Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3016. Jesus had to rise from the dead, and I mean that word “had” with full theological weight rather than as a loose figure of speech. His resurrection was not a fortunate rescue after a plan that had somehow gone wrong at the cross. It was the necessary and always intended second half of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3015. The transfiguration of Jesus is one of the strangest and most wonderful scenes in the Gospels, the moment when the ordinary appearance Jesus had worn for thirty years briefly gave way to something the disciples could barely describe. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record it, and each writer clearly regarded it as too…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3014. The resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns, and I say that without any exaggeration. Paul makes the same point in blunt terms in 1 Corinthians 15: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. He is not softening the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3013. Christ our advocate is one of those short phrases that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological all in a single breath. John writes, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3012. Son of Man is the title Jesus used of Himself more often than any other in the Gospels, and it is also the one most commonly misunderstood among ordinary readers today. Many assume it simply balances “Son of God” by emphasising His humanity, as though the two titles divided His two natures neatly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3011. The baptism of Jesus raises an obvious question the moment you think about it seriously. John’s baptism was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), and people came to the Jordan confessing their sins as they were baptised. Jesus had no sins to confess and needed no forgiveness whatsoever….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3010. Working out the consciousness of Christ during His earthly life pushes us further into the mystery of the incarnation than almost any other question in this series. When exactly did Jesus become aware that He was the eternal Son of God? From the moment of birth? Earlier still, in the womb? Or did…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3009. The childhood of Jesus receives only the briefest treatment in the Gospels, and yet those few verses raise questions that repay careful attention. Did the infant Jesus know He was God while lying in a Bethlehem manger? Did the toddler in Nazareth grasp the Trinity? What was actually happening in His developing mind…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3007. The sinlessness of Christ is where this question ultimately lands, though getting there requires asking something quite specific first. When Adam fell, sin entered the human race, and every one of his natural descendants inherits an inward corruption, a bent toward evil, that Scripture sometimes calls the sin nature or indwelling sin, a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3006. We rightly emphasise the deity of Jesus, but the humanity of Jesus receives just as much insistence in Scripture, and I do not think we can afford to let either truth crowd out the other. If Jesus was not genuinely human, He did not genuinely die, and if He did not genuinely die,…