Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 in some sense stands behind, terrible evils like abuse, assault or murder? How can I say that nothing touches your life outside of God’s providence…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, and it is worth slowing down to see exactly why. This simple declaration reshapes how I understand God’s nature, how I approach worship, and what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 all of Scripture. They arrive without qualification, without hedging, and without any parallel phrase to soften them. I want to work through what John actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 callous shrug. The difficulty most people feel is reconciling the love of God with the reality of eternal punishment. So let me walk through what…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 at the frontier of what the word consciousness is even equipped to mean once it is applied to a divine being rather than a human…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 site. Middle knowledge refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 in either direction. It is a framework developed to explain how God can know and providentially work through history with certainty while human beings retain…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 happiness, and not for His glory. Understanding why that is true, and why it is not the discouraging answer it might first sound like, takes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 am I here. What am I actually for. Scripture answers this not as an abstract puzzle to be solved but as a statement of identity,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 perfectly loving, do those two things ever pull in opposite directions? I hear this question in different forms all the time, and it matters more…