Lit Bible Quotes

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.

Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night? Not in his Bible.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.

I do not think I was a hothead—not then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life.

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you -- and besides, the Bible bids us return good for evil.

When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, an looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kin of pleasure could be her religion.

For Isaac’s protection he had a blue Turkish evil eye and a painted tin hand of Fatima hanging from the bedpost; a candle was always lit on his chest of drawers, next to Hebrew and Christian Bibles and a jar of holy water that one of the domestic staff had brought from the Shrine of Saint Jude.

Right there in the middle of the road he took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his, then struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the two of them together, exactly like Humphrey Bogart. Then, ever so gently, he put the lit cigarette back in my lips. It seemed almost like we had kissed. Chills ran down my back, but I couldn’t tell for sure if it was thrill chills or the creeps. Sometimes it is very hard to know the difference.

for the Law made nothing perfect), and on the other hand there is a bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God. 20And inasmuch as it was not without an oath 21(for they indeed became priests without an oath, but He with an oath through the One who said to Him, “THE LORD HAS SWORN AND WILL NOT CHANGE HIS MIND, ‘YOU ARE A PRIEST FOREVER’ ”); 22so much the more also Jesus has become the guarantee of a better covenant. [14 aLit has arisen from 16 bLit fleshly commandment; i.e. to be a descendant of Levi]

People are so soon gone; let us catch them. That man there, by the cabinet; he lives, you say, surrounded by china pots. Break one and you shatter a thousand pounds. And he loved a girl in Rome and she left him. Hence the pots, old junk found in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea. It is strange though; for once, as a young man, he sat on damp ground and drank rum with soldiers. One must be quick and add facts deftly, like toys to a tree, fixing them with a twist of the fingers. He stoops, how he stoops, even over an azalea. He stoops over the old woman even, because she wears diamonds in her ears, and, bundling about her estate in a pony carriage, directs who is to be helped, what tree felled, and who turned out tomorrow. (I have lived my life, I must tell you, all these years, and I am now past thirty, perilously, like a mountain goat, leaping from crag to crag; I do not settle long anywhere; I do not attach myself to one person in particular; but you will find that if I raise my arm, some figure at once breaks off and will come.) And that man is a judge; and that man is a millionaire, and that man, with the eyeglass, shot his governess “through the heart with an arrow when he was ten years old. Afterwards he rode through deserts with despatches, took part in revolutions and now collects materials for a history of his mother’s family, long settled in Norfolk. That little man with a blue chin has a right hand that is withered. But why? We do not know. That woman, you whisper discreetly, with the pearl pagodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who lit the life of one of our statesmen; now since his death she sees ghosts, tells fortunes, and has adopted a coffee-coloured youth whom she calls the Messiah.* That man with the drooping moustache, like a cavalry officer, lived a life of the utmost debauchery (it is all in some memoir) until one day he met a stranger in a train who converted him between Edinburgh and Carlisle by reading the Bible. Thus, in a few seconds, deftly, adroitly, we decipher the hieroglyphs written on other people’s faces. Here, in this room, are the abraded and battered shells cast on the shore.

The story of the Bible is the story of God’s grace to graceless humanity. It is the story of God bringing heaven to earth so that it might be saved from hell. Each of us, like the thief on the cross, has a choice to make: to receive God’s gift or to refuse it. The feasting hall is lit and decorated; the table is set and a delicious meal prepared; the wine goblets are filled to overflowing; the invitation has been sent. But the choice is ours. Will you come to the party?

The Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative; it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it. Moreover, Mark includes very little of Jesus' teachings; worse yet, (from Matthew's point of view) he even misunderstood totally the purpose of Jesus' use of parables. Indeed, by the last two decades of the first century, Mark's theology seemed already old-fashioned and even slightly suggestive of heresy. So, working apparently without knowledge of each other, within perhaps twenty or thirty years after Mark, two authors (or Christian groups), now known to us as "Matthew" and "Luke" (and even a third, in the view of some-"John') set about rewriting and correcting the first unsatisfactory Gospel.

