Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 cried out to a God they were not otherwise sure they believed in. Did God hear that? I want to answer honestly rather than with…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 of prayer altering what happens next, and I think the honest answer requires us to hold prayer’s real effectiveness together with God’s fixed, trustworthy nature…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 it deserves a proper place among the attributes we teach. David’s one great request was ‘to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD’ (Psalm 27:4),…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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). It is one of the more delicate corners of Trinitarian doctrine, because getting it wrong in either direction leads somewhere heretical, and I want to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 LORD ‘regretted that he had made man on the earth’ (Genesis 6:6). At first glance it looks like a straightforward contradiction of God’s unchanging character,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, grieving, being moved with compassion and, at least on the face of it, responding to what creatures do, and I do not think we should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 not answer. I have sat with people in that place, and I have been there myself, and I want to say plainly that this experience…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 material. When we speak of God knowing the future, we naturally reach for spatial metaphors. God looks ahead. He foresees events. He knows in advance…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 them. These are not arbitrary labels attached to God the way a nickname might be attached to a person. Each one emerged from a specific…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 existed but evil never entered it? The question deserves more than a quick answer, because it touches the nature of freedom itself, why God chose…