Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon’s words, “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where…
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: 9 minutesQuestion 2004. Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist to be known even by an omniscient God. On this view, the future is genuinely "open," not yet settled, and God discovers what happens alongside…
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: 9 minutesQuestion 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves anything other than mainstream evangelical Christians. This surprises people who assume the Trinity is one settled doctrine with no internal variety at all. It is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within the Godhead. It is called "proper" not because other branches of theology are somehow improper, but because it studies God as the direct subject rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2000. God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every act of corporate worship, every song, every prayer, every sermon, teaches something true or false about who God is, whether or not anyone in the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4059. The Holy Spirit’s deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and how seriously you take the words Jesus Himself spoke against dishonouring Him. I have met sincere Christians who speak of the Spirit as a kind…