Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60059. The first thing God makes in Genesis is created light, and He makes it on day one, which is three whole days before He hangs the sun in the sky. Sceptics point at that and say the author did not understand basic astronomy. Christians sometimes shuffle their feet and change the subject. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60056. Whether the sun stood still over Gibeon is one of those questions that separates a reader from the text before he has begun. Joshua 10 records that Joshua spoke to the LORD in front of Israel and said, Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon, and that the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can…