Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2008 The question of whether God speaks today, and how He does so, sits at the intersection of several significant theological debates. Cessationists argue that God speaks exclusively through Scripture now that the canon is complete and that the gifts of the Spirit, including prophecy, have ceased. Many charismatics emphasise direct divine communication through…
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: 3 minutesQuestion 2012 The question feels almost presumptuous at first glance, as if we are asking to be compared with the eternal Son. But the reason people ask it is usually deeply personal: does God’s love for me carry any real weight, or is it simply what is left over after the infinite love within the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2017 The question tends to arrive from one of two directions. Some people ask it because they have read the Old Testament and noticed that God appears to deal very differently with different people – choosing Israel over the nations, calling Abraham while seemingly overlooking his contemporaries, appearing to prefer Jacob to Esau before…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2027 “Three persons but one God” sounds, on first hearing, like a straightforward contradiction. If there are three persons, surely there are three gods? If there is only one God, how can there be three persons? The objection is natural, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a retreat into vague appeals to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 02030 James 1:13 states it plainly: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” That sounds straightforward enough. Yet the same New Testament that gives us that verse also tells us that Jesus was tempted…
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: 3 minutesQuestion 01183 The name Esdras is the Greek and Latin form of Ezra, and two books bear this title in various versions of the Old Testament: 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras. Neither belongs to the Protestant canon, but the question of whether they are worth reading at all deserves a considered answer rather than a…