Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3073. The virgin birth is not a decorative detail on the edge of the Christmas story; it is load-bearing doctrine, and if you remove it the whole structure of the Gospel begins to crack. Some treat it as a pious legend that grew up around Jesus after the fact, something a modern believer can…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3065. When Jesus prayed, who was listening? It is one of the sharpest questions a sceptic, or a Muslim friend, or an honest child can put to a Christian. If Jesus is God, was he talking to himself in Gethsemane? Does the very fact that Jesus prayed prove he must be something less than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3060. Ask about the appearance of Jesus and most people can supply an answer instantly: long hair, flowing robe, serene European features, perhaps a soft glow. Two thousand years of paintings, icons and films have fixed an image in the world’s mind. There is only one problem with it. Not a single detail of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3028. Eternal generation is the theological term that answers what sounds, at first, like a contradiction: how can Jesus be eternal, without beginning or end, if He was also born in Bethlehem at a specific point in history? The resolution lies in carefully distinguishing two very different things Scripture affirms about Him. Let me…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3027. Jesus is still human now, and His glorified humanity is not a temporary costume He will one day set aside once His earthly mission is fully wrapped up. The incarnation was permanent. The Son of God became a man at Bethlehem, and He remains a man today, seated in heaven, and He will…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3010. Working out the consciousness of Christ during His earthly life pushes us further into the mystery of the incarnation than almost any other question in this series. When exactly did Jesus become aware that He was the eternal Son of God? From the moment of birth? Earlier still, in the womb? Or did…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3009. The childhood of Jesus receives only the briefest treatment in the Gospels, and yet those few verses raise questions that repay careful attention. Did the infant Jesus know He was God while lying in a Bethlehem manger? Did the toddler in Nazareth grasp the Trinity? What was actually happening in His developing mind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3006. We rightly emphasise the deity of Jesus, but the humanity of Jesus receives just as much insistence in Scripture, and I do not think we can afford to let either truth crowd out the other. If Jesus was not genuinely human, He did not genuinely die, and if He did not genuinely die,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 3005. The hypostatic union is, in my judgment, one of the most profound truths in the whole of Christian theology, and also one of the most practically important. It describes how Jesus Christ can be fully God and fully man at the same time, united inseparably in one Person, without either nature swallowing up…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10125 When Revelation 21:3 announces, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God,” it declares the fulfilment of a theme that runs from the opening chapters of Genesis to the closing chapters…