But there were strange girls in red jackets trying to read my mind, and I lit a bible on fire, not to mention that a killer might have my phone number.

After Giles Palot was burned to death, Sylvie’s mother went into a depression. For Sylvie this was the most shocking of the traumas she suffered, more seismic than Pierre’s betrayal, even sadder than her father’s execution. In Sylvie’s mind, her mother was a rock that could never crumble, the foundation of her life. Isabelle had put salve on her childish injuries, fed her when she was hungry, and calmed her father’s volcanic temper. But now Isabelle was helpless. She sat in a chair all day. If Sylvie lit a fire, Isabelle would look at it; if Sylvie prepared food, Isabelle would eat it mechanically; if Sylvie did not help her get dressed, Isabelle would spend all day in her underclothes. Giles’s fate had been sealed when a stack of newly printed sheets for Bibles in French had been found in the shop. The sheets were ready to be cut into pages and bound into volumes, after which they would have been taken to the secret warehouse in the rue du Mur. But there had not been time to finish them. So Giles was guilty, not just of heresy but of promoting heresy. There had been no mercy for him. In the eyes of the church, the Bible was the most dangerous of all banned books—especially translated into French or English, with marginal notes explaining how certain passages proved the correctness of Protestant teaching. Priests said that ordinary people were unable to rightly interpret God’s word, and needed guidance. Protestants said the Bible opened men’s eyes to the errors of the priesthood. Both sides saw reading the Bible as the central issue of the religious conflict that had swept Europe.

truly I tell you. Lit. “Amen, I tell you”; “amen” normally concluded a prayer, and most scholars believe that beginning a saying this way implied distinctive authority. smallest letter. The smallest Hebrew letter was a yod, formed by a single stroke of the pen. One Jewish story recounted that the yod removed from Sarai’s name (when it was changed to Sarah, Ge 17:15) protested to God from one generation to another, lamenting its removal from Scripture, until finally God put the yod back in the Bible. When Hoshea’s name was changed to Joshua (Nu 13:16), a yod was reinserted in Scripture. “So you see,” remarked Jewish teachers, “not a single yod can pass from God’s Word.” In a similar Jewish story, a yod protested that King Solomon was trying to remove it from Scripture; “A thousand Solomons shall be uprooted,” God declared, “but not a single yod will pass from my Word.” Such illustrations were merely graphic ways of emphasizing that all of God’s Word must be respected; no part was too small to matter.

1 14:29. Lit mustered

Sin blinds our hearts to the true meaning and purpose of the Bible, even if we carry well-highlighted copies in our hands.

The waters saw you, God;           the waters saw you and lashed about,           even the deeps of the sea* trembled.j     18 The clouds poured down their rains;           the thunderheads rumbled;           your arrows flashed back and forth.k     19 The thunder of your chariot wheels resounded;           your lightning lit up the world;           the earth trembled and quaked.l     20 Through the sea was your way;           your path, through the mighty waters,           though your footsteps were unseen.m     21 You led your people like a flock           by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

ECCLESIASTES—NOTE ON 1:2 vanity of vanities! All is vanity. This extremely important thematic word (Hb. hebel, lit., “vapor,” taken figuratively as “vanity”; see esv footnote) occurs frequently throughout the book; at this early point, however, the Preacher leaves it unexplained. It is only as the book progresses that its meaning becomes clear (for further discussion of its meaning, see Introduction: Key Themes

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, 5who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various atrials, 7so that the bproof of your faith, being more precious than gold which cis perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; 8and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and dfull of glory, 9obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of eyour souls. [6 aOr temptations 7 bOr genuineness cLit perishes 8 dLit glorified 9 eOne early ms does not contain your]

Closed Bibles will not convince our children of the value of the Bible.

