1. The youths that mock Elisha are representative of Israel’s collective contempt and disregard for all things relating to their One True God.
  2. Our experience with good fathers – even when they are not our own – can point us to God the Father.
  3. Jesus meets us in our life of lies, in our falsehoods, in the untruth of our being, and in the company, we create to cover up our nakedness.
  4. One could reason that God might, at least, give the church a little worldly power.
  5. Wilson reminds his reader over and over again that, in his love, God accepts sinners as they are so that we may be delivered from the self-acceptance, self-worship, and self-justification of our selfish definitions of love.
  6. Christ has taken our failures and defeats and exchanges that yoke for his own.
  7. The Son of God is still God the Son in the Incarnation.
  8. Bulls, lions, dogs. Why all these metaphors from the animal kingdom to describe humanity as it encircles the crucified Savior? Because the man on the cross, God incarnate, is there for all creation, not just humanity.
  9. God and Jeremiah may have been looking at the same person, but they were seeing very different things.
  10. God has in fact executed his plans for his people, plans of peace (probably a better translation than welfare), a future, and a hope in Jesus Christ.
  11. God uses the unlikely, the unexpected, and sometimes even the unsavory to deliver us and to crush the heads of his enemies
  12. A seed grows the kingdom of God. A whisper eventually turns the world upside down. A carpenter’s son from nowhere becomes the Savior of everyone. Such is God’s way.