Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3038. The crucifixion of Jesus raises a question most of us have never stopped to ask: why that particular death? If the Son of God had to die for sinners, He could in principle have been stoned like Stephen, beheaded like James, or killed in a hundred quieter ways. Instead, the eternal plan of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this is a single word, tetelestai (τετέλεσται), and it is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire New Testament. Far from being a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60006 If God is all-powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all-loving, He would want to prevent evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore, either God is not all-powerful, not all-loving, or He does not exist at all. This is the problem of evil, and it has been posed as an objection to Christian faith…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7099 This question gets to the heart of the Gospel. If God is all-powerful and merciful, why couldn’t He simply forgive our sins without requiring the death of His Son? Couldn’t an omnipotent God just declare us forgiven and be done with it? The cross seems so brutal, so extreme. Was it really necessary?…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7098 Among the various ways Christians have understood what Jesus accomplished on the cross, one stands at the centre of evangelical faith: substitutionary atonement. This doctrine teaches that Jesus died in our place, taking the punishment that our sins deserved so that we might be forgiven. While some today question or reject this understanding,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7100 What exactly happened when Jesus died on the cross? Christians have always agreed that the cross is central to salvation, but they have understood its meaning in different ways throughout history. Various “theories of the atonement” have been proposed, each highlighting a different aspect of what Jesus accomplished. Some of these theories are…