"The world is to God as wine and chocolate are to us. Creation isn't something God needs; it's something he likes. He doesn't say, 'I need the world.' That's a statement that would get him off the train of delight many stops short of 'I love the world.' Therefore, the world is not something God has to have; it's the overflow of the totally unnecessary love of the Trinity as they tell each other how delicious they find things. And it's precisely that deliciousness of things in the sight of God that's the taproot of our existence. We're all fine wines in God's cellar. He has all of eternity to give us the aging we deserve. . . .

Theologians can talk all they like about the unchangeableness of God and his unswerving antipathy to sin. But the God who appears in the film of the Bible apparently never read the etiquette manuals they wrote for him. It makes no difference to the God of Scripture when (or even whether) we change for the better: 'While we were still sinners, Christ died for us' (Romans 5:8). God's longing to see us as 'Good!' is the only thing that counts. In Christ, therefore, he has no problem with sin — which is exactly what the Lady Julian said back in the fourteenth century: 'Sin is behovely; and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' From the beginning, the Best News has always been that the world is good in his eyes. So Adam, Noah, Abraham, Hosea, you, and me (sin to the contrary notwithstanding) are all 'first' proclamations of the Gospel. The Beginning himself insists on a happy ending from the start.”