Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Paul: A Biography > Status Update

When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves.

Any "power" that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise.

the powers that have gripped the pagan world and the fake "gods" that these "powers" have used to deceive the nations have been overthrown. Zeus, Hermes, and the rest have been shown up as shams. They simply do not exist.

it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.

People often think of "miracles" as the "invasion" of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn't how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way.

those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization.

They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven.

Paul's "missionary" journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope,

When a person has come to faith in Jesus, as the risen, Lord, that event is self assign of the spirit work through the gospel, and that, if the spear has begun that, “Good Work,” of which that Faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job.(Philippians 1:16 & Romans 5-8)