The New Testament teaching about the future is not that we look forward to what we do not have at the moment. For the Christian, the present and the future are closely tied together. So before we look at how Christians should prepare for the future, we need to look at the way the present and the future affect each other. Read more
We begin then by looking at creation from the differing perspectives of the biblical narrative and some other ancient stories.
This will help to show the distinctiveness and power of the Bible’s account of creation.
The recitation of creation stories in the ancient world bore little resemblance to our detached discussions on creation today. To these ancient peoples it was a matter of worship. Their sagas were not like the telling of fairy tales, but recitations of the annual religious festivals. Recounting these stories had the serious purpose of seeking both to preserve the order of society and to guarantee order and life before the threats of chaotic forces. Read more
Another commonly-drawn consequence of belief in inspiration is the claim that the Bible is ‘inerrant’ or ‘infallible’. If we believe that God overruled and inspired the record of those events upon which faith depends, then it is right to suppose that such an account should be reliable. Clearly an inspired Bible is a reliable Bible. But does this reliability necessarily extend to every single detail? Read more
The Christian faith teaches that it is possible to know God through Jesus Christ. For Jesus is risen from the dead and is alive for evermore. Through the Holy Spirit, he is present in the lives of those who trust and follow him. And so it is perhaps initially surprising that this faith should attach supreme importance to a book, a book which is a collection of documents all written in the ancient world some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. If we can know the living God today, why should we bother with ancient documents? Yet the fact is that Christians do attach, and always have attached, central importance to the Bible. Why is this so? Read more
All we know about God has come to us in history. He has revealed himself in historical events and in words spoken by historical people. What he has revealed has affected the history of the nations it has touched.
God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity in a number of remarkable ways. One of these is to use deeply significant names for himself. His ‘names‘ or ‘titles’ reflect what and who he is. He is ‘Yahweh‘, the personal God of the covenant with his people. (The old word for this was ‘Jehovah’; in most Bibles it is given as ‘the LORD’.) The name signifies ‘I am what I am’. He is ‘Yahweh the everlasting God‘. He is addressed as ‘Yahweh provides’, ‘Yahweh is our righteousness’, ‘the Ancient of days’, ‘the holy One of Israel’. Read more
No analysis of Christian belief in God is complete without one further point. The God of the Bible is great, and his worshippers acknowledge that ‘his greatness is unsearchable’. Christians speak of the mystery of God, using ‘mystery’ to mean, not a puzzle that can be solved, but a reality which surpasses our understanding.
A two-year-old boy whose father has a brain like Einstein’s can know his father in a happy parent-child relationship. This is knowledge of the most important kind. Yet the boy could understand very little of what is in his father’s mind, however much his father tried to put it into words for him. There are limits to what a two-year-old, Read more
The claim that God raised Jesus from the grave is so stupendous that no one could be expected to believe it without very strong evidence. Yet without the resurrection there would have been no gospel, no Christian faith, no church and no New Testament. There might, of course, have been a community of people who honored Jesus of Nazareth and tried to follow his teaching, but that would have been an entirely different thing. So the question is: does such evidence exist? Read more
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became Man.
It is impossible to read in the Gospels the account of Jesus‘ ministry without being struck by the many stories about Jesus doing things such as healing people and stilling the storm which people normally cannot do. There are over thirty such incidents recorded, apart from some general accounts which refer to large numbers of people being healed. Read more
We have no idea what Jesus looked like. There are no physical descriptions of him at all in the Gospels. Yet the person of Jesus and events of his life have been one of the greatest subjects of art throughout the centuries. He has inspired artists of many different cultures, even of many different faiths. We often learn more about the artist and his cultural setting than we do about Jesus. Read more
