Theology Proper (God)

Question 2061. I hear this question often, sometimes gently and sometimes with real frustration: why does God seem so different in the Old Testament, commanding conquest and judgment, compared to ...

Question 2007. Genesis 2:2-3 tells me that God finished His work of creation and rested on the seventh day, and that simple statement about seventh day rest raises an obvious ...

Question 2116. The Shema is Israel's great confession of faith, recited morning and evening by devout Jews for three thousand years, and it stands at the head of every serious ...

Question 2115. The oaks of Mamre witnessed one of the most remarkable afternoons in the Old Testament: the day God came to lunch. Genesis 18 opens without any drumroll - ...

Question 2114. The figure who wrestled with Jacob at Peniel is introduced with deliberate mystery: "And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of ...

Question 2113. The shekinah glory is the visible, radiant presence of God dwelling among His people - the cloud and fire and brightness that filled the tabernacle, settled on the ...

Question 2112. The pillar of cloud and fire is one of the most striking sights in the entire Old Testament: a towering column that led two million people through a ...

Question 2111. The burning bush is one of the most famous scenes in the whole Bible, yet ask who actually spoke to Moses from it and you will get a ...

Question 2109. A Christophany is an appearance of the Son of God before His incarnation - the eternal Christ showing Himself to people in the Old Testament, centuries before Bethlehem ...

Question 2108. A theophany is a visible appearance of God to human beings, and once you know the word you will start spotting them all over your Old Testament. The ...

Question 2107. Eternity and everlastingness sound like two words for the same thing, and most of us use them interchangeably without a second thought. God lives for ever; God is ...

Question 2106. Was there a "before" before creation? It sounds like a question a child might fire at you over breakfast, and like most children's questions it turns out to ...

Question 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job ...

Question 2020. What does Trinitarian prayer look like, and should we pray to the Father, to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit? This question comes up more than you might ...

Question 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How ...

Question 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within ...

Question 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in ...

Question 2014. Does God hate sinners, or does He only hate sin? It is one of those questions that sounds like a technicality until someone asks it through tears, usually ...

Question 2016. Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for the evil in the first place? This question sits at the bottom of ...

Question 8010. The Angel of the LORD is the most intriguing figure in the Old Testament, and working out who He is has been one of the most rewarding studies ...

Question 2040. Divine omnipresence means that God is fully and equally present everywhere at once, in every place, at every moment, without being spread thin, divided into portions, or contained ...

Question 2041. God's holiness is the attribute Scripture reaches for more often than any other to describe who He is, and it means two things held together, that God is ...

Question 2042. God's love is not primarily a feeling, and it is not the vague affection our culture usually means when it uses the word. It is His settled, active ...

Question 2043. God's justice is His settled commitment always to do what is right, to treat every person exactly as they deserve, and never to let evil go unaddressed forever ...

Question 2044. God's mercy is His compassionate refusal to give sinners what their sin actually deserves, withholding deserved judgement out of tender, active compassion. Lamentations 3:22-23 puts it with unmatched ...

Question 2045. God's wrath is His settled, righteous opposition to sin, not a sudden fit of temper or an emotional outburst He later regrets. Romans 1:18 states plainly that "the ...

Question 2046. Wrath and love feel, to many people, like they must belong to two different gods, one frightening and one kind, rather than to a single, coherent character. I ...

Question 2047. God's supreme rule means that He reigns as King over every person, every nation and every event in history, with nothing genuinely outside His authority or beyond His ...

Question 2048. God's providence is His continuous, active care in directing the events of creation and history toward His good purposes, quietly working through ordinary causes rather than only through ...

Question 2049. Change his mind is a question Scripture answers in two apparently different ways, and I think both answers need to be taken seriously rather than one quietly explained ...

Question 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature ...

Question 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this ...

Question 2059. The Trinity and consciousness is a question that takes me right to the frontier of what can actually be known about God, and it turns out to sit ...

Question 2053. God's attributes are not a set of competing interests inside a divine committee, however often popular preaching makes it sound that way. If God is perfectly holy and ...

Question 2056. God's self-sufficiency is the reason the answer to this question is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us, not for His existence, not for His ...

Question 2051. Divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of separate parts or ingredients the way a created thing is, a portion of love here, a measure of ...

Question 2052. Divine aseity is one of those doctrines that sounds abstract until you actually sit with it, and then it quietly rearranges how you think about everything else you ...

Question 2050. Divine immutability means that God's character, His purposes and His promises never change, improve, decay or shift in any respect. James describes Him as the Father "with whom ...

Question 2072. Divine beauty is not a category Christians spend much time thinking about, next to holiness, love, or justice, yet Scripture reaches for it often enough that I think ...

Question 2069. God's experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, ...

Question 2070. Divine repentance is the term theologians use for those startling verses where God is said to have 'repented' or 'relented' of something, most famously Genesis 6:6, where the ...

Question 2067. Divine eternity is the doctrine underneath one of the most fascinating questions in all of theology, and one with genuinely practical consequences for how I read Scripture's prophetic ...

