Iain M. Duguid > Quotes

“Choosing the way of Christ not only means identifying with Christ, however; ‘it also means identifying with the stubborn, recalcitrant, and frequently offensive flock that he calls his own. . . .Yet as flawed as the people of God are, if the Lord is to be our God then his people must be our people too.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Esther & Ruth

“The purpose of confessing our sins is not to render us miserable by simply reminding us what great sinners we are. It is to remind us of what a great Savior we have.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Prone to Wander: Prayers of Confession and Celebration

“Exile. It is not simply being homeless. Rather, it is knowing that you do have a home, but that your home has been taken over by enemies. Exile. It is not being without roots. On the contrary, it is having deep roots which have now been plucked up, and there you are, with roots dangling, writhing in pain, exposed to a cold and jeering world, longing to be restored to native and nurturing soil. Exile is knowing precisely where you belong, but knowing that you can’t go back, not yet.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“It is hard to imagine a viewpoint more radically different from that of Ezekiel 20. For Ezekiel, what is definitive is not Israel’s choice but the Lord’s choice. Israel”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“our felt needs are not always our real needs. Sometimes what offers temporary relief causes long-term problems. Jesus”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“There is no “of course” about our salvation. By nature, we are deservedly dead and have no prospect apart from God’s wrath. It might be a more biblical approach if instead of starting with the love of God, we begin our presentation of the gospel where Paul does in Romans: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” (Rom. 1:18). That there is another way, as Paul goes on to unfold in what follows, is an astonishing testimony to God’s determination to finish what he started, for his own glory and not for ours. Our salvation is entirely by grace.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“To sum up, then, the message of the prophets in general, and Ezekiel in particular, is not simply instruction addressed to their own day and age. Still less is it a manual to help you interpret current events in the Middle East and work out the countdown to Armageddon. The message of the prophets is Jesus, and specifically “the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.” Thus, when you interpret Ezekiel correctly, without allegory, you will find that his message is not primarily morality, or social action, or eschatology. His central message is Jesus.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“In addition, we have those who, while recognizing the Bible as a revelation from God, blunt its message by applying it to a time other than our own. This may take the form of an eschatologically overworked imagination, which pushes the significance of the Bible into the future. On this approach, the Bible is seen as a source book for end-times prophecies rather than a message that speaks to us in our everyday life.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“veneer”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Even though we may steer clear of its excesses, the health and wealth gospel (“God loves you and wants to give you a Cadillac and a mansion by the Country Club”) still influences our thinking. We tend to believe that God’s loving plan for our lives must surely include reasonable health, a job, a spouse, and a decent standard of living. If any of these things are absent from our lives, we tend to place the responsibility not on God but on the forces of evil in the world. God wants us to have these things, we theorize, but we are caught in the crossfire of the cosmic battle. Nowhere in his Word does God promise us such an easy ride through life. Nor does he pass off responsibility on others. He is the sovereign Lord, which means that even on the battleground, the buck stops with him. Ezekiel’s wife dies not because God is powerless to prevent such a thing happening, but because God has a significant purpose to accomplish through that “evil” also. It is a painful providence for the prophet to bear, but nonetheless he must receive this bitter cup too from the hand of his loving Father. As”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The ultimate problem with the approach to the Bible that reads Ezekiel 38–39 alongside the morning newspaper in an attempt to correlate the events described in the two documents is that it assumes that unless we are living in the end times, these passages have nothing to say to us. In fact, whether or not these happen to be the final days of God’s plan for the world, Ezekiel 38–39 addresses believers with a powerful message of hope. As”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The thing whose loss or threatened loss is crushing your soul has become your idol. Those negative emotions thereby can become messengers from God, enabling you to identify your idols, a necessary prerequisite for turning from them.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Living in the Grip of Relentless Grace: The Gospel in the Lives of Isaac and Jacob

“[For the genuine believer] There are moments in life when God's pursuit of us seems like that of a persistent mosquito, constantly buzzing around our heads and causing us pain, and we are utterly powerless to shake him off.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Esther & Ruth

