Inspirational Quotes by Herman Bavinck

“God’s will is the will of the Creator of heaven and earth, who cannot repudiate his own work in creation or providence, and who cannot treat the human being he has created as though it were a stock or stone. It is the will of a merciful and kind Father, who never forces things with brute violence, but successfully counters all our resistance by the spiritual might of love. The will of God realizes itself in no other way than through our reason and our will. That is why it is rightly said that a person, by the grace he receives, himself believes and himself terms from sin to God.”

“Life often mocks every system; it is richer and fuller than the deepest thinker in all his wisdom can imagine.”

“God makes everything beautiful in His time, He makes everything happen at the right moment, at the moment He has fixed for it, so that history in its entirety and in its parts corresponds to the counsel of God and exhibits the glory of that counsel.”

“there is great danger that modern culture, progressing in its anti-supernaturalistic course, will be stirred against the steadfastness of believers and attempt to accomplish by oppression what it cannot obtain by reasoning and argument.”

“nature and grace stood over against each other like light and darkness, day and night, heaven and earth, like Creator and creature. For that reason, a radical separation had to emerge eventually between nature and grace, not only in doctrine but also in life, both in theory and in practice. By virtue of that opposition and separation, the Anabaptists taught that the first man Adam, because he was from the dust of the ground, could not yet have been the true image of God, could not have shared in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness; the second Man, Christ, could not have received His human nature from the virgin Mary, but He must have brought it with Him from heaven; believers who had been born of God from above and had received a new, heavenly substance in that regeneration, were to be viewed not merely as renewed, but as new heavenly people in origin and essence, people whose position now was against the world, having nothing more to do with the world.”

“Human nature is not an empty notion, no purely abstract conception, but a reality, a particular manner of being, which includes distinctive habits, inclinations, and attributes.”

“The parallel, rather, is with human language. It is human to have the ability to speak, an essential part of the image of God in us. Nonetheless, concrete language, which exists in countless forms, is not native but acquired; it is learned.”

“Like all knowledge, knowledge of God is mediated to us through our senses, through speech and symbol, mediated to us by parents and others. If this were not the case, we would be unable to account for the great diversity of representations of God. If knowledge of God, of the moral order, of the beautiful—if these were all innate, they would be universally identical and acknowledged as such.”

“There is enough light for those who only desire to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. There is enough clarity to illumine the elect and enough darkness to humble them. There is enough darkness to render the reprobate sightless and enough clarity to condemn them and to render them inexcusable.”

“Wanting to hold on to some form of scriptural value, [modern] theologians modified their view of inspiration. One approach reduced its inspired character to religious-ethical matters only and allowed for all kinds of historical, geographical, and other error. The Word of God was to be distinguished from Scripture. Only doctrine is immediately inspired; in the rest error was easily possible. A split was created between “that which is needed for salvation” and “the incidentally historical.” This distinction is impossible; in Scripture, doctrine and history are completely intertwined.”

“The heaven that he won for us by his atoning death presupposes a hell from which he delivered us. The eternal life he imparted to us presupposes an eternal death from which he saved us.”

“The doctrine of the divine authority of Holy Scripture constitutes an important component in the words of God that Jesus preached, and if he was mistaken on this point he was wrong at a point that is most closely tied in with the religious life and he can no longer be recognized as our highest prophet. We cannot take Jesus seriously as a teacher and reject his own teaching concerning Holy Scripture.”

“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite, human consciousness.”

“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite human consciousness.”

“Therefore it is completely erroneous to place the church as organism and the church as institution in opposition to each other, to put the former high above the latter, and to play the former against the latter. The institution is particularly that organization, that one, necessary, indispensable organization undergirding the so-called church as organism. This latter has no other specific address than precisely that address of the institution. It comes to manifestation in no humanly invented society or corporation, but in its God-given institution.”

“The covenant is rooted in eternity. At that point it consisted not simply in the decree, like everything else can in that sense be said to have existed in eternity. Rather, the covenant existed at that point also in truth and in reality between the Father and the Son, and therefore immediately after the Fall the covenant could be made known to man and be established with man.”

“We do not see God as he is in himself. We behold him in his works. We name him according to the manner in which he has revealed himself in his works. To see God face to face is for us impossible, at least here on earth. If, nevertheless,, God wills that we should know him, he must needs descend to the level of the creature. He must needs accommodate himself to our limited, finite human consciousness.”

“The condition in which the pagan world dwells outside of the special revelation is portrayed in Holy Scripture as darkness, ignorance, self-invented wisdom, and great unrighteousness. The preaching that addresses them is thus a calling to come out of darkness into the light; it is an invitation to be converted from idols and to serve the living and true God.”

“The law, which was added to the promise, did not render the promise of no effect or obliterate it, but rather took the promise up into itself in order to be of service to the development and fulfillment of it. The promise is the main thing; the law is subordinate. The first is the goal; the second is the means. It is not in the law, but in the promise, that the core of the Revelation of God and the heart of Israel's religion lies. And because the promise is a promise of God, it is not a hollow sound, but a word full of power, which is the expression of a will bent on doing all that pleases God (Ps. 33:9 and Isa. 55:11). Therefore, this promise is the propelling force of Israel's history until it gets its fulfillment in Christ.”

“God is so good that in His electing and in the dispensing of His grace, He follows the line of generations and receives into His covenant both parents and their seed together. So the children of believers are to be viewed as holy, not by nature but through the benefit of the covenant of grace, in which they together with their parents are included according to God’s arrangement. Given this position, therefore, baptism is not administered to children of the church in order to make them holy, in order to make them partakers of sanctifying grace, but because they are sanctified in Christ and therefore as members of His church ought to be baptized. Baptism is no conduit through which grace flows to the baptized person, but a sign and seal of received grace, of the covenant, in which the child is included together with his parents.”