Gospel e-Letter

We cannot understand God fully because he is infinite and we are mere specks of dust. ‘Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable’ (Ps 145:3). No man will ever plumb his wisdom. ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it’ (Ps 139:6). A ‘god’ who is thoroughly understood is nothing but an idol of human imagination. The true and living God is exalted above the heavens, well beyond the reach of our mind. All the same, we must assert that God can be known. Though we can never delve completely into the depths of the Infinite, still we may truly know our Creator. Our knowledge of God must always be limited, yet it can be genuine and sufficient to satisfy the thirst of the human soul. Indeed we are invited to ‘Seek the LORD while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near’ (Isa 55:6).

God is holy — he is absolutely perfect, pure, righteous, majestic, marvelously beautiful, and brighter than the sun. But we are not! We are darkened and unclean, and quite frankly, we feel uncomfortable and miserable in his holy presence. The moral law reflects his holiness. ’The law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good' (Romans 7:12). The Lord commands all that is good and righteous and he prohibits all evil. But we have not conformed to his will; we have gone our own way and defiled ourselves in the filth of all sorts of sin — lying, immorality, disobedience, jealousy, hatred, envy, deceit, greed, hypocrisy, pride and irreverence. Since he is holy, God detests all sin, as the Scripture says, 'You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness' (Hab 1:13). Moreover, the Bible warns that God will judge and punish the unrepentant: ’because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God...

It’s hard to defend the faith in the face of unbelief. Recently I was invited on a TV discussion about faith. The panel included a Roman Catholic priest (who happened to be a very good friend of mine), an atheist and a humanist (that’s an atheist by a different name). The atheists presented themselves as non-religious, rational and scientific. They claimed that science has done away with the concept of God. Science has explained how we came about through millions of years of evolution, they said; we are not any different from other animals, it simply happened that Homo sapiens evolved a bigger brain. As humans we are not dependent on or accountable to any higher Being; we only have ourselves to decide what is good and bad for us. We can construct our ethics on the human value of love without any divine revelation. Furthermore, they said, there is no design in nature, and this is the only life that we will ever live. At death, we simply cease to exist. It was impossible, of cours...

'Trinity' is a theological term (derived from two Latin words, tres , three, and unitas , one); it is employed to express certain truths about God clearly taught in the Bible. The core truths that form this foundational Christian doctrine are these: (1) the unity of God; (2) the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God; (3) the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct persons. One God Our belief in one God is fundamental; Christianity is a monotheistic religion. The Old and New Testaments both assert the unity of God: 'Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!' (Deut 6:4); 'I am the First and I am the Last; besides Me there is no God' (Isa 44:6); 'There is one God, and there is no other but He' (Mark 12:32). Pagans believe in many gods. Even Satan is considered as 'the god of this world'. But Christians do not acknowledge pagan gods because they take the first commandment seriously: 'You shall have no other go...

In the Second Commandment, and elsewhere in Scripture (Exodus 20, Leviticus 26, Deut. 4, etc), we are forbidden to make or worship images of God. It is not for us to discover the form of God by our imagination. Rather, God has revealed Himself, and we are obliged to respond accordingly by worshipping Him in spirit and truth. Otherwise our religion is reduced to pagan idolatry. We can only know God through His Son, Jesus Christ - the image of the invisible God – who, “for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” To know Christ is to truly know God and experience His redeeming love. Can we then depict Christ by pictures and statues since He possesses a true human nature? No, not least because we do not know how He looked like. The hundreds of different pictures of Jesus testify against each other that they are false images. What is called a picture or a statue of Christ is not His true likeness. Like...