The origin of the Jews is revealed by the origin of their tribal name. The word "Jew" was unknown in ancient history. The Jews were then known as Hebrews, and the word Hebrew tells us all about this people that we need to know. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines Hebrew as originating in the Aramaic word, Ibhray, but strangely enough, offers no indication as to what the word means. Most references, such as Webster's International Dictionary, 1952, give the accepted definition of Hebrew. Webster says Hebrew derives from the Aramaic Ebri, which in turn 19 derives from the Hebrew word, Ibhri, lit. "one who is from across the river. 1. A Member of one of a group of tribes in the northern branch of the Semites, including Israelites." That is plain enough. Hebrew means "one who is from across the river." Rivers were often the boundaries of ancient nations, and one from across the river meant, simply, an alien. In every country of the ancient world, the Hebrews were known as aliens. The word also, in popular usage, meant "one who should not be trusted until he has identified himself." Hebrew in all ancient literature was written as "Habiru". This word appears frequently in the Bible and in Egyptian literature. In the Bible, Habiru is used interchangeably with "sa-gaz", meaning "cutthroat". In all of Egyptian literature, wherever the word Habiru appears, it is written with the word "sa-gaz" written beside it. Thus the Egyptians always wrote of the Jews as "the cutthroat bandits from across the river". For five thousand years, the Egyptian scribes identified the Jews in this manner. Significantly, they are not referred to except by these two characters. The great Egyptian scholar, C. J. Gadd, noted in his book, The Fall of Nineveh, London, 1923, "Habiru is written with an ideogram. . . sa-gaz. . . signifying 'cut-throats'." In the Bible, wherever the word Habiru, meaning the Hebrews, appears, it is used to mean bandit or cutthroat. Thus, in Isaiah 1:23, "Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves," the word for thieves here is Habiru. Proverbs XXVIII:24 , "Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith, 'It is no transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer," sa-gaz is used here for destroyer, but the word destroyer also appears sometimes in the Bible as Habiru. Hosea VI:9 , "And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent; for they commit lewdness." The word for robbers in this verse is Habiru.

If there is a poor man with you, one of your brothers, in any of your atowns in your land which the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother; 8but you shall freely open your hand to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he lacks. 9Beware that there is no base bthought in your heart, saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,’ and your eye is hostile toward your poor brother, and you give him nothing; then he may cry to the LORD against you, and it will be a sin in you. 10You shall generously give to him, and your heart shall not be grieved when you give to him, because for this thing the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in all cyour undertakings. 11For the poor will never cease to be din the land; therefore I command you, saying, ‘You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.’ [7 aLit gates 9 bLit word 10 cLit the putting forth of your hand 11 dLit in the midst of]

When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, and looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kind of pleasure could be her religion

In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession. As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot…

Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms. For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine.

He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn? I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath. He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers. That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that. He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down. I nodded at the King James Bible cadence he’d slid into, his accent no longer evoking Grandpappy on the porch with a slab of pie, but a preacher whose fire and brimstone maybe came from a guilty conscience about underage choristers. I tried to adopt the big-eyed face of a church girl with a well-armed brother. A crumb of fear. He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip? No, sir, I said.

With two fingers, he stroked the edges of his thick mustache like some diminutive Chinese emperor about to sign a death order. He said, We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin. He paused to spit in the coffee can. He said, I can see past this day to the time when these same waves will be made of blood. You believe that? Sounds like you know the Bible, I said. That I do. I’ve studied on it pretty good. You don’t mind, he said, brightening up—you don’t mind, I gotta make a quick stop by a friend’s house right this side of San Clemente. With that statement, his manner altered. He smiled, showing the pointy incisors of a gerbil.

He pulled his sword and pistols free of his sash and clanked them on the table, struck a flame with his tinderbox and lit a candle, then carefully lifted out of a pocket the handkerchief that was wrapped around Byron’s toe. Byron was now, in a sense, physically on Mount Parnassus, in the mountain, but Trelawny had no idea how he might use the toe to facilitate contact with the species with whom he and Odysseus hoped to make an alliance: the creatures referred to in the Old Testament as the Nephelim, the giants that were “in the earth in those days.

