“What is pure Bill? Or excellent or admirable? The death of a million people in a flood? God evidently through so. He is incapable of acts that are not admirable, and it is He who brought about the Flood. How about the slaying of children in Jericho? There are a few Bible stories that are not as terrible as they are happy. We just prefer to leave out the terrible part, but that only makes the good anemic.”

“Oh, now don't act like the idea is so terrible. When you come down to it, what could be more romantic than a few hours of scrambling around in a cold, dripping hole known for occasionally flooding and drowning people?”

“Why are we so afraid when we think about death? Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God's Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in Him.”

“Shattered by the cumulative effect of so much horror and death, Joan was again afflicted by a crisis of faith. How could a good and benevolent God let such a thing happen? How could He so terribly afflict even children and babies, who were not guilty of any sin?”

“Thus, when Paul says, "Praise the Lord all you nations, and let all the peoples extol him" (Rom. 15:11), he is saying that there is something about God that is so universally praiseworthy and so profoundly beautiful and so comprehensively worth and so deeply satisfying that God will find passionate admirers in every diverse people group in the world. His true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish his beauty. His excellence will be shown to be higher and deeper than the parochial preferences that make us happy most of the time. His appeal will be to the deepest, highest, largest capacities of the human soul. Thus, the diversity of the source of admiration will testify to his incomparable glory.”

“There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”