Quote for the day

If I am the one who gets to decide where God will be found, then I will always find a god there, a god who some way or other is the kind of god I am looking for, a god I like, a god appropriate to my own nature and personality. But if God is the One who says where he will be Found, then this will very likely be the place that at first does not at all fit my own nature and character, a place I probably will not like at all. This place is the cross of Jesus. And those who want to find God there must take their place under the cross, as demanded by the Sermon on the Mount. This does not at all correspond to our nature; it is exactly contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New Testament but also in the Old Testament (Isaiah 53!). in any case this was the understanding of both Jesus and Paul: in the cross of Jesus the Scripture, that is, the Old Testament, is fulfilled. Thus the whole Bible is permeated by the divine intention of being that word in which God wants to be found by us. No place that seems pleasant to us, or that at first even seems reasonable to us, but a place in every way strange to us, totally alien to us. Precisely there is the place God has chosen to meet us.—Bonheoffer in Reflections on the Bible