Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 us just as plainly that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. How do both of these claims stand together without contradiction? This question comes up…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 first seem, because if the doctrine of the Trinity suddenly appears out of nowhere in the New Testament, with no anticipation whatsoever in Israel’s own…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 if asked. This Deep Dive sets out, at proper length and without shortcuts, what Trinity doctrine actually asserts, how it differs from the various errors…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 Deep Dive question because the honest answer requires more than a slogan. I want to walk through what Scripture actually claims, why it is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, as I explained in my article on whether God has a gender. This question digs into the small word “He” specifically, the pronoun itself, rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 slogan. Does God have a gender in any biological sense, or does He simply speak of Himself in masculine terms as an accommodation to human…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 expect, usually from newer believers who have noticed that different prayers offered in church seem to be addressed to different persons of the Trinity and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 questions where I want to slow down and take my time, because the traditional answer and the biblical data sit in real, sustained tension with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the Christian faith, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissive one, because the logic behind it feels tight. If God…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 actually teaches? I ask this because Scripture does describe God choosing Israel out of all the nations, calling David “a man after his own heart,”…