more destructive. The goats completely denuded the areas they inhabited, chewing up every single shrub in sight. This then had the effect of removing the last line of the land’s defense against the annual massive rains. The result? Annual monsoons led to deluges of biblical proportions, which wiped out the little remaining arable land and flooded the coal mines that were a source of energy. This only worsened the chronic food and energy shortages.

Lincoln started the war over tariffs but in no way can tariffs justify what has happened. So Lincoln has transformed the war into an epic moral struggle of biblical proportions. If that moral struggle had been his initial concern, though, all he had to do was let that original Deep South fringe secede.

If it was true that God really was moving at an unprecedented rate around the world, and His spirit was doing things that were, well, of biblical proportions on a pretty regular basis, then church for church’s sake wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

As the night progressed, the story of Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s murder and the recovery of her stolen child took on gargantuan proportions as talking heads hosted experts in every crime field imaginable on air, trying to understand the nature of the murder, how it could have happened in the heartland of America, and who was this woman who allegedly had committed such an unthinkable crime. Not even an undersea earthquake of biblical proportions, which would occurr in the coming days, was enough to reduce coverage of the Lisa Montgomery story. Because of the size of the quake, reverberations on the surface of the water generated a tsunami that killed a reported 150,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in history.

Our ability to influence the world is directly proportional to our knack for managing our own lives,

The first thing you will notice is that Simms’ ark is much closer to the biblical proportions that were given: 300 by 50 by 30 cubits (Genesis 6:15). Mr. Simms simply squares them off. I’m surprised many illustrators and researchers today have failed to attain this basic information, considering it is given in the Scriptures. Instead, they proceed

More than a century later, Athanasius Kircher published his Arca Noë in 1675, with lavish illustrations depicting a rectangular ark of biblical proportions. Kircher ark depiction In 1707, a German Bible had an image of Noah’s ark that also had been carefully considered. Famed Baptist commentator Dr. John Gill included it in his commentary on Genesis in 1748–63.4 The John Gill ark depiction

Ancient historians like Josephus the Jew, Berosus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus (Josephus even mentions these last four) discussed a powerful flood that occurred in their past. Ancient Greek historians like Xenophanes, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and Strabo all commented on fossils being from a significant water event in the past (not always to the extent of biblical proportions but they understood the point).

Otto Devereaux was a career scumbag of almost biblical proportions. We could show his full oeuvre, but it would take too long. Let’s just lead with some of the highlights. Murder, assault, extortion. His nickname was Home Depot because he liked using tools on his victims. He enforced for the legendary Ache brothers until someone decided that he was too violent for them. Then he worked on his own or for whatever desperate bad guy needed a true sicko.” He smiled at me. “Look, Jake, I don’t know how you got the drop on this guy, but what you did was a blessing for society.” “So,

Following the Lord's authority, one of the distinctives of Christian cultural understanding is that it also is minimally concerned with politics. The restoration of the nations is not, in any important sense, a political process. Rather, the process is one of baptism and catechism. The means given for the conversion of the heathen were the waters of baptism and the words of instruction. When the lessons have been learned, there will of course be some political consequences. But they will be minimal for the simple reason that the state itself, in a nation that has come to repentance, will also be minimal. For the Christian, the political realm is a creature to be redeemed, sinful like the rest of us and with a long way to go before it retires to more biblical proportions.

In 1593, the Spanish biblical scholar Arias Montano proposed that the proportion of creation was concealed in weights and measures given to the Hebrews by God through Moses.[36]

I was amazed! I never would have guessed that a colossal transparent golden sphere holds the insides of Heaven. Enclosed inside this sphere is God’s house, New Jerusalem. The sphere is of Biblical proportions; to stand and gawk at it; to try to take it all in, and try to understand what the Master of this universe has accomplished. Awesome; just awesome.

It was the tale of a woman scorned, a woman locked in battle over her man, her money, her children, and her rights as a long-term wife. It was a morality tale of Biblical proportions, involving adultery and covetousness, all of it wrapped in a great big flag emblazoned with the almighty U.S. dollar—and concluding in what, on the face of it, appeared to be a most blood-curdling case of stark, premeditated murder in the first degree. Shooting them in their sleep? No soap opera writer could have concocted better.

Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’ve never been on the receiving end of one of his tirades.” “They can’t possibly be any worse than my brother’s.” “What, that lovely sweet man who sat at my bar telling funny stories all the afternoon? Don’t tell me he has a temper?” “Fire and brimstone,” I affirmed. “In biblical proportions.

