Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion Q04017 Resisting the Holy Spirit is not the same as quenching the Spirit, though the two are sometimes confused. Quenching is something believers can do by suppressing the Spirit’s work within them; resisting is something the unconverted do by opposing the Spirit’s work upon them. Understanding the difference illuminates both the Spirit’s convicting work…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04016 When Christians think about prayer, the question of who exactly we are addressing is more significant than it might first appear. Most believers instinctively pray to “God” or “Father” without pausing to consider the Trinitarian dimensions of what they are doing. But when someone asks whether it is appropriate to direct prayer specifically…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121 The sight of someone placing their hands on a sick person and praying for healing can provoke a range of reactions in evangelical circles, from warm affirmation to deep suspicion. For some, the practice conjures images of televangelist excess and manufactured spectacle. For others, it represents a sincere and scripturally grounded act of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60093 This question has been posed as a sceptical challenge to the historical reliability of Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, when Archbishop James Ussher was reportedly confronted with it. It assumes that the Genesis narrative has left itself an unanswerable problem, and that the only honest response is to admit the story…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02085 The term “common grace” describes the benefits God extends to all people regardless of whether they are in a saving relationship with Him. It is distinguished from saving grace, which transforms the soul and brings about new birth, and it raises a genuine question: can someone who has never trusted Christ still perceive…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2008 The question of whether God speaks today, and how He does so, sits at the intersection of several significant theological debates. Cessationists argue that God speaks exclusively through Scripture now that the canon is complete and that the gifts of the Spirit, including prophecy, have ceased. Many charismatics emphasise direct divine communication through…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2010 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood concepts in the Bible. Two errors recur in how people handle it. The first is to sentimentalise it — to insist that fearing God simply means respecting Him or standing in…
Reading Time: 4 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 legitimate question: is this a doctrine the church developed to explain what Scripture teaches, or is it an addition that goes beyond what Scripture says? The answer matters, because the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2017 The question tends to arrive from one of two directions. Some people ask it because they have read the Old Testament and noticed that God appears to deal very differently with different people – choosing Israel over the nations, calling Abraham while seemingly overlooking his contemporaries, appearing to prefer Jacob to Esau before…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02031 Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God “is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). If that is true — and it is — then a reasonable question follows: why does God command worship? What…