Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04053 In a world where spiritual counterfeits are not merely possible but repeatedly warned against in the New Testament, the gift of discernment of spirits is not a luxury. It is one of the Spirit’s provisions for protecting the church from deception. Understanding what this gift actually involves, and how it differs from ordinary…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04027 Assurance of salvation is not a luxury reserved for the theologically confident. It is something the New Testament presents as genuinely available to every believer, and the Holy Spirit plays a central role in making it real. This is not a matter of working oneself up to a sufficient level of emotional certainty;…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04041 Few passages in the New Testament have generated more theological controversy than Hebrews 6:4-6. Here the writer describes people who have been “enlightened,” who have “tasted the heavenly gift,” who have “shared in the Holy Spirit,” and who have “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02042 “God loves you” may be the most repeated statement in Christian communication, yet it is also among the most casually assumed. In popular usage, it can become little more than a warm feeling attached to a benign deity who means well — something entirely different from what the New Testament actually presents. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02046 To many people today, combining the words “God,” “love,” and “wrath” in the same sentence feels like a contradiction. The common assumption is that a God who genuinely loves cannot be a God who is genuinely angry — that wrath and love are mutually exclusive, that one must be qualified out of existence…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02053 If God is perfectly holy and perfectly loving, do those two things ever pull in opposite directions? The question is not merely academic. It shapes how we understand the atonement, how we relate to God in prayer, and whether the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02056 The answer Scripture gives is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us. Understanding why that is true — and why it is not a discouraging answer — takes us into some of the most important territory in the biblical doctrine of God. God Is Entirely Self-Sufficient Paul’s address to the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2062 “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in Scripture. They arrive without qualification, without hedging, and without any parallel phrase to soften them. But what exactly does John mean? What kind of light…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2078 The account of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is one of the earliest and most studied passages in Scripture, and yet the reason God accepted one offering and rejected the other remains genuinely puzzling to many readers. The text seems, on the surface, to offer very little explanation, which has led to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3013 1 John 2:1 is one of those verses that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological in the same breath: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the…