Scripture: John 1:19-29
“Good, upstanding, proper people, who consider themselves regular human beings with no real weaknesses or guilt, cannot understand this passage. They offer grace no entrance gate, the gate that sin by its very nature is . . . Because such people lack nothing, that which they most need – which means everything – is not brought to them. Even the love of God does not bandage the person who has no wounds . . . whoever has not fallen will never be lifted, and whoever is not soiled will not be cleansed.”
—Charles Peguy
“As ‘the Lamb of God’, Jesus saves the anti-godly world out of its fallenness into sin by means of his substitutionary atoning death on the Cross. Precisely in the place where the Johannine Jesus for the first time comes into actual view, right here, he appears as the Crucified One. Already in the beginning, therefore, the end is present, and the hearers/readers know that the way of the preexistent and incarnate Word leads to the Cross.”
—Udo Schnelle
“If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge
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