Believing the Bible is not always the easiest or most popular thing to defend. There are many things that God asks us to believe that are not really logical contradictions but are mysteries or paradoxes, matters that we cannot fully explain. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity, or the hypostatic union of Christ (the union of Christ’s human and divine natures in one person), or God’s sovereignty and our responsibility, are doctrines that fall in this category. Why can we not explain fully what the Trinity is like? It is because there is nothing in all creation that is exactly like the Trinity! There is no other being that consists of three distinct persons, with each person possessing the whole of that being in himself, and yet the three together are only one being, not three. How can this be? It is not a contradiction, but it is a mystery beyond our comprehension.
And then there are other doctrines in which God does not ask us to approve something that is evil or wrong, but asks us to believe things that are emotionally hard for us to receive, at least in this age. Such doctrines include the doctrine of hell (with the eternal conscious punishment of the wicked), and the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in relationship to evil, for example.
In these matters that are not easy to defend, and in many more, the question is, will we believe them, not because we can explain them fully, and not because we enjoy them and take delight in them in our present state of understanding, but simply because God’s Word teaches them and we submit to his Word?
Wayne Grudem, in his chapter in Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor
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