Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5019. Whether animals have souls sounds like a child’s question, usually asked through tears over a dead pet, but it opens onto real theology, and the Bible’s answer is more interesting than most people expect. The surprise is in the Hebrew of Genesis itself: the phrase usually translated living creature, applied to animals, is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5018. Psalm 8 begins under a night sky, and you can almost see David leaning on his shepherd’s staff, looking up. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him? Anyone who…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5017. The words image and likeness in Genesis 1:26 have generated more theology per syllable than almost any pair in the Bible, and one of the first questions people ask is whether they mean two different things. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, God says. Is image one gift and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5013. The question of babies who die is not an academic one, and I refuse to treat it academically. It is asked at gravesides small enough to break your heart, in hospital rooms after machines fall silent, and quietly, years later, by parents who have never stopped counting birthdays that were never celebrated. If…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5012. The age of accountability is the idea that a child is not held responsible before God for accepting or rejecting the gospel until they are capable of genuinely understanding it. You will not find the phrase anywhere in your concordance, which makes some people suspicious of the whole concept. But plenty of sound…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5011. Can we trust our hearts? Our culture answers before the question is finished: follow your heart, be true to yourself, you do you. It is the closest thing the modern West has to a creed. The Bible’s answer is bracingly different, and it comes from the prophet Jeremiah: the heart is deceitful above…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5010. How the church treats people with disabilities reveals what it really believes about the image of God. Not what it prints in its statement of faith, but what it believes in practice, in the car park, the pew, and the membership roll. Scripture speaks to this with surprising directness, and its verdict is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5008. Spiritual perception is a real capacity, and the Bible is remarkably precise about how much of it an unregenerate person actually has. Get this question wrong in one direction and you will assume the lost can reason their way to God unaided; get it wrong in the other direction and you will treat…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5006. God created us male and female, and Genesis announces it not as biology trivia but as theology of the highest order. The statement sits inside the Bible’s very first chapter, in the verse that tells us we bear the image of God. Whatever else that pairing means, it means this: sexual difference is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5005. Biblical femininity is one of those subjects where the caricatures arrive before the Bible does. One stereotype paints the godly woman as a doormat, decorative and silent; the reaction against it dismisses any created distinction at all. Scripture is more interesting than both. The women of the Bible are strong, intelligent, courageous, and…