Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60084 The Gospel of Thomas is regularly cited in documentaries, popular books, and online discussions as evidence of suppressed early Christianity — a hidden text that the orthodox church buried in order to control what people believed. The reality is considerably different, and understanding what Thomas actually is matters for anyone who wants to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6021 The hardened heart is one of Scripture’s most sobering images. From Pharaoh’s repeated resistance to Moses through to the stern warnings of Hebrews, the biblical writers return again and again to the danger of a heart that has become impervious to God’s voice. Understanding what this means, and how it happens, is not…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6022 The conscience is one of God’s remarkable gifts to human beings: an internal moral faculty that registers the difference between right and wrong and alerts the person to the gravity of their choices. What happens when that faculty is persistently overridden and ultimately silenced is one of the most alarming descriptions in the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6023 The teaching about generational curses has become widespread in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, typically claiming that sins committed by ancestors create spiritual bondages that pass through family lines and require specific prayer to break. The idea is appealing in its apparent explanatory power, and it draws on real biblical language. The question is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6024 This question is related to the question of generational curses but is distinct from it. The previous question asked whether ancestral sins create binding spiritual mechanisms. This one asks something more concrete: do the sins that parents commit actually affect their children? The honest answer requires holding two biblical truths together without collapsing…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6025 Scripture consistently holds individuals accountable for their own choices before God, but it also speaks of communities sinning as communities, of groups bearing collective responsibility for shared patterns of wrong. Corporate sin is a genuine biblical category, and understanding it correctly has significant implications for how we read the Old Testament, how we…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11083 Gluttony is perhaps the most consistently ignored sin in contemporary evangelical culture. Behaviours that would draw immediate pastoral concern in relation to other appetites are routinely overlooked when the appetite in question involves food. Yet Scripture addresses it with surprising directness, and the underlying principle it violates is one that touches the whole…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11082 This question is framed as though it must be one or the other, and most of the energy in contemporary discourse goes into arguing for the disease model. Addiction, we are told, is a brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and framing it as sin is unhelpful at best and cruel at…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6029 Pride occupies a unique place in the catalogue of human sin. The Christian tradition has long regarded it not merely as one sin among others but as the root from which most other sins grow. Scripture is remarkably consistent in its treatment of pride, addressing it across virtually every genre and period of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06032 When Jesus addressed lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not introducing a new standard. He was revealing the standard that had always been there, the one that an outward-focused reading of the law had managed to obscure. By reaching behind the act to the intention of the heart, He made…