Question 2068. God's silence is one of the hardest experiences a believer can walk through, that stretch of praying into what feels like an empty room when heaven simply does ...

Question 2062. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in ...

Question 2065. Genuine human freedom sits at the very centre of one of the oldest and hardest questions in theology. Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom ...

Question 2066. The names of God in the Old Testament form one of the richest veins of theological material in all of Scripture, and I never tire of returning to ...

Question 2080. David's child died on the seventh day of his illness, the son born to David and Bathsheba after their affair and the arranged death of her husband Uriah, ...

Question 2077. The death of Uzzah is one of those Old Testament episodes that stops readers cold: a man reaches out to steady the ark of the covenant when the ...

Question 2079. Pharaoh's hardened heart troubles many readers of Exodus for a very understandable reason: if God hardened Pharaoh's heart, how could Pharaoh be justly held responsible for refusing to ...

Question 2075. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, ...

Question 2076. Is God in hell? The question of God in hell sounds like a strange question, almost a trick, but I get asked it seriously and often, usually by ...

Question 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they ...

Question 2073. Changing God's mind through prayer sounds, on the surface, like a contradiction of everything else Scripture teaches about His unchanging character. Yet Scripture itself records instance after instance ...

Question 2078. Abel's offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel ...

Question 2071. Functional subordination is the term I use to describe what Jesus means in John 14:28 when He tells His disciples, 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28) ...

Question 2055. God created us, and the reason why sits underneath most of the anxiety that drives people towards religion in the first place, and towards its alternatives too. Why ...

Question 02085 The term "common grace" describes the benefits God extends to all people regardless of whether they are in a saving relationship with Him. It is distinguished from saving ...

Question 2003. God's will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a ...

Question 2004. Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist ...

Question 2005. God's providence is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole of Theology Proper, largely because two opposite errors keep pulling the conversation off balance. One error ...

Question 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about ...

Question 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture ...

Question 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon's words, "the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the ...

Question 2011. Ask a room of Christians how the persons of Trinity actually communicate with one another, and you will likely get some puzzled looks. The question seems either too ...

Question 2012. The question of the Father's love for ordinary believers, compared with His love for the eternal Son, feels almost presumptuous at first glance, as though we are asking ...

Question 2013. The phrase eternal generation of the Son appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a fair question. Is this a ...

Question 4015. When someone asks me what the procession of the Spirit means, I usually start by admitting that it is one of those phrases the church has used for ...

Question 2015. Is what we call the economic Trinity, the roles the Father, Son and Spirit play toward creation and redemption, essential to who God is, or is it just ...

Question 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text ...

Question 2018. If unlimited atonement really means Christ's death was sufficient for every person, why doesn't an all-loving God simply save everyone? This is one of the oldest objections to ...

Question 2019. What does divine impassibility mean, and is it something the Bible actually teaches or something Greek philosophy smuggled into Christian theology? This is one of those Deep Dive ...

Question 2027. How can the triune God be three persons and yet one God, without that being either a contradiction or three gods wearing a trench coat? This is a ...

Question 2028. Trinity doctrine is, without much question, the single most distinctive claim Christianity makes about the very nature of God, and yet many Christians could not explain it clearly ...

Question 2029. Is the Trinity in the Old Testament, or does it only appear once the New Testament arrives with Jesus and Pentecost? This question matters more than it might ...

Question 2030. God and temptation seem, on the surface, to sit uneasily together in Scripture, since James tells us plainly that God cannot be tempted, and yet the Gospels tell ...

Question 2031. Why does God require worship, and doesn't a God who demands to be worshipped sound uncomfortably like the insecure, glory-hungry rulers Scripture itself condemns? This is a genuinely ...

Question 2032. Divine emotions is a phrase I use carefully, because Scripture clearly describes God loving, grieving, rejoicing and growing angry, yet these responses are not identical to the changeable, ...

Question 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all ...

Question 2038. When people ask me what divine omniscience means, I always start in the same place. It means that God knows everything there is to know, perfectly and all ...

Question 2039. Divine omnipotence means that God is able to do all that He wills to do, without effort, without rival, and without any power outside Himself limiting what He ...

Question 2022. Masculine language for God runs through the whole Bible, "He," "Him," "Father," "King," and I am often asked why, given that God is spirit and not literally male, ...

Question 2021. God's gender is a live question in a culture busy renegotiating what gender even means, and I want to answer it carefully rather than reaching for the nearest ...

Question 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves ...

Question 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy's teeth, to let ...

Question 02084 We live in an age of anxiety. Surveys consistently show rising levels of worry, stress, and fear—about the future, about circumstances beyond our control, about what might happen ...

Question 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both ...

Question 2064. God's providence raises one of the hardest pastoral questions I ever get asked. If God's providence extends over everything that happens, does that mean He permits, or even ...

Question 2063. God is Spirit. When Jesus told the Samaritan woman this in John 4:24, He was making one of the most consequential theological statements in the whole of Scripture, ...

Question 2060. Why hell exists is one of the hardest questions people bring to me, and it deserves a careful, honest answer rather than either a dismissive dodge or a ...

Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because ...

Question 2000. God's existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see ...