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John Webster

John Webster Biography

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“Why do we tell lies? We lie because the truth is too painful or too shameful for us to face, or because the truth is simply inconvenient and has to be suppressed before it’s allowed to disturb us. We invent lies because, for whatever reason, we want to invent reality. And the false reality which we invent, the world we make up by our lying, has one great advantage for us: It makes no claim on us. It demands nothing. It doesn’t shape us in the way that truth shapes us; it faces us with no obligations; it has no hard, resistant surfaces which we can’t get through. A lie is a made-up reality, and so never unsettles, never criticizes, never resists, never overthrows us. It’s the world, not as it is, but as we wish it to be: a world organized around us and our desires, the perfect environment in which we can be left at peace to be ourselves and to follow our own good or evil purposes.”

Lies
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“Reading the Bible isn’t about confirming our ideas and experiences and going away satisfied. It’s about being challenged, called into question. Part of the point of the Gospel stories is to upset our habits, to set before us something utterly different from our world, to push us into thinking about something absolutely new. We aren’t the judges of Scripture; it judges us. Its task is to astonish us; it doesn’t say to us what we want to hear, but says to us what must be said if we are to hear and respond to the truth of the gospel.”

Confronted By GraceReading Scripture
Author:John Webster
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“There’s no resolution to the conflicts of our lives within ourselves, no freedom from wickedness to be sought in striving, no peace with God which is the fruit of moral effort. And the reason why there is none is that we are, indeed, defeated by sin. It’s not that we’re occasionally overcome, or even that more often than not we lose the battle with ourselves. It’s that we’re wholly defeated, ruined, “there is no health in us.” To look to ourselves, therefore, to try to sort ourselves out by doing an audit of our moral lives or a clean-up operation on our spirituality is, quite literally, a hopeless undertaking.”

Confronted By Grace
Author:John Webster
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“Sin is misery, because it’s the perversion of our natures away from God. Sin deforms human life, which always leads to suffering. We cannot hope to despise God and his ways and remain authentically human—yet the singular history of the human race is that we do just that: break loose from God, tear up our roots in his life-giving presence, and then wonder why it hurts. Sin ruins us; and in ruining us it makes us guilty. It makes us feel guilty because we are guilty, our lives characterized by iniquity and lawlessness.”

Confronted By Grace
Author:John Webster
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“The story of the passion, these few brief hours one afternoon in the history of the world, [is] the outworking of the eternal will of God for our salvation. Jesus’ abandonment and death is not his defeat. It does not spell the overthrow of God’s ways—quite the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of those ways, the fulfillment of the eternal resolve of God to be our God, to take up our cause, to put an end to our opposition and establish our peace. ‘By oppression and judgment he was taken away,’ Isaiah tells us. ‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; …he has put him to grief’ (53:8a, 10). This is God’s doing. This is not tragedy; it’s not Jesus overtaken by a destiny which he could not master. It’s the fulfillment in time of the eternal purpose of God.”

Confronted By Grace
Author:John Webster
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“As we read the stories of [the] last week of the life of Christ…, we are not to think of what we read as the last days of a good man scandalously treated and slowly engulfed by powers too great for him. No, we’re to wonder at the majestic condescension of God, the unbroken movement of the will of God. At the Last Supper, faced with the presence of his betrayer, Jesus said, ‘the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed!’ (Luke 22:22). These words—‘as it has been determined, but woe’—stand over the whole of the course of the passion. Holy Week is no accident and no tragedy. The betrayal of Judas, the abandonment of the disciples, the vacillation and weakness of Pilate, the self-protection of the leaders of the people—none of this corners Jesus or overtakes him. He is and remains Lord.”

Confronted By Grace
Author:John Webster
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“Fellowship with God is what human beings are for. That is, we flourish as human beings if we live in free and joyful and humble relation to God. To be human is to be in relation to God—and that relation to God is not a sort of added extra, something to supplement our lives. It is the core of being human; it is the way in which we are properly alive. We are alive and truly human as we live in and from that fellowship.”

Confronted By Grace
Author:John Webster
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“I myself have loved a lady and pursued her with a great deal of under-age protestation, whom some three or four gallants that have enjoyed would with all their hearts have been glad to have been rid of. 'Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.”

HeartHas BeensAgeThreeFearJusticeDealsFourDespairSummerBirdGardenGladEnjoyedConsumptionPursued
Author:John Webster
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