Dispensationalism

Question 7199. If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things ...

Question 10203. Let me tell you plainly why dispensationalism matters so much to me, because it is not a dry label that I wear but a way of reading the ...

Question 11092 The question of whether Christians should worship on Saturday (the Sabbath) or Sunday is one that generates considerable debate, particularly with the influence of Seventh-day Adventism and certain ...

Question 11044 The question of whether Christians should keep the Jewish festivals is one that surfaces regularly, particularly among believers who have developed a deep appreciation for the Old Testament ...

Question 11089 The question of what role the Mosaic law plays in the life of a Christian is not a new one. Paul spent considerable effort addressing it in his ...

Question 10065. Is modern Israel prophetically significant? My answer is a carefully qualified yes. I believe the return of Jewish people to the land, and the existence of a Jewish ...

Question 10008. The Land covenant of Deuteronomy 29-30 is the least known of Israel's great covenants, and the old label "Palestinian covenant" has not helped it, since the covenant concerns ...

Question 10002. The seven dispensations of the classic dispensational scheme raise an immediate question for anyone new to this subject: does the Bible actually number them, or is seven a ...

Question 10005. The Abrahamic covenant is the backbone of biblical eschatology, and I choose the word backbone deliberately: remove it and the entire prophetic skeleton collapses into a heap of ...

Question 10024. The pretribulational rapture is the view I hold, and it is simply this: Jesus will catch His Church up to Himself before the seven-year Tribulation begins, not partway ...

Question 10022. Critics love to say that the rapture is a nineteenth-century invention, cooked up in a British parlour and unknown to the church before then. It is a confident ...

Question 10023. The second coming of Jesus and the rapture of the Church are often folded into a single event, and that folding causes more confusion in prophecy than almost ...

Question 10094 Both historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism affirm that Christ will return before the Millennium and reign on earth for a thousand years. On this they agree, and the ...

Question 10136 Preterism is an approach to biblical prophecy, particularly to the book of Revelation, that holds that most or all of the prophetic events described in the New Testament ...

Question 10137 Futurism is one of the four major approaches to interpreting the book of Revelation, and it is the framework that flows most naturally from the consistent application of ...

Question 10153 The phrase "the blessed hope" has become so familiar in Christian vocabulary that it can lose its force through sheer repetition. But when Paul used it in his ...

Question 10132 The relationship between the Millennium and the eternal state is one of the most important structural questions in biblical eschatology. These are not the same thing, and confusing ...

Question 10148 The opening chapters of Revelation contain letters addressed to seven specific churches in the Roman province of Asia. These are not abstract symbols or generalised moral lessons. They ...

Question 10144 Inaugurated eschatology is a term that attempts to hold together two truths that Scripture clearly teaches: the kingdom of God has genuinely arrived, and the kingdom of God ...

Question 10145 One of the most important patterns running through the New Testament is the way in which certain realities are described as both present and future at the same ...

Question 10142 Few questions in biblical theology generate as much confusion as whether the kingdom of God is a present spiritual reality or a future physical one. The answer, as ...

Question 10143 The term "realised eschatology" is one that many Christians will never encounter in the pulpit but which has profoundly shaped how the New Testament is read in academic ...

Question 10162 On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel, and within minutes the new nation was recognised by the United States. For the ...

Question 10192 It is one of the most puzzling questions in all of eschatology. After a thousand years of Christ reigning visibly on earth, with perfect justice, universal knowledge of ...

Question 10009. Replacement theology, the teaching that the Church has permanently superseded Israel in God's purposes and inherited her promises in spiritualised form, is one of the oldest and, I ...

Question 10140 The phrase "the kingdom of God" appears dozens of times across the Gospels and the Epistles, yet Christians often use it without pausing to consider what it actually ...

Question 10007. The New Covenant is announced in Jeremiah with a named addressee, "the house of Israel and the house of Judah," and yet the Lord Jesus lifted the cup ...

Question 10170 The question of whether Jews lived in the land of Israel before the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 is one that carries enormous political, ...

Question 10004. Progressive dispensationalism is the name of a revision movement that arose among dispensational scholars in the late twentieth century, and if you have heard the term and wondered ...

