Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 a convenient arrangement they could have swapped around? This question sounds abstract until you notice how much of the gospel depends on the answer. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 because they have just been told by a well meaning Christian that God cannot stand the sight of them. I have sat with people in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 doctrine the church developed to explain what Scripture teaches, or is it an addition that goes beyond what Scripture actually says? The answer matters a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 to be measured against the Son of God Himself. But the reason people keep asking me this is usually deeply personal. Does God’s love for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 obvious to bother with or too speculative to answer at all. In reality it touches something genuinely profound about the nature of God, and Scripture…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the whole Bible. Others find it puzzling: if God knows everything, how can He forget anything at all? Getting this right matters, because misunderstanding it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 makes God the direct author of literally everything that happens, including sin and atrocity, as though every act of cruelty, every natural disaster, every child’s…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 to be known even by an omniscient God. On this view, the future is genuinely "open," not yet settled, and God discovers what happens alongside…