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: 5 minutesQuestion 2029 The answer is yes — though it requires careful qualification. The full, explicitly articulated doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the New Testament, where the personal identities of Father, Son, and Spirit are disclosed with a clarity that was not available in the earlier revelation. What the Old Testament contains is not the…
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 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…
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…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 60095 The word “firmament” appears in the King James Version of Genesis 1 and has generated considerable discussion ever since, particularly as critics of the biblical account have claimed it reveals a primitive, pre-scientific cosmology in which the ancient Israelites believed the sky was a solid dome. That claim is worth examining on its…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6001 It is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask, and yet so many struggle to define it clearly. What exactly is sin? The world around us has largely abandoned the concept, preferring words like “mistake” or “poor choice” or even dismissing moral failure altogether as merely the product of environment or…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6002 If God is good and created everything, then where did sin come from? This question has puzzled believers and sceptics alike for centuries. It touches on some of the deepest mysteries of theology: the problem of evil, the nature of free will, and the character of God Himself. Scripture does not give us…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6004 Scripture uses several different words to describe our moral failure before God, and each one sheds light on a different aspect of what we have done wrong. When David confessed his sin after his adultery with Bathsheba, he used all three major terms: “Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05007 Few questions in ethics carry more weight than this one. When does a human life begin? It is the question underlying every discussion of abortion, every debate about embryo research, and every conversation about what we owe to the most vulnerable. Scripture addresses it, and its answer is consistent: the life in the…