Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2073. Changing God’s mind through prayer sounds, on the surface, like a contradiction of everything else Scripture teaches about His unchanging character. Yet Scripture itself records instance after instance of prayer altering what happens next, and I think the honest answer requires us to hold prayer’s real effectiveness together with God’s fixed, trustworthy nature…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2064. God’s providence raises one of the hardest pastoral questions I ever get asked. If God’s providence extends over everything that happens, does that mean He permits, or even in some sense stands behind, terrible evils like abuse, assault or murder? How can I say that nothing touches your life outside of God’s providence…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2016. Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for the evil in the first place? This question sits at the bottom of nearly every conversation I have had with people walking through genuine suffering, whether that is illness, betrayal, bereavement or the aftermath of someone else’s cruelty….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about how we cope with what has happened to them. Does the Lord control every wicked act in this world down to the last detail, or…
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: 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: 6 minutesQuestion 04113. Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television healing programme with deep suspicion or just heard a testimony from a friend that they cannot quite explain away. My answer is a careful yes,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4074. The counsel of God is not a phrase Scripture uses lightly. It describes the settled purpose and plan that God formed within Himself before He ever spoke creation into being, and the question of what part the Holy Spirit plays within that counsel takes us into some of the most careful thinking the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 02084 We live in an age of anxiety. Surveys consistently show rising levels of worry, stress, and fear—about the future, about circumstances beyond our control, about what might happen next. Into this anxious world, the doctrine of God’s sovereignty speaks a profoundly comforting word: God is in control, and nothing escapes His notice or…