Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02048 Providence is one of those theological words that Christians use often but rarely stop to define precisely. It comes from the Latin providentia, meaning foresight or foreknowing, but in theological usage it refers to something wider: the ongoing activity by which God sustains, directs, and governs all that He has created, working His…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02049 Several passages in the Old Testament appear, on first reading, to describe God changing His mind. Genesis 6:6 states that “the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth.” Exodus 32:14 records that “the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.” Jonah 3:10 notes…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2070 Genesis 6:6 records that “the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Jonah 3:10 states that “when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2065 Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom existed but evil never entered? The question is one of the most serious in all of theology, and it deserves more than a quick answer. It touches on the nature of freedom itself, on why God chose to create at all, and on…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2066 One of the richest veins of theological material in the Old Testament is the collection of names and titles by which God revealed himself to his people across the centuries. These names are not arbitrary labels. Each one emerged from a specific encounter, a particular moment of divine self-disclosure, and each carries theological…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2075 Of all the objections raised against the God of the Bible, this one carries perhaps the most emotional force. The conquest of Canaan, in which God commanded Israel to destroy entire populations, is regularly cited as evidence that the God of the Old Testament is a deity of tribal violence rather than the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2078 The account of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is one of the earliest and most studied passages in Scripture, and yet the reason God accepted one offering and rejected the other remains genuinely puzzling to many readers. The text seems, on the surface, to offer very little explanation, which has led to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02055 Why are we here? The question underlies much of the anxiety that drives people towards both religion and its alternatives. Scripture addresses it not as an abstract puzzle but as a statement of identity — telling us not just what we were made for but who made us and why that shapes every…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60093 This question has been posed as a sceptical challenge to the historical reliability of Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, when Archbishop James Ussher was reportedly confronted with it. It assumes that the Genesis narrative has left itself an unanswerable problem, and that the only honest response is to admit the story…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 13012 The episode in Genesis 9 following the flood is brief, strange, and deeply uncomfortable. Noah becomes drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, his son Ham “sees the nakedness of his father” and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth cover Noah carefully without looking at him, and when Noah awakes and learns what happened…