Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2003 Scripture presents what appears to be a genuine tension. God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), yet plainly not all people are saved. He tells Israel through Ezekiel that He takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2004 Open theism is a theological position that has attracted academic attention over recent decades, particularly through writers such as Greg Boyd, John Sanders, and Clark Pinnock. It takes its name from the idea that the future is “open” — not yet determined — and that God, though omniscient in every other respect, does…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2005 The question of how much control God exercises over events in the world is one of the most practically significant in theology. It has direct bearing on how we think about suffering, prayer, human responsibility, and what we can honestly say about God when evil occurs. The position sometimes called “meticulous providence” —…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2006 The existence of evil is, in its most honest form, an uncomfortable subject for theology. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why is there evil at all? Any answer that diminishes God’s power or His goodness in order to resolve the problem has paid too high a price. But the way…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2007 The account in Genesis 2:2-3 is short and theologically rich: “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2008 The question of whether God speaks today, and how He does so, sits at the intersection of several significant theological debates. Cessationists argue that God speaks exclusively through Scripture now that the canon is complete and that the gifts of the Spirit, including prophecy, have ceased. Many charismatics emphasise direct divine communication through…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2010 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood concepts in the Bible. Two errors recur in how people handle it. The first is to sentimentalise it — to insist that fearing God simply means respecting Him or standing in…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02031 Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God “is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). If that is true — and it is — then a reasonable question follows: why does God command worship? What…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02032 The Bible speaks of God grieving (Genesis 6:6), delighting (Zephaniah 3:17), being angry (Psalm 7:11), and being moved with compassion (Hosea 11:8). Whether these are genuine descriptions of God’s inner life or simply human language used to make an incomprehensible God accessible to created minds is a question that has occupied theologians for…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02038 The word omniscience comes from the Latin omnis (all) and scientia (knowledge). Applied to God, it means that His knowledge is complete, perfect, and without limit. He knows all things that are, all things that were, all things that will be, and all things that could have been under different circumstances. Nothing escapes…