September 2022 – Semper Reformanda

XXVI

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Ecclesiastes 5:1 (ESV)

God is speaking and must be listened to. But what good is a speaking God without listening ears? So God gets a pick and shovel and digs through the cranial granite, opening a passage that will give access to the interior depths, into the mind and heart… The result is a restoration of Scripture: eyes turn into ears.

Peterson, E. (1989) Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, 71

XXV

Though (death) is our last enemy, it cannot do what it likes with us. God has appointed it to its office, but He can also disarm it… For with death the Lord of death is also present. To be sure, He will be present as the Judge and Avenger, as the One who causes us in death to reap what we have sown, as the One whom we must fear now, and then still more. But he is also the Lord of death. If death has such terrors for us, it is because in death we shall finally fall into the hands of the living God.

Karl Barth (as quoted in Bartholomew, 2009, 156)

XXIV

… (shalom is more than an absence of hostility) at its highest it is enjoyment in one’s relationships… to dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in one’s physical surroundings, to enjoy living with one’s fellows, to enjoy life with oneself.

Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, 1981, 69