Glen Scrivener Quotes

Jesus is not just what true divinity looks like. He is also what true humanity looks like.

If natural selection means the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest, Christianity is about the sacrifice of the Fittest (Jesus Christ) for the survival of the weakest (us).

In order to pursue the kingdom without the King, we have had to dethrone the person of Christ and install abstract values instead. The problem should be obvious: persons can forgive you; values cannot. Values can only judge you.

Infanticide was so widespread in the Roman world (in fact, in all the world) that the first known treatise on gynaecology included the vital section “How to Recognise the Newborn That is Worth Rearing”.[23] If they did not make the grade, the advice was “Expose it and try again”.

Hitler considered Christianity, in particular the Jew Paul, to have introduced to the world “the deliberate lie”. This lie concerns the values of equality and compassion that we have explored in this book.

In other words, the first move in nazifying Christianity involved tearing up the Old Testament (three quarters of the Bible), followed by half of the New Testament (the letters of Paul). That left them, essentially, with the biographies of one “Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1).

if someone has no emotional reaction to evil, we generally label them a sociopath!

Isaiah had said, ‘He won’t snap off a reed, no matter how battered. He won’t snuff out a candle, no matter how smouldering.’37 The Saviour of the world is tender with the broken, gentle with the bruised and patient with the weak. Yet at the same time he wields almighty power.

Jesus is like a walking, talking garden of Eden – a sphere of paradise on earth. With him wrongs are righted, darkness is dispelled and everything that’s twisted gets smoothed out again.

The story of me – and the story of you – is caught up in a story far grander and far older than anything we can control.

When Christians say ‘God is love’, they don’t then conclude that ‘everything is lovely’. It’s not. But the God of love makes sense of our outrage at everything that is unlovely. He gives us the right to call a bad world ‘bad’.

Can you rest?  Or is your life all about performing, producing and providing?  I wonder whether your picture of God might be shaping your work habits.  Certainly God works. Indeed Christ’s mighty work of redemption cost Him immeasurable blood, sweat and tears.  But the work was not the point.  The work leads to rest.  More specifically, His work leads to your rest.  And today you’re invited to rest in Him: “Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him.”  (Psalm 37:7)

the beginning”.  There was a time (a very long time!) when God was not Creator.  Originally God was not in manufacturing.  He entered that vocation in later life. In our case, we are driven to workaholism because we don’t know who we are apart from performing, producing and providing.  But God has no such identity crisis.  The Father, Son and Holy Spirit have known each other in love long before they knew each other in labours. So as we enter chapter 2 of Genesis, we’re again reminded that “Creator” is not the fundamental truth about God.  Here is a God who rests from His work.  And this is not an abdication, it’s a consummation. God’s activity reaches a goal.  You see creation is not a wheel that must be kept turning.  It is a work that comes to completion.  The seventh day (the Hebrew word is Sabbath) shows that there’s an ‘end’ to creation.  And by ‘end’ we mean, most basically, a goal.  There is not endless work.  There is not cosmic burnout.  There is fulfilment.  There is rest.

The Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) came up with five periods of human history, descending from Golden Age to Iron Age. The only way was down (though perhaps we’d cycle back around to experience the whole unravelling again, and again). It was the Bible which proclaimed a unique view of history: not a cycle but an arrow pointing onwards and upwards. The Israelites had come from slavery, yes, but they were heading to “the promised land”. The Messiah would come as a Prince of Peace. Though he would suffer, he would nevertheless set the world to rights.