Theology

Far more terrifying than persecution, ideologies, and militant atheism put together may be the hidden force behind the seemingly innocuous statement: "You don't need God!"

Even in this secular age, the world’s largest group of religious believers—a full third of Earth’s human population—worships Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal God who appeared in human flesh. Millions more—Muslims, Baha’i, Hindus, Buddhists and others—recognise His unique connection to the Divine, His wisdom and His compassion.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

In a society with a pragmatic mindset, any kind of belief is subject only to practical judgments. Effectiveness, usefulness, and utility are the basic criteria by which actions, deeds or beliefs are valued.

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Homer the Heretic,” Homer Simpson has a conversation with God.

I was born into an Adventist family. This meant feeling that pretty much everything I knew, including my religious tradition, was the sole truth.

“Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

I still remember May 21, 2011, like it was yesterday. Thousands of kilometres away in Boulder, USA, an evangelist named Harold Camping, president of the popular ministry Family Radio, was in the news spotlight. He had predicted that on May 21, more than 200 million Christians all around the world would be raptured away to heaven and that five months later, the world would end.

You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).

For those who accept the biblical account of Jesus's life as true, the most important thing is deciding how to respond to the Savior’s act of offering His life. What does it mean to accept Jesus's sacrifice? How does it apply to us? How does it become part of our lives?

God gave Christians a message to spread. The whole Bible talks about creation, about the fall of the world into sin, but also about the existence of a Saviour, in the person of Jesus Christ.

I have read the Parable of the Talents many times, and have understood it in different ways at different times in my life. During my last read, I came across a commentary concerning the man who was given only one talent, which he chose to bury. Author Ellen White writes: The Lord desires His people to reach the highest round of the ladder...

No leader has ever inspired mankind to a greater extent than the baby born in Bethlehem, the one who divided history. No other personality in the world has left such a mark on such a large number of fields as Jesus did. And the legacy He left in terms of human rights (especially women's rights), education, attitudes towards children, humility, and forgiveness is...

Centuries ago, the German theologian and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used the term “theodicy”1 for the first time—“God’s justification”. By theodicy, Leibniz meant the ultimate reality of justification, once and for all, of God and all of His ways before the whole universe.

It could be a perfunctory ritual, passed down through generations; a mechanically recited poem. But equally, the mealtime prayer can be a genuine spiritual exercise.