Question 10006. The Davidic covenant is God's sworn commitment that a descendant of David will sit on David's throne for ever, and I want to show you why this promise, ...

Question 10001. Dispensational theology is one of the most misrepresented frameworks in the modern church, dismissed by critics who have rarely read its careful exponents and caricatured as a novelty ...

Question 10003. Covenant theology and dispensational theology are the two great rival frameworks by which evangelical Christians organise the storyline of Scripture, and the difference between them is not a ...

Why we should believe in the 'Rapture' (from the Latin for 'caught up') ...

Question 10050.Premillennialism is the view that Jesus will return before the thousand-year reign described in Revelation 20, coming in glory to establish His kingdom on the earth in person. The ...

Question 10068. The covenants with Israel are the backbone of biblical prophecy, and if you get them right a great deal else falls into place. There are five of them, ...

Question 10067. Does God still have a plan for Israel? Yes, and I hold that with more confidence than almost anything else I teach about prophecy, because Paul devotes three ...

Question 09045 The phrase "Messianic Jew" describes a Jewish person who has come to faith in Jesus (Yeshua) as the promised Messiah of Israel. This is not a modern invention ...

Question 09043 The question of when the church began is not a matter of historical curiosity but a question with significant theological consequences. The answer determines how we understand the ...

Question 09038 The church and the kingdom of God are closely related, and in popular Christian language they are often treated as interchangeable. They are not. Understanding the distinction between ...

Question 09044 The relationship between Israel and the church is one of the most consequential interpretive questions in all of biblical theology. How a person answers it will determine how ...

Question 60071 Christian Zionism is the belief, held by many evangelical Christians, that the modern state of Israel represents a fulfilment of biblical prophecy and that God's covenant promises to ...

Question 60048 Few theological errors have achieved the global influence of what is commonly called the prosperity gospel; also known as the health-and-wealth gospel, word of faith teaching, or name-it-and-claim-it ...

Question 60066 British Israelism is the belief that the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the British Isles, and by extension the United States and other English-speaking nations, are the direct biological descendants ...

Question 07037 The phrase "eternal covenant" appears at several points in Scripture and raises an important question: what does it mean for a covenant to be described as eternal, and ...

Question 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest ...

Question 7000 Few passages in Scripture have generated as much theological discussion as Ephesians 2:8-9. The debate centres on a grammatical question with enormous theological implications: when Paul writes "and ...

Question 60098 The claim that Peter and Paul preached fundamentally different gospels is associated with a strand of dispensational teaching sometimes called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism. In its more extreme forms, ...

Question 9002 The word "church" is thrown around quite loosely today. People talk about "going to church" as if it were simply a building or a Sunday morning activity. But ...

Question 3039. How were Old Testament believers saved, when the cross lay centuries in their future? It is one of the best questions a thoughtful reader of Scripture can ask ...

Question 1121. The pretribulational rapture is not, as some of its critics sometimes suggest, a doctrine simply invented out of thin air by nineteenth-century prophecy teachers with no genuine textual ...

Question 09200. The mystery of Christ is Paul's own name for a truth he regarded as the hidden centrepiece of his ministry: that Jew and Gentile would be joined in ...

Question 10016. Will ethnic Israel be saved? I mean the question exactly as it sounds: not whether individual Jewish people can come to faith today, which is happening continually, but ...

Question 10017. "All Israel will be saved" is one of the most argued-over clauses in the New Testament, and no wonder: five Greek words carry the weight of the whole ...

Question 10018. The partial hardening of Israel has a terminus, and Paul names it with a phrase that repays careful study: "until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" ...

Question 10019. The Mosaic law occupies six hundred and thirteen commandments, three biblical books, and a fair amount of Christian confusion, and the confusion usually begins with a wrong assumption: ...

Question 12046 Christian Nationalism has become one of the most discussed and divisive terms in contemporary Christianity, particularly in the United States but increasingly in broader Western discourse. Some advocates ...

Question 7081 This question goes right to the heart of how we understand God's dealings with humanity throughout history. The relationship between law and grace is not one of contradiction ...

Question 10201 Revelation is among the most misread books in the Bible, and part of the reason is that readers approach it in isolation. In fact, it is the most ...

Question 60091 The Canaanite conquest narratives in Joshua are among the passages most frequently raised as moral objections to the Old Testament, and they deserve honest engagement rather than evasion ...

