Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature of salvation, into a single coherent, logically arranged treatment. It asks, what does the whole of Scripture teach about this particular subject, drawing together texts…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned until the nerve endings no longer report anything at all. It is one of the bleakest phrases in the New Testament, and it is worth…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is helped by a version of the gospel that promises what the New Testament does not. The question is why, and the answer has to do…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer’s spare room. He is describing the person you used to be, considered as a whole, in Adam and under condemnation. Getting that right changes a great deal about how the Christian life is fought,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by the writers of Scripture themselves. That fact alone should reassure anyone who has felt guilty for asking it. The Bible does not treat this as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many Christians are confessing as lust something that Scripture does not call lust at all. So let me try to define it accurately first, because a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it. What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place…