Unlike many a royal couple, Nicholas and Alexandra shared the same bed. The bedroom was a large chamber with tall windows opening onto the park. A large double bed made of light-colored wood stood between two windows. Chairs and couches covered in flowered tapestry were scattered about on a thick carpet of mauve pile. To the right of the bed, a door led to a small chapel used by the Empress for her private prayers. Dimly lit by hanging lamps, the room contained only an icon on one wall and a table holding a Bible. Another door led from the bedroom to Alexandra’s private bathroom, where a collection of old-fashioned fixtures were set in a dark recess.

Rm 7:151 do Lit., do not know; i.e., do not acknowledge, do not approve of. Paul did not allow, approve of, or acknowledge his wrong action, for it issued from his flesh, which served the law of sin against his mind and against his will.

Sin blinds our hearts to the true meaning and purpose of the Bible, even if we carry well-highlighted copies in our hands. The problem is not with our Bibles; the problem is with our sinful hearts. Sin darkens and deadens our spiritual perceptions. God must illuminate our hearts. God must act. God must remove the blindfolds.

In every scriptural instance where Jesus expresses anger—the rawest of all emotions—this is the match that lit his fuse: Do not get in the way of God’s love. Think about it this way: Jesus came to provide his people direct access to the Father as demonstrated by the veil in the temple being torn at the crucifixion (Matt. 27:51). This was an enormously symbolic part of the crucifixion that most people miss. The area behind the veil was the Holy of Holies, where God dwelt. Only the high priest could go into the Holy of Holies, and only once a year.

We are now in a better position to appreciate the truth of Warfield’s wry comment on Scripture’s interior decorating: the Old Testament is “a chamber richly furnished but dimly lit.”230

One time they had a minister in Spencervale who was a very good, spiritual man but very deaf. He couldn't hear any ordinary conversation at all. Well, they used to have a prayer meeting on Sunday evenings, and all the church members present would get up and pray in turn, or say a few words on some Bible verse. But one evening Aunt Atossa bounced up. She didn't either pray or preach. Instead, she lit into everybody else in the church and gave them a fearful raking down, calling them right out by name and telling them how they all had behaved, and casting up all the quarrels and scandals of the past ten years. Finally she wound up by saying that she was disgusted with Spencervale church and she never meant to darken its door again, and she hoped a fearful judgment would come upon it. Then she sat down out of breath, and the minister, who hadn't heard a word she said, immediately remarked, in a very devout voice, 'amen! The Lord grant our dear sister's prayer!' You ought to hear father tell the story.

IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever. Away down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. The mother especially—watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way. The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. Even now they resist affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes—the one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious—flanked by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp. But gamely enough they climb together over logs of rank decay that have fallen across the

for water. Without taking his eyes from her, he twitches a little at the knee, then the shoulder, where a fly devils him. Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks. She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water’s skin, as if he were lapping from her hand. His head bobs gently, nodding small, velvet horns lit white from behind like new leaves. It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it’s been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences. I never had more than five minutes’ peace unbroken. I was that woman on the stream bank, of course. Orleanna Price, Southern Baptist by marriage, mother of children living and dead. That one time and no other the okapi came to the stream, and I was the only one to see it. I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterward in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book. I read that the male okapi is smaller than the female, and more shy, and that hardly anything else is known about them. For hundreds of years people in the Congo Valley spoke of this beautiful, strange beast. When European explorers got wind of it, they declared it legendary: a unicorn. Another fabulous tale from the dark domain of poison-tipped arrows and bone-pierced lips. Then, in the 1920s, when elsewhere in the world the menfolk took a break between wars to perfect the airplane and the automobile, a white man finally did set eyes on the okapi. I can picture him spying on it with binoculars, raising up the cross-haired rifle sight, taking it for his own. A family of them now reside in the New York Museum