J. Alec Motyer > Quotes

“Don’t ever be ashamed of being thought of as being tied to Holy Scripture. Don’t ever be ashamed of exalting Holy Scripture. You’re following in the steps of Jesus who bound himself to the Word of God, and insisted by his obedience to fulfil what was written of him.”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“only the perfect can bear the sins of another.”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“And why did Caesar Augustus make just such a decree at that precise moment? Bible in hand, we answer, because Micah had said that the Messiah must be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). So”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“It is not a light thing for very religious people to accept that their religion itself is offensive to God!”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Here is a very largely forgotten and yet most vital principle. It is certainly the case that the church is called by God to safeguard, publicize and transmit His truth (e.g. 2 Tim. 1: 13, 14; 2:1, 2); but it is equally the case that the truth is the safeguard of the church, both in the corporate sense of preserving the whole body and in the individual sense of guarding, defending and keeping each member.5 The life which walks in the truth is impregnable (cf. Jn. 8:31, 32, 34-36).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Since it is through faith in the Lord’s promises that we are saved (Acts 16:31), then surely, if faith is mighty to solve the great and eternal problem of our sinfulness, alienation, and helplessness, is it not the way to tackle every problem – to look up to our almighty, ever-loving God and say ‘I trust you’?”
― J. Alec Motyer, Isaiah by the Day: A New Devotional Translation

“Seven titles for the Word of God from Psalm 1 (NKJV): ‘law’ = ‘teaching’, the word to instruct (v. 1); ‘testimonies’, what God ‘testifies to’ as his truth and the truth about himself, the word to reveal (v. 2); ‘ways’, the word as the guide to characteristic life-style (v. 3); ‘precepts’, the word as instruction for the details of daily life (v. 4); ‘statutes’, from the verb ‘to engrave’, the word in its permanency, engraven in the rock (v. 5); ‘commandments’, the word given by God for our obedience (v. 6); ‘judgments’—as of the authoritative pronouncements of a judge; the word expressing what the Lord himself has ‘decided upon’ as truth to hold and life to live (v. 7).”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“But to whom was Amos speaking? Even the most casual reading of his book reveals his hearers as a church which had confused assurance with complacency. They not only professed salvation but also an unworried certainty of salvation (cf. 5:14, 18). As Amos looked at them, however, he saw a people who not only professed salvation but who exhibited a total lack of the sort of evidence which would make their profession credible.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“It is not just illogical that people should love mercy when they seek it from God for themselves and hate it when required to show it to others. The Scripture says that it is impossible. The unforgiving cannot be forgiven, the unmerciful cannot receive mercy.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“If we do not labour to establish justice in the gate, we shall be accused from this passage in Amos of a one-sided morality stopping short of the biblical concern for society, we shall be exposed, according to Amos 3:9-4:5, of playing around with a useless religion while society rots, and we shall find, according to Amos 6:3, that, while we have been unconcerned, other and sinister forces have been at work to enthrone violence and disorder.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The verb possess signifies a conquest. The people of God demonstrate a superior power. But the conquest is followed by an equality of citizenship in that it is not their name but the name of their God by which the Gentiles are called. What the Old Testament thus saw in its own terms as military expansion, the New Testament, following the lead of Jesus who said, If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight (Jn. 18:36), teaches us to see as the missionary expansion of the church. At the Council of Jerusalem James used this very passage of Amos as scriptural justification for the decision that the Gentiles were eligible for co-equal membership in the things of the Lord Jesus (Acts 15:12-19). Clearly, missionary expansion involves a submission followed by an equality.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“But see how he reverses what we often hear said: that by means of a new ‘blessing’ from heaven we are enabled to walk in holiness. We ever want the blessing first and the duty second, but Amos says that it is those who set themselves in the way that delights their God who receive life, power and grace from and in Him. Jesus put things the same way when He promised that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness would be filled (Mt. 5:6).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Jeremiah saw the Jerusalem temple subjected to this abuse: people confessedly finding peace with God and all manner of religious helpfulness there, but coming back unchanged, praying on their knees in the temple and preying on their neighbours everywhere else!”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“There is, then, one thing which the Almighty cannot do: He cannot bestow mercy on those who do not show mercy. Nothing is left for those who turn their faces away from the needy—or who exploit the needy for their own gain—than that God will turn His face away from them. This is the grim but biblically realistic truth of Amos 8:1—10. The plumb-line hangs vertical in the unmoving hand of God, a mute summons to eternal wrath to flash forth, terrifyingly, disastrously, unendingly against those who are pitiless towards the poor, the central evidence of false religion (cf. Jas. 1:27) and dead faith (cf. Jas. 2:14-”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Jesus did not say ‘I thirst’ because he was thirsty, but ‘in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled.’ Dare”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“What are justice and righteousness? In 5:7 the turning of justice to wormwood indicates that justice is a word involving the treatment of other people: wormwood has to be tasted before it is known for the bitter thing it is. Justice, therefore, is right behaviour in relation to others, whereby they ‘taste’ or experience what is good and pleasant.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“He found himself in the Old Testament Scriptures. He understood himself, and his role, his vocation, and his future from his Bible. He was content, later, to say: ‘The Son of Man goes as it is written of him’ (Matt. 26:24). The pathway was laid down in the Word of God, and he set himself to walk in it.”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“The point at issue is not the social injustice involved, that comes later, but the refusal to allow life to be governed by truth.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“With our New Testaments in hand, we look back and see, in embryo, what would be the full reality, the perfection of the flowering, in Jesus. The”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“We have forgotten that our God can turn and become our enemy (Is. 63:10) and with all our talk of taking care not to fall into the power of Satan we have become blind to the much more dangerous possibility of falling out of the power of God.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“to force us to make our calling and election sure, to remind us that it is one thing to claim God’s promises but another to inherit them, and to teach, seven hundred and sixty years before a greater than Amos used the words, that many will call out ‘Lord, Lord’ only to hear the words in reply ‘Depart from me, you evil-doers’ (Mt. 7:22 f.).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“When the grace of God reaches out to man its purpose is to make him truly human: as we would say, the purpose of God’s saving work is to make us like Jesus, the perfect Man.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Another way of stating the same truth is to say that the face which God turns to the world is predominantly one of mercy, that wrath comes, when it comes at all, late and overdue,”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“We cannot be wrong in supposing that at any rate the majority of those who flocked to Bethel, Beer-sheba and Gilgal thought that they were legitimate partakers of the promises of God. Amos and history unite to proclaim that of these the majority was wholly mistaken. In the bitter event they discovered that it was one thing to know a promise but quite another to be an inheritor of it; it was one thing to be around to hear the promise proclaimed but quite another to be able to register a valid claim to possess it for oneself.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“In the Old Testament, in God’s revelation though Moses, as in the New Testament, in the divine Covenant, the Law is not a ladder of merit we attempt to climb in order to win God’s favour; it is God’s pattern of holy living given to us because, by redemption, we are already in his favour. It is not a way of salvation by works of obedience; it is a pattern of obedience divinely provided for those who have been saved by grace.”
― J. Alec Motyer, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament

