Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice. It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, and pretending otherwise requires ignoring a great deal of the Old Testament. The difficulty is that this doctrine has been enlisted recently to support ideas…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion people usually draw from that, which is that the child somehow carries the parent’s guilt. Two things are true at once here, and holding them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6021. To harden your heart, in biblical language, is to make yourself progressively less responsive to God. It is not usually a decision anyone announces. It is the cumulative effect of small refusals, each one making the next refusal a little easier and a little quieter. The Bible treats it as one of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never said. It has been quoted to shut down every intuition, every emotion and every conviction a believer has ever had. That is not what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two people can weep over the same sin and end up in entirely different places. Knowing which one you are experiencing is not a matter of…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the God who gave her, the woman blamed the serpent, and the pattern has been running ever since. Scripture takes our enemy entirely seriously. It also…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it. Let me try to read it…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the world system. God so loved the world, John writes, and then he tells us not to love the world. The knot unties the moment you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been asked it in hospital corridors and in the church car park, and it always carries a certain weariness with it. It deserves a straight answer…