Those were people launched into an exodus of biblical proportions, pushed only by the will to survive; beings weighed down with an enormous list of frustrations and tangible losses with gazes from which even dignity had disappeared.

Popery, in the ordinary state of its profession, combines the form of godliness with a total denial of its power. A heap of unmeaning ceremonies, adapted to fascinate the imagination, and engage the senses; implicit faith in human authority, combined with an utter neglect of divine teaching; ignorance the most profound, joined to dogmatism the most presumptuous; a vigilant exclusion of Biblical knowledge, together with a total extinction of free inquiry—present the spectacle of religion lying in state, surrounded with all the silent pomp of death. The very absurdities of such a religion, render it less unacceptable to men whose decided hostility to truth inclines them to view with complacency whatever obscures its beauty, or impedes its operation. Of all the corruptions of Christianity which have prevailed to any considerable extent, Popery presents the most numerous points of contrast to the simple doctrines of the Gospel; and just in proportion as it gains ground, the religion of Christ must decline.—Robert Hall

Imprecations and Incantations Psalm 58 is known as an “imprecatory” psalm because it calls down curses (imprecations) on the enemy. In the ancient Near East, such curses were enhanced or activated by magical rituals and spells, but this sort of practice would have been unacceptable in the Biblical system. Imprecatory psalms can be best understood against the background of the Retribution Principle (see the article “Retribution Principle”). Since God’s justice was seen as requiring punishment proportional to the seriousness of the sin, the psalmist is calling down the curses that would be appropriate if justice were to be maintained. These are curses of the same magnitude that God pronounces on his enemies (Isa 13:15–16). The forceful language of this passage contains aspects of an East Semitic curse formula that relies on the deity to carry out vengeance on the enemy nations. An example of this type of indirect curse is found in the vassal treaties of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon as he calls on a host of gods to do the treaty-breaker harm. It is also employed, with the addition of ritual acts of execration, in the Aramaic Sefire Treaty that describes bows being broken with the expected result that their enemies’ bows will likewise be broken. The psalmist indirectly curses by imprecation, calling on God to “laugh at them” (Ps 59:8) in their puny efforts to menace Israel. He does not employ magical incantations or execration rituals against them, but instead relies on God to render them impotent, breaking their power and their weapons of destruction (cf. Jer 49:35; 51:56; Eze 39:3). ◆

The greatest risk to human flourishing, then, is not institutionalization but the loss of institutions. In our time we have seen the rise of the “prosperity gospel,” which in its crassest forms promises quick wealth in mechanical proportion to faith. But the prosperity gospel has not only a thin and unbiblical understanding of wealth (which in Scripture is never a private matter but an occasion for blessing for whole communities, not to mention the fruit and source of justice)—it has a thin and unbiblical understanding of time. In the biblical mindset, prosperity that does not last is not true prosperity at all. The only biblical prosperity gospel is a posterity gospel—the promise that generation after generation will know the goodness of God through the properly stewarded abundance of God’s world.

Does biblical psychology, then, merely ask us to value good things a little less? Does the Bible seek a reduction of guilt by an overall deflation of the currency of moral ideals, so we can live more comfortably with an uneasy conscience? That would exaggerate a valid point. Although the Bible holds that no finite relationship is of infinite value, it does not embrace an extreme ascetic view that the source of happiness lies essentially in the reduction of desire. Some ascetic strategies try to diminish desire and reduce all valuing so as not to allow any loss to become an overwhelming disappointment. According to this view, the less one values created goods, the happier one is. In contrast, life-affirming Christianity hopes that love, desire, and appreciation of limited values can be increased or decreased to the measure of their real proportional value. Jesus does not call for a stark reduction of all finite valuing merely as a preventative measure against disappointment. He calls for a love of good things with an awareness that they exist within the boundaries of birth and death, and are therefore under the judgment of the giver and source of all value (Matt. 6:19-21).

Perhaps some very wicked persons will suspect that the lawgiver is here speaking enigmatically, when he says that the Creator repented of having created man, when he beheld their wickedness; on which account he determined to destroy the whole race. But let those who adopt such opinions as these know, that they are making light of and extenuating the offences of these men of old time, by reason of their own excessive impiety; for what can be a greater act of wickedness than to think that the unchangeable God can be changed?