“Three principles were held and acted upon: the primary importance of seeking material possessions (the sin of covetousness), the irrelevance of the rights of other people (the sin of indifference and oppression)9 and the unrestricted promotion of self-advantage (the sin of self-importance).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“again the roaring lion is heard (3:8a), but it is not followed by the lion growling over its prey. The roaring lion has provoked the voice of prophecy (3: 8b).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Thus in a nutshell Amos summarizes the Bible’s doctrine of the life of holiness as the life which loves and obeys the truth. But when the truth is no longer loved and is not kept by daily obedience its rejection is complete: and this is the charge levelled against Judah. God’s people have despised His truth.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The question whether Amos was teaching that the Lord had decided to change His covenant purposes, or whether he was foretelling purgative judgments designed to sweep out of the covenant-people all whose profession was a pretence and whose lives did not show the marks of true membership, must be settled by the study of chapters 7-9.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“It would have been helpful (Psalm 39:2) if David had felt able to tell us the sort of thing he was fearful he might say in the presence of someone with no profession of faith. We can, of course, try to guess. We have all heard Christians speak in such a carelessly confident way about dying that their testimony sounded glib and brash, failing to take into account the solemnity of death, or that in the majority of cases it comes as an unwelcome intruder into a life we are loathe to leave. Again, have we not heard Christians speak of death – or pray for someone seriously ill – as if death was the very worst thing that could possibly happen (whereas the truth is that for a Christian, considered solely as an individual, setting aside relationships and responsibilities, to die is the very best thing that can happen)! David discovered that the ending of earthly life and the advent of death was, putting it mildly, a hurdle to be faced, and a task to be prepared for. First, be careful what we say – and maybe best say nothing. Dying without being afraid is one of the pearls of great price of being a Christian, so be careful, in the words of Jesus, not to cast this pearl before swine. A calm and unanxious demeanour could well speak louder than words. And, secondly, David certainly does tell us how we can go about cultivating this – in the threefold directive implied in 39:7–8. As ever that great old song ‘Turn your eyes upon Jesus’ strikes the essential note – or as David put it: ‘my hope is in you’. Are you in the prime of life? Are you in the later years when death waits round the corner? Are you, by divine sovereign appointment, in a terminal illness? Whatever: turn your eyes on Jesus and keep them fixed there. Beyond this, we must take up Paul’s motto – to have a conscience void of offence towards God and man always (Acts 24:16), for is that not what David is saying in Psalm 39:8? Yes, of course, all our sins were anticipated at Calvary and covered there, but what was done once and for all on the Cross becomes real all over again in our experience as we obey the divine command that all men everywhere should repent (Acts 17:30). The third strand in a ‘good death’ is the repute among others that we leave behind – a ‘savour of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing’ (2 Cor. 2:15, niv).”
― J. Alec Motyer, Psalms by the Day