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“In life, high school actually never ends, even though they hand you a paper and tell you farewell. The prom kings and prom queens continue to snipe at each other for the duration of existence.”
Chuck Culpepper, Bloody Confused (New York: Broadway, 2007), 173.
“I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue [humility], but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it . . . There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.”
Cited in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 257.
There is a chaotic abundance of material distractions. Our walk is infiltrated with limitless collisions. In a computer model, Doug James, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon, created a virtual quarter mile high stack of plastic lawn chairs (3,601). He then toppled the plastic chairs to test an algorithm to predict the collisions, including the way that they bump and bend. After 14 hours, a computer counted 1.6 billion collisions.
David Pescovitz, “It’s Raining Chairs,” Wired Magazine (August 2004).
“When we call things holy when they are not holy, we commit the sin of idolatry. We give to common things the respect, awe, worship, and adoration that belong only to God. To worship the creature instead of the Creator is the essence of idolatry.”
R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1998), 40.
“Why is the law of God irrevocable? The Bible makes that plain. Because it is rooted in the nature of God. God is righteous and that is the reason why His law is righteous. Can He then revoke His law or allow it to be disregarded? Well, there is of course no external compulsion upon Him to prevent Him from doing these things. There is none who can say to Him, ‘What doest thou?’ In that sense He can do all things. But the point is, He cannot revoke His law and still remain God. He cannot, without Himself becoming unrighteous, make His law either forbid righteousness or condone unrighteousness. When the law of God says, ‘The soul that sinneth it shall die,’ that awful penalty of death is, indeed, imposed by God’s will; but God’s will is determined by God’s nature, and God’s nature being unchangeably holy the penalty must run its course. God would be untrue to Himself, in other words, if sin were not punished; and that God should be untrue to Himself is the most impossible thing that can possibly be conceived.”
J. Gresham Machen, “The Doctrine of the Atonement,” (December 1936); Sunday radio address given three weeks prior to his death.
“There was a door
And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle.
Why could I not walk out of my prison?
What is hell? Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), I.3, p. 98.
“Should it be objected, as it has been by some, that ‘the sins of finite creatures can never require an infinite atonement,’ I answer that all sin is objectively infinite; it is infinitely evil because it is committed against God, the infinite good; it offends infinite majesty; it is a contempt of infinite justice; a contrariety to infinite holiness; a reproacher of infinite glory; and an enemy to infinite love. From all which, it appears, that every sin properly deserves infinite, or endless, punishment.”
Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778); “Christ our Passover.”
“All sin is objectively infinite; it is infinitely evil, because it is committed against God, the infinite good; it offends infinite majesty; it is a contempt of infinite authority; an affront to infinite sovereignty; an abuse of infinite glory; and an enemy to infinite love.”
Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778); “Christ our Passover.”
“Human society can advance only to a certain point before it becomes corrupted, and begins to die.”
Samuel Stanhope Smith, Presbyterian minister and seventh president of the College of New Jersey (i.e. Princeton) from 1795 to 1812; cited in Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 21, n. 31.