“Christianity has always struggled against two pale imitations of itself, each of which seizes on one aspect of the truth and absolutizes it. On the one hand is legalism, which emphasizes the need for separation and distinctive living, for absolute obedience to the law. But legalism lacks the freedom and joy and fullness of life that are key marks of the Christian walk. On the other hand is antinomianism, the attitude that celebrates the freedom of being a Christian. But antinomianism tends to throw off any moral imperatives.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But our remembering of what we once were and, by the grace of God, what we are now must also have an evangelistic impact on our lives. If we were saved by our works, then it would be understandable for us to give up on many of those around us. There’s no way that they could earn their way into heaven. But there is room for neither pride nor despair when salvation is all of grace; it can reach down to Sodom as easily as to Jerusalem. It can touch the heart of a prostitute more easily than a Pharisee. Though the city is to be judged, yet it can be restored. Even”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Charles Haddon Spurgeon put it: Oh, my brothers and sisters in Christ, if sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies; and if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay, and not madly to destroy themselves. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for.18”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But to us as Christians, troubles come now not as visitations of God’s wrath on us but as opportunities for God to uncover his power to the world.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Our hearts are, in Calvin’s vivid image, factories that mass-produce idols.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“One of the dangers against which I warn aspiring preachers in our seminary is that of preaching against all the sins with which no one in their congregation struggles. It is relatively easy to warn the heterosexuals about the dangers of homosexuality, the teetotaler about the snare of alcoholism, the politically conservative about the hazards of liberalism, the rigidly orthodox about the perils of false teaching. All”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“If we see all of these evils as only the result of God’s punitive purpose, then we develop a tragically distorted view of God. God is then seen as a kind of divine policeman, eternally hiding at the roadside to catch us exceeding the speed limit of life.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Why do we love to read the Scriptures daily? Because they speak to us of home. Why do we live differently from those around us? Because we remember that we are soon going home (1 Peter 4:1–7). Why”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Perhaps few Old Testament passages have seen so many attempts to interpret them in the light of current events as Ezekiel 38–39. This is hardly a new phenomenon. The church father Ambrose, writing in the late fourth century, confidently identified Gog as the Goths.14 In the seventh century, Gog and Magog were the Arab armies that threatened the Holy Land.15 By the thirteenth century, Gog had become a cipher for the Mongol hordes from the East.16 William Greenhill, writing in the seventeenth century, records the opinion of some contemporaries who identified Gog as the Roman emperor, the Pope, or the Turks.17 In the nineteenth century, against the background of the tensions in Asia Minor that culminated in the Crimean War, Wilhelm Gesenius identified Rosh as Russia.18 This view was subsequently popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, along with the idea taken from other sources that “Meshech” and “Tubal” are the Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk.19 During the First World War, Arno Gaebelein argued that Gomer was Germany.20 More recently, in response to the rise of Communism, these ideas have become the staples of popular dispensational end-times literature, to which has in some cases been added the contemporary threat of the Red Chinese, usually identified as “the kings from the East” in Revelation 16:12.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“God is able to write straight with a crooked pencil and to achieve his perfect ends through the use of less than perfect instruments, without himself being tainted or hampered by their imperfection. Indeed,”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“But God will live in our midst only as the King, nothing less.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“James paints a picture of a downward spiral of giving into temptation. First, evil desire entices and lures (or traps) the complicit victim. Next, as this indwelling evil desire is allowed to run unchecked, it “gives birth to sin.” In other words, just as conception leads naturally to childbirth, giving free rein to sinful inclinations naturally results in discrete moral transgressions. Just as water runs downhill, so evil desire, if allowed to pursue its “gravitational inclination,” runs down into sinful activity.”
― Iain M. Duguid, ESV Expository Commentary (Volume 12): Hebrews–Revelation

“In response, Tertullian pointed out what an emasculated, inconsistent figure Marcion’s god was. This supposed deity: plainly judges evil by not willing it, and condemns it by prohibiting it; while on the other hand, he acquits it by not avenging it, and lets it go free by not punishing it. What a prevaricator of truth is such a god! What a dissembler to his own decision! Afraid to condemn what he really condemns, afraid to hate what he does not love, permitting that to be done which he does not allow, choosing to indicate what he dislikes rather than deeply examine it!”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The difference between Christians and religiously minded idolaters is that Christians repent not only of their sins but also of their very best deeds, their best righteousness, in order to receive in its place the righteousness of Christ, to which they cling single-heartedly.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“The choice is not whether you will be a Christian soldier or a Christian civilian but whether you will be a prepared Christian soldier or an unprepared one.”
― Iain M. Duguid, The Whole Armor of God: How Christ's Victory Strengthens Us for Spiritual Warfare

“same time, there is a danger with being too comfortable proclaiming the wrath of God. In”
― Iain M. Duguid, Ezekiel

“Just as Ezekiel’s contemporaries put their trust in the temple rather than in the God of the temple, so also in our day there are many who place their faith in the gifts of God rather than in the Giver. The complacency of such people, then and now, needs to be challenged. The true and living God is not a tame God. He cannot be comfortably manipulated into a box and made to do our bidding. If he were, he would hardly be worthy of following. God’s radical freedom to be God, bound only by his own self-revelation, means that his ways can never be reduced to a pat formula or a trite slogan.”
― Iain M. Duguid, Niv Apppication Commentary Ezekiel