Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2044. God’s mercy is His compassionate refusal to give sinners what their sin actually deserves, withholding deserved judgement out of tender, active compassion. Lamentations 3:22-23 puts it with unmatched beauty in the middle of a book otherwise soaked in grief, saying “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2043. God’s justice is His settled commitment always to do what is right, to treat every person exactly as they deserve, and never to let evil go unaddressed forever. Moses celebrates this at the end of his life, singing “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2042. God’s love is not primarily a feeling, and it is not the vague affection our culture usually means when it uses the word. It is His settled, active commitment to the good of those He loves, a commitment proved beyond doubt at the cross. John states it as plainly as any verse in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2041. God’s holiness is the attribute Scripture reaches for more often than any other to describe who He is, and it means two things held together, that God is entirely set apart from His creation in majesty, and that He is entirely set apart from sin in moral perfection. When Isaiah is given a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2040. Divine omnipresence means that God is fully and equally present everywhere at once, in every place, at every moment, without being spread thin, divided into portions, or contained by any location. David captures this with unmatched honesty in Psalm 139, asking “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2039. Divine omnipotence means that God is able to do all that He wills to do, without effort, without rival, and without any power outside Himself limiting what He can accomplish. When Job finally answers God out of the whirlwind, he says “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2038. When people ask me what divine omniscience means, I always start in the same place. It means that God knows everything there is to know, perfectly and all at once, without ever having to work anything out, look anything up, or wait for events to unfold before He understands them. There is no…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2032. Divine emotions is a phrase I use carefully, because Scripture clearly describes God loving, grieving, rejoicing and growing angry, yet these responses are not identical to the changeable, often involuntary feelings that sweep over us. Genesis 6:6 says God “was grieved… and it grieved him to his heart” over human wickedness before the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about how we cope with what has happened to them. Does the Lord control every wicked act in this world down to the last detail, or…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2028. Trinity doctrine is, without much question, the single most distinctive claim Christianity makes about the very nature of God, and yet many Christians could not explain it clearly if asked. This Deep Dive sets out, at proper length and without shortcuts, what Trinity doctrine actually asserts, how it differs from the various errors…