Joseph Serwach

“Theologian Bruce L. McCormack puts it well: God will not allow anything to stand in the way of his love. The holiness of the divine love is its irresistibility. God’s will to love the creature will not be stopped by the will of the creature to resist that love. God’s love will reach its goal, even if the path to that end lies through condemning, excluding, and annihilating all resistance to it. God’s love turns to wrath when it is resisted, but not for a minute does it cease to be love even when it expresses itself as wrath.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“the meaning of Christmas is that God is invading the territory held by the Prince of Darkness. The definitive closure of this cosmic invasion, the V-Day to its D-Day, will be the final Day of God. 190 On that last day there will be only one Ruler, only one Lord. Scripture is quite clear and unambiguous about that. The Judge of all the cosmos will not be Satan. Radical evil will have no status in the day of judgment, or the day of final reconciliation, as Volf calls it. 191 “Death shall have no more dominion” (cf. Rom. 6: 9). If evil is the absence of good, then the victory of our Lord and of his Christ will be the absence of evil, “for ever and ever.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“For Saul, with the vision of Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah close to his heart, there would be no question of retreat from the world. If the Stoics had a big integrated vision of a united world, so did he. If the Roman Empire was hoping to create a single society in which everyone would give allegiance to a single Lord, so was he. Paul believed that this had already been accomplished through Israel’s Messiah. If the Platonists were speaking of possible commerce between “heaven” and “earth,” so was he—though his vision was of heaven coming to earth, not of souls escaping earth and going to heaven. As a Jew, he believed that the whole created order was the work of the One God; as a “Messiah man,” he believed that the crucified and risen Jesus had dealt with the evil that corrupts the world and the human race and that he had begun the long-awaited project of new creation, of which the communities of baptized and believing Jesus-followers were the pilot project.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul: A Study of the Apostle Paul's Life and Legacy

“In the Bible, the term “apocalyptic” (apokalypsis) encompasses a worldview in which the truly significant battle is the ongoing one between the Lord God of Sabaoth2 (Hebrew, meaning armies) and the Enemy, who deploys the principalities and Powers (Eph. 2: 2). This contest on the heavenly level is enacted on the earthly level by struggles large and small in the realm of human affairs —battles waged not with worldly weapons but with the spiritual armor of God (Eph. 6: 11-17). 3”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