Craving Answers, Craving God

Different branches of the American church have different ideas about miracles - the more rationalistic branches of Christianity don’t place a high value on miracles, while more charismatic churches consider miracles to be a vital part of their Christian life. But all Christians believe that miracles are a part of scripture, and scripturally speaking, miracles happen all the time, as long as we und...

The great redemptive event of the Bible is the exodus from Israel out of Egypt. God’s plan and actions to rescue his people from slavery form the foundational backdrop for how we understand his heart. But then why do so many texts in scripture seem to accept slavery as a permissible fact? We can find the main answer to this question in the difference between how contemporary people try to solve pr...

The Gospel is the proclamation that God has triumphed over sin and death through the work of Jesus. Every Christian sermon has to proclaim this Gospel by announcing the death and resurrection of Jesus. Since the whole text of Holy Scripture centers on Jesus’ death and resurrection, every sermon has to explain, illustrate, and apply the sermon text. The job of the sermon is not merely to explain an...

The Bible makes it clear that the Holy Spirit is still active in the life of Christ’s church. But what does this mean, and how does this look? For some, the Holy Spirit speaks directly in a miraculous way; for others the Holy Spirit guides by opening doors. How do we know that what we’re hearing or being led to do is coming from the Holy Spirit? By judging the message or compulsion on the basis of...

Scripture–in some ways–is a reflection of God’s mind, which means that understanding Scripture can never be completely mastered. Like a big city, there is something new and unexplored around every corner for the reader. In other words, reading the Bible is a great adventure of exploration and discovery. The main foundation of solid biblical interpretation is to read it as the Word of God. Humanity...

For Christianity, marriage is much more than a convenient way to order society and build and protect families. Marriage is at its heart a reflection of two deeper theological realities: first, it reflects the eternal relationship that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have. In other words, God has given his human creatures the gift of marriage so they can look like the Trinity, bearing God’s image...

For lots of Christians knowing when they were saved is very important, and knowing the date they were baptized or the date they first believed becomes a way to assure themselves of the security of their relationship with God. There are two questions behind this issue: first, am I saved because of a decision I’ve made or a decision God has made. Chuck and Aaron talk about how our salvation is compl...

Prayer, with Bible reading, is a conversation with God. But sometimes it seems that God isn’t listening to our prayers. Is this an illusion of our lack of faith, or is perhaps God not really listening? The Bible sometimes talks about God not hearing prayers, but how does this work for an omniscient God–isn’t it impossible for him not to hear everything everyone is saying, whether to him or anyone...

One of the reasons Jesus called himself the Son of Man is the name’s vagueness. The title can simply mean “human”; this is the way the prophet Ezekiel seems to be using it during the many times he refers to himself in this way. There is no possible way this seemingly innocuous usage could land Jesus in trouble with the authorities. But on the other hand, the title “Son of Man” probably mainly refe...

Because love is not primarily an emotional disposition toward someone else but is instead about self-sacrificial actions, trust is baked into such a relationship. We come to know and love someone precisely by trusting in that person enough to get close enough to live in intimacy with them. This sort of relationship intentionally reflects the inner life of the Trinity, where the three persons of th...

All the statistics point to an increase in acts of aggression and violent crime in our society. But why is this happening? Secular thinkers used to opine that religion exacerbated violence; the theory being that commitment to absolute truth would cause people to insist that their viewpoint must be adhered to and that violence would be the tool most readily used by close-minded bigots to force othe...

For Christians, any discussion about any topic must begin and end with the Bible, because if God is God we cannot afford to deny him the final word. When it comes to topics upon which the prevailing culture diverges from what God says in the Bible, the temptation for Christians is to accommodate its teaching to meet the current mood of the cultural moment, but this is at its heart an attempt to be...

What does it mean when someone wears a cross? What if that person is a Christian, or a non-Christian? Is it ever wrong to wear a cross? There are roughly two answers to this question. First, since the cross serves as a symbolic reminder for Christians that the creator God is not a distant divinity, but a flesh-and-blood human who died to rescue his creation, the cross should be worn with faith in...

An idea frequently heard from contemporary Christians is that the Bible is God’s “love letter” to humanity. But is this true? And if it is, why does so much of the Bible not read like a love letter? In this episode Chuck and Aaron discuss the question of the Bible’s genre and its relationship to God’s love. While a main theme of the Bible is God’s love for his human creatures, it–contrary to a pop...

How do pastors become pastors? How does God make pastors, and how do they know that’s what God wants them to be? And how do they know what church they should be at. In this episode Chuck and Aaron answer these questions and also talk about Aaron’s call to be a pastor. Pastors are called by God to preach and teach the Gospel to the Christian church. In this sense the call is unique to this particul...

It’s not at all controversial to note that Christmas, as a cultural phenomenon in the United States, does not always resemble the Christian festival celebrating Jesus’ birth. Commercial interests have exploited the season for profit, and it seems like all of us have agreed to make the month of December the most hectic and least peaceful season of all. On the one hand, this misplaced emphasis on ca...

Luther expands the “father and mother” of the fourth commandment to also mean “other authorities.” His reasoning for this is that all human leadership flows out of the leadership and responsibility God gives to parents over their children: parents cannot teach their children everything so they hire schools and teachers to represent them in training their kids; parents cannot defend their homes and...

All of us know what it’s like to be humbled, and almost all of those times of humiliation have been forced upon us - after all, no sane person would willingly choose to be humiliated in front of other people. But Jesus’ humiliation is active: “he humbled himself” Paul says in Philippians 2. But why would he do this? Paul insists that the path of salvation - in other words, the path of exaltation -...

A person’s appetite for and willingness to change can frequently be a matter of personality - some people are by nature more conservative in their personality and tend to resist change by nature, while others have personalities that are more progressive and tend to embrace and even pursue change. The former group have the advantage of not being easily swayed into making bad changes in their life b...

In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fund...

Every human belief or opinion is based upon a presupposition - a faith commitment that cannot be proven but can only be assumed. For instance, the difference between Christianity and atheism is not the difference between “faith” and “reason”, between opinion and fact, between superstition and rationality; instead, both positions are based on unprovable, faith-based assumptions - presuppositions. C...

Some Christians have held that cremation is not permitted by the Bible, on the grounds that bodies buried intact, or “sleeping”, are a concrete anticipation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day. But the Bible never expressly forbids cremation, and in at least one place cremation is approvingly performed (1 Samuel 31:11-13). The key issue is the question of what the resurrection from the...

Virtue, in the ancient world, was the word for moral and physical excellence. Those who were brave, those who were honest, those who accomplished great things, were excellent, therefore virtuous. The Bible, too, picks up on this ancient idea and calls humans to pursue virtue. But the Bible, unlike the Stoics and other ancient philosophies, holds that virtue is something that is only located in God...

When Jesus was falsely accused of sedition and blasphemy, Pontius Pilate asked him a question which has persistently confounded every thinker before and since: “What is truth?” Pinning down truth so that everyone can have access to reality has been notoriously difficult. One option is to hold that humans can figure out the truth based upon their own observations and experiences - but the human pro...

The cultural trope of the twenty-something guy living in his parents basement, not working, not exercising, and playing hours of video games, is perhaps a caricature, but it touches on a reality that is all too common today: the disillusioned and lonely young man. Individualism has taught all of us that community responsibility and living life in relationship is unimportant, and guys who have boug...