Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06062 The category of secret sin is as old as the fall itself. Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, hid themselves among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8). The desire to conceal wrongdoing is one of the most instinctive expressions of a guilty conscience, and it has operated in every human life since…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06063 There is a difference between a person who stumbles into sin through weakness or momentary failure of judgement, and a person who looks at what they know to be wrong and chooses it anyway, with full awareness and deliberate intent. Scripture recognises this distinction, and Hebrews 10:26 addresses it in terms that have…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11090 Few pastoral questions produce more confusion, guilt, and genuine suffering than this one. The Christian who has wrestled with an addictive or compulsive pattern of sin — whether that involves alcohol, pornography, drugs, food, gambling, or any other form — frequently encounters competing frameworks. Some Christian traditions treat it as purely spiritual: a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06065 The relationship between temptation and sin is one of the most practically important questions in Christian theology, precisely because every believer is tempted and every believer needs to understand what temptation is, what it is not, and how it relates to sin. The discussion is considerably deepened — and genuinely complicated — by…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 06066 This question touches one of the deepest fault lines in all of theology — the relationship between God’s purposes and the existence of evil in His creation. Scripture affirms with remarkable plainness that God can and does bring good out of evil. It also affirms with equal plainness that God is not the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06071 This question is one of the more practically pressing ones in Christian sexual ethics, and it is one Scripture does not answer directly. The word masturbation does not appear in the Bible. Any honest answer has to begin there, because the temptation — in both directions — is to pretend more certainty than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06072 This is one of those pastoral questions where a great deal of unnecessary guilt and confusion has accumulated because the distinction between two very different things has been blurred. Many sincere Christians live under a burden of condemnation about their own normal human responses, whilst the genuinely problematic territory of lust goes unaddressed…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06069 The question of whether some sins are worse than others touches something most people intuitively sense but find difficult to reason through biblically. Instinctively, most people feel that murder is worse than petty dishonesty, that premeditated cruelty is worse than a moment of impatience. But there is also the uncomfortable teaching that all…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what sin actually is than any single word could capture. Three of those terms recur throughout the Hebrew Scriptures — and significantly, they appear together in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 06067 The practice of confession sits at the intersection of theology and daily Christian experience. Most believers know they should confess sin to God, but questions arise about whether that private prayer is all that is ever required — or whether Scripture sometimes calls for something more. The answer is more layered than a…