In Jesus, and supremely in his death and resurrection, Israel’s God had done what he had long promised. He had returned to be king. He had visited his people and redeemed them.

The early Christians believed that Israel’s One God had returned in person. In the person of Jesus.

Be shrewd like snakes, but innocent like doves. Christians often find it easy to be one or the other, but seldom both.

Following Jesus is what being a Christian means; and Jesus is not leading us on a pleasant afternoon hike, but on a walk into danger and risk.

People often scoff at the wordiness of Christianity . . . but without the words to guide it, faith wanders in the dark and can easily fall over a cliff.

There is a new world, it’s already been launched in Jesus’ resurrection, and all God’s people will be given new bodies in order to share in it.

The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.

Our task in the present is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day.

Empires thrive on religious relativism; the more gods the better, since the more there are the less likely they are to challenge the ruling ideology.

The Bible which Paul had known and loved as a young man was like a story in search of an ending; and when Jesus rose from the dead the ending was now revealed.

There is after all one ‘image’ of God, and that, for Paul, is Jesus the Messiah himself, the truly human one.

Paul reaffirms the goodness and God-givenness of the created world, of food and drink, of marriage and sexuality, of political structures; the goodness and image-bearing vocation of human beings.

The unity of God himself grounds the unity of the [church] community.

Central to second-temple monotheism was the belief that Israel’s God, having abandoned Jerusalem and the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile, would one day return.

Jesus is the embodiment of the one God, returning as promised to rescue his people.

The long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion is, I suggest, the hidden clue to the origin of christology.

The God who would not show his face to Moses has shown his face to his people in and as Jesus.

Just as the Exodus was launched by the coming of Israel’s God in person to rescue his people, so the new Exodus has been launched by the long-awaited return of this same God in and as Jesus himself.

Jesus’ first followers found themselves not only (as it were) permitted to use God-language for Jesus, but compelled to use Jesus-language for the One God.

In his life, death and resurrection Jesus had accomplished the new Exodus, had done in person what Israel’s God had said he would do in person. He had inaugurated God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.