Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.

Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.

The essence of God's action in wrath is to give people what they choose, in all its implications.

The God of Israel is King of kings and Lord of lords... He know, and foreknows, all things, and his foreknowledge is foreordination; he, therefore, will have the last word, both in world history and in the destiny of every man; his kingdom and righteousness will triumph in the end, for neither men nor angels shall be able to thwart him.

Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central. The love of God, the taking of human form by the Son, the meaning of the cross, Christ's heavenly intercession, the way of salvation-all are to be explained in terms of itand any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards

God's wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable.

The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .