Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2073 The question touches something every thoughtful believer wrestles with. If God knows the end from the beginning and his purposes are fixed, what does prayer actually accomplish? And if he already knows what we are going to ask, and has already decided how he will respond, does the whole exercise amount to little…
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 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: 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…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 2064 If God is sovereign, does that mean He “permits” or “allows” terrible evils like rape, abuse, or murder? How can we say “nothing touches your life without passing through God’s sovereign permission” without making God sound complicit in evil? This is a question that real people ask when they have been violated, when…