Biblical Stories Quotes & Sayings

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ. — John Piper

The Biblical stories are sacred inspiration. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to. — Peter Block

But the fact is that the Bible itself is the grandest of grand stories, yet it prizes truth and reason without being modernist, and it prizes countless stories within its overall story without being postmodern either. In short, the Bible is both rational and experiential, propositional as well as relational, so that genuinely biblical arguments work in any age and with any person. — Os Guinness

The Biblical "dualism" in life then, is not between the "sacred" and the "secular" in contrived upper and lower stories of life, but rather between that which is in harmony with God's design or in conflict with it, that is, between good and evil, no matter in what sphere of life or endeavor it takes place. — Christian Overman

Lemberger's stories are marvelous compounds of scholarship, imagination and empathy. Brought to life with rich historical detail, these biblical women, sidelined and silenced for centuries, prove to be audacious, utterly relatable, and spellbinding companions. — Michelle Huneven

The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can't the people who are descendants of the Bible be in dialogue with other cultures? — Bruce Feiler

Immigration is a kind of pilgrimage. That's the way I see it. Just to go back to the desert, biblical metaphors, that's the story of great migration right there, the Old Testament. — Ruben Martinez

The doctrine of hell does not stand alone as a kind of ancient Christian horror story. Rather, hell is inseparable from three other interrelated biblical truths: human sin, God's holiness, and the cross of Christ. — Douglas Groothuis

To me, these biblical stories are just so many fish stories, and I'm not specifically referring to Jonah and the whale. I need indisputable proof of anything I'm asked to believe. — W.C. Fields

If you find that you're going through hell, keep moving. You will get to the end eventually. — Kimberly Brouillette

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David's house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth. — Rachel Held Evans

It cannot be denied that as institutions, churches do good work. They operate schools and hospitals. Their charity outreaches, which take care of the homeless, sick, and hungry, have real impacts on communities. And while there are certainly hellfire-and-brimstone preachers around, there is counterweight in Presbyterian and Methodist ministers, who are grounded in a modicum of rationality, using Biblical stories as fables to teach psychological and ethical principles. — Gudjon Bergmann

Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. — Robert M. Price

Whatever we do, let's not imagine that the Israelites were ancient versions of ourselves, maybe less well groomed, who were "nice," read their Bibles daily, the kind you could invite to church and want to marry your daughter, who would vote Republican or drive a hybrid. We respect these biblical stories most when we try to understand what the writers did and why, not when we place false expectations on them, like seeing them as a timeless script or a permanent fixture for how to think about God. — Peter Enns

We often lose sight of God's dreams for us in the darkness of disappointment or the distraction of discouragement. It is all too common to forget the promises in the midst of the problems. But every significant biblical figure has a story of waiting for the promises of God to be revealed. We see many stories in the Scriptures where it seems the dream has died, only to be resurrected solely by the power of God. Think about it - Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, the apostle Paul - they all had to trust God in the darkness, waiting for the light to be revealed. — Ross Parsley

Well, don't say I didn't warn you. You've never been on the receiving end of one of his tirades." "They can't possibly be any worse than my brother's." "What, that lovely sweet man who sat at my bar telling funny stories all the afternoon? Don't tell me he has a temper?" "Fire and brimstone," I affirmed. "In biblical proportions. — Susanna Kearsley

The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just because it tells me the story of Jesus. — George MacDonald

My mother read me biblical stories at night. — Malcolm Gladwell

I've often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently. — Howard Barker

These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil. — Gudjon Bergmann

I believe we find imaginative satisfaction in stories that end with weddings because we live in a world that will end with a wedding. The Bible tells the story of history, a story that is mysteriously 'built into' the structure of our minds and practices, so that even writers who resist this story cannot help but leave traces of it - faint and distorted as they may be - on every page. — Peter J. Leithart

The Song of Songs, the book of Ruth, and the cycle of stories associated with King David demonstrate that biblical perspectives on sexual desire and family ties remain much more complicated than is often thought. The appropriate expression of desire is not limited to marriage between a man and a woman, but can include the love of a son of a king for his charismatic ally, the love of rabbis and theologians for God, their "husband," and the love of a faithful Moabite for her Israelite mother-in-law. The nuclear family is also not idealized: Naomi, Ruth, and Obed are a family, bound together by their common love for one another, and, in the Song of Songs, the woman's mother supports her daughter's premarital encounters over the objections of her sons, who seek to control their sister's sexuality and are overruled. King David never even bothers to pursue marriage as commonly envisioned today. His — Jennifer Wright Knust

The Louvre! The Louvre has me in its clutches. Every time I'm there rich blessings rain down upon me. I am coming to understand Titian more and more and learning to love him. And then there is Botticelli's sweet Madonna, with red roses behind her, standing against a blue-green sky. And Fiesole with his poignant little biblical stories, so simply told, often so glorious in their colors. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

The Scriptures contain many stories of people who waited years or even decades before the Lord's promises came to pass. What modern believers can learn from the patience of biblical saints like Abraham, Joseph, David, and Paul is that waiting upon the Lord has eternal rewards. — Charles Stanley

It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith. — Reza Aslan

The biblical stories are the greatest sacred-inspirations. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I think of a person I haven't seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about. A car passes me on the road, and its license plate consists of my wife's and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.
I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten. — Frederick Buechner

[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid. — Elaine Pagels

The biblical story of Noah can be found in the book of Genesis. — Noah