Question 009112 Paul uses the word "mystery" in a very specific and technical sense that differs from its ordinary usage. When we speak of mysteries today, we typically mean something ...

Question 10202 One of the most common objections to the pretribulational Rapture is the claim that the "last trumpet" of 1 Corinthians 15:52 must be the same as the seventh ...

Question 7083 The question sounds simple, but it touches on something of real theological importance. Did the rules change somewhere between Genesis and Acts? Were Old Testament believers saved by ...

Question 10029. Are the Jewish people still God's chosen people, or did their election end when the nation rejected its Messiah? I answer without hesitation that Israel remains God's chosen ...

Question 10082 Few eschatological questions generate as much confusion as this one. The idea that the Holy Spirit will be "removed" from the earth during the Tribulation is widely stated ...

Question 10036. The times of the Gentiles and the fullness of the Gentiles sound almost identical, and they are constantly confused, yet they describe two quite different things in Scripture ...

Question 10014. The biblical covenants are the load-bearing walls of eschatology, and once you see how they connect, end-times doctrine stops being a heap of curiosities, beasts here, trumpets there, ...

Question 11056 Acts 1:8 is the last thing the risen Jesus said before His ascension, and it was not a farewell encouragement. It was a structured programme. "But you will ...

Question 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke ...

Question 4058. The Spirit in the Millennium is a subject Scripture addresses more directly, and more beautifully, than most believers realise, and I want to trace what the Old and ...

Question 10066. Replacement theology is the view that the Church has taken Israel's place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to the nation now belong to ...

Question 12045 Baptists hold a remarkable and often underappreciated distinction in the history of Western civilisation: they were among the earliest voices in the English-speaking world to call for universal ...

Question 2029. Is the Trinity in the Old Testament, or does it only appear once the New Testament arrives with Jesus and Pentecost? This question matters more than it might ...

Question 4099.Receiving the Spirit is exactly what Paul asks these Ephesian men about in Acts 19:2, and the answer they give has been fought over ever since, mostly by people ...

Question 4105. laying on hands by the apostles, rather than the moment of their belief, is what Luke tells us the Samaritans in Acts 8 were actually waiting for before ...

Question 1037. Literal interpretation is the single most misunderstood term in the whole discussion of how we read the Bible, mostly because critics and defenders alike often use it to ...

Question 1130. Dispensational hermeneutics gets accused, fairly often and rather confidently, of playing a shell game with the biblical text: reading the Old Testament literally when it suits the argument ...

Question 1120. Does literal interpretation require a young earth position? I hold both a literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic and a young earth reading of Genesis, and I think the two are connected ...

Question 10020. Unconditional covenants and conditional covenants are the two hinges on which all of biblical prophecy swings, and learning to tell them apart is, I would argue, the single ...

Question 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to ...

Question 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament ...

Question 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through ...

Question 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story ...

Question 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to ...

Question 13. Itching ears is one of Paul's most quietly devastating phrases, and it describes a danger that is more alive today than ever. Writing his final letter to Timothy, ...

Question 3044. Son of David is the very first title given to Jesus in the New Testament: 'The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the ...

Question 12. False doctrine spreads like gangrene. That is not my phrase but Paul's, and it is one of the most arresting medical images in all his letters. Writing to ...

Question 1139. Equipped for every good work is the phrase Paul uses to describe the purpose of Scripture in the life of a believer, and it comes at the climax ...

Question 1138. Rightly handling Scripture is what the apostle Paul commands every believer who teaches or studies the Bible to do, and the phrase comes from one of the most ...

Question 7080 This question has caused considerable debate throughout church history so how we answer it affects everything; from how we read the Old Testament to how we live our ...

Question 10013. The Church and Israel are the two peoples at the centre of God's dealings with humanity, and whether you distinguish them or merge them will quietly determine your ...

Question 10041.Sceptics love to wave 1 Kings 9 in my face and claim the temple promise God made to Solomon collapsed in ruins, so the Bible cannot be trusted after ...

Standing with Israel in Biblical Truth and Justice Q10141 Preamble As an Evangelical Baptist committed to the authority of Scripture and the unchanging promises of God, I find myself compelled ...