Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2079. Pharaoh’s hardened heart troubles many readers of Exodus for a very understandable reason: if God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, how could Pharaoh be justly held responsible for refusing to let Israel go? This question sits at the intersection of divine action and human responsibility, and I want to walk through it honestly rather than…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2065. Genuine human freedom sits at the very centre of one of the oldest and hardest questions in theology. Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom existed but evil never entered it? The question deserves more than a quick answer, because it touches the nature of freedom itself, why God chose…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2005. God’s providence is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole of Theology Proper, largely because two opposite errors keep pulling the conversation off balance. One error makes God the direct author of literally everything that happens, including sin and atrocity, as though every act of cruelty, every natural disaster, every child’s…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2004. Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist to be known even by an omniscient God. On this view, the future is genuinely "open," not yet settled, and God discovers what happens alongside…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2003. God’s will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a child walks away from the faith, or a nation legalises something Scripture calls sin, people sometimes ask in genuine distress whether all of that happened…
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 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all of time — then in what meaningful sense are those choices really free? When you sat down this morning and decided what to have for…