Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08131. The question of why God create Satan in the first place is usually asked with more feeling than curiosity, and I understand why. If God knew what this creature would become, and made him anyway, then the trail of misery running through human history seems to lead back to a decision God took…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both are grace, because neither is earned. They differ in scope, in purpose and in what they accomplish. The distinction is worth getting straight, because a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10104. Will there be animals in heaven and on the new earth? I think the biblical answer is yes, and I say that not to be sentimental but because the prophets describe the coming kingdom as a world full of living creatures at peace, and because the new earth is presented as a restored…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2000. God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05042. Human longevity is one of those subjects where the Bible’s early chapters startle the modern reader, and the questions they raise deserve straight answers. Methuselah lived 969 years. Adam reached 930, Noah 950. Yet within a few generations of the flood the numbers collapse, until Moses can write of seventy or eighty years…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05041. The imago Dei is the doctrine that determines how a Christian should think about the environment, and I want to show you why it steers us safely between two very real ditches. Some believers treat ecological concern as warmed-over secular politics and dismiss it entirely. Others drift the opposite way until the natural…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05039. Why did God create us? Scripture answers that God created us out of the overflow of His own love, for His glory and for our joy, and I want to show you why that answer changes everything about how you see your own life. This is not an abstract puzzle for philosophers. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5025. The breath of life is what turned a beautifully shaped pile of dust into a living man. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). One verse, two movements: forming, then…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5024. To be made from dust is Scripture’s blunt, unflattering, and strangely comforting description of what we are. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). No marble, no gold, no stardust poetry. Dust. The stuff you sweep off…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5021. To be wonderfully made is not a compliment David pays himself in Psalm 139; it is worship he pays to his Maker. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) is a sentence about God before it is a sentence about David, and that ordering matters more than almost…