All Answered Questions Listed

Question 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the ...

Question 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with ...

Question 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something ...

Question 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul's own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for ...

Question 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one ...

Question 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology ...

Question 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that ...

Question 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed ...

Question 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a ...

Question 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays ...

Question 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations ...

Question 52. Confessional Christianity describes churches and believers who hold to a formal, written confession of faith, a Baptist confession, a Reformed catechism, a denominational statement, as a settled, publicly ...

Question 51. The analogy of faith is a hermeneutical principle stating that Scripture should always be interpreted in harmony with itself, so that no single passage is read in a ...

Question 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature ...

Question 47. Doctrinal disagreement between sincere Christians reading the very same Bible is a question that troubles many thoughtful believers, and it deserves a more careful answer than either of ...

Question 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of ...

Question 44. Doctrinal development describes the genuine, historically observable way the church's articulation of certain doctrines has grown sharper and more precise across the centuries, without the underlying truth itself ...

Question 43. Changing your mind on a doctrine as you mature is not automatically a sign of instability or spiritual drift, though it can feel that way, especially if you ...

Question 42. Cafeteria Christianity describes the practice of selecting which biblical teachings to accept and which to quietly set aside, much as a diner moves along a cafeteria line choosing ...

Question 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously ...

Question 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, ...

Question 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the ...

Question 26. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy describe two dimensions of genuine Christian faithfulness that Scripture never allows to be separated, even though believers regularly drift toward emphasising one at the expense ...

Question 22. Guarding the deposit is Paul's own phrase for one of the central responsibilities he hands to Timothy near the end of his life, and it captures something important ...

Question 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every ...

Question 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as ...

Question 11. Divine accommodation is the term theologians use for a simple but important fact: God, who is infinite, eternal, and utterly beyond our full comprehension, has chosen to reveal ...

Question 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine ...

Question 0030 The difference between academic theology and practical doctrine is one of those distinctions that sounds dry until you realise how much harm comes from getting it wrong. I ...

Question 0028. Knowing which doctrines to divide over is one of the most important and most difficult judgements a believer ever has to make. Get it wrong in one direction ...

Question 0029. Sooner or later every believer who takes both truth and relationships seriously has to ask whether a disagreement is worth breaking fellowship over. You find yourself genuinely at ...

Question 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People ...

Question 00049.It is entirely possible to be doctrinally correct and spiritually dead at the very same time, and the Bible says so without flinching for a moment. A person can ...

Question 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest ...

Question 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems ...

Question 0034 When people ask me what resources will help their doctrinal growth, I always start in the same place, because the answer matters more than any book list. The ...

Question 0032 I understand exactly why theology feels dry to so many Christians, because I have felt it myself and I have watched it in others for years. The word ...

Question 0033 If you long for an appetite for doctrine that you do not yet feel, take heart, because that very longing is already a seed of the thing you ...

Question 0031 Sound doctrine works in the soul rather like a spiritual immune system works in the body, and once you see the picture you cannot unsee it. Your body ...

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 15. Progressive Christianity is a movement many believers have heard named but few could define clearly, and that vagueness is part of what makes it so difficult to respond ...

Question 16. To detect false teaching is a skill every believer needs, and not only the pastors and scholars among us. Jesus warned that false prophets would come in sheep's ...

Question 17. Why does right belief lead to right behaviour? I am convinced that right belief is the hidden engine behind a holy life, and that most of our failures ...

Question 20. How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would ...

Question 19. Why are so many Christians still spiritual infants after years of faith? It troubles me, and I suspect it troubles you, that so many believers remain spiritual infants ...

Question 18. What does spiritual maturity look like according to Hebrews 5 and 6? I love this passage because the writer to the Hebrews refuses to let spiritual maturity stay ...

Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of ...

Question 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value ...

Question 23. Why did Paul always start his letters with doctrine before application rather than practical instruction? Once you notice this pattern of doctrine before application, you cannot unsee it, ...

Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. 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 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly ...

Question 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather ...

Question 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and ...

Question 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine ...

Question 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and ...

Question 07053 The elementary doctrines of Christ are listed in Hebrews 6:1-3, and the passage has puzzled readers for a long time. The writer tells his readers to leave these ...

Question 00048.The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer ...

Question 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships ...

Question 8000. Angels and demons are two of the most talked about subjects in our culture and two of the least carefully studied in our churches, which is a strange ...

Question 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated ...

Question 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an ...

Question 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has ...

Question 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, ...

Question 4000. The doctrine of the Spirit is the part of Christian teaching that asks who the Holy Spirit is, what He does, and what His nearness means for an ...

Question 3000. Christology, once you get past the imposing name, is simply the study of Christ, and I want to start there because the word puts people off far more ...

Question 6. Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it ...

Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because ...

Question 4. Why does Paul call right teaching sound doctrine, and what does the word sound actually mean? When he tells Titus to 'teach what accords with sound doctrine' (Titus ...

Question 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, 'All ...

Question 2. Does doctrine divide the church? You have probably heard it stated as though it were settled fact: doctrine divides, but love unites. The idea is that if we ...

Question 1. If you want to know why doctrine matters, start by noticing how quickly people's eyes glaze over when the word is mentioned. Doctrine sounds dusty and academic, something ...

Question 0. Why do I keep going to the Bible for answers when the world is full of other voices? It is a fair question, and it sits right at ...

Question 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the ...

Question 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with ...

Question 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something ...

Question 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul's own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for ...

Question 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one ...

Question 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology ...

Question 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that ...

Question 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed ...

Question 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a ...

Question 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays ...

Question 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations ...

Question 52. Confessional Christianity describes churches and believers who hold to a formal, written confession of faith, a Baptist confession, a Reformed catechism, a denominational statement, as a settled, publicly ...

Question 51. The analogy of faith is a hermeneutical principle stating that Scripture should always be interpreted in harmony with itself, so that no single passage is read in a ...

Question 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature ...

Question 47. Doctrinal disagreement between sincere Christians reading the very same Bible is a question that troubles many thoughtful believers, and it deserves a more careful answer than either of ...

Question 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of ...

Question 44. Doctrinal development describes the genuine, historically observable way the church's articulation of certain doctrines has grown sharper and more precise across the centuries, without the underlying truth itself ...

Question 43. Changing your mind on a doctrine as you mature is not automatically a sign of instability or spiritual drift, though it can feel that way, especially if you ...

Question 42. Cafeteria Christianity describes the practice of selecting which biblical teachings to accept and which to quietly set aside, much as a diner moves along a cafeteria line choosing ...

Question 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously ...

Question 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, ...

Question 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the ...

Question 26. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy describe two dimensions of genuine Christian faithfulness that Scripture never allows to be separated, even though believers regularly drift toward emphasising one at the expense ...

Question 22. Guarding the deposit is Paul's own phrase for one of the central responsibilities he hands to Timothy near the end of his life, and it captures something important ...

Question 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every ...

Question 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as ...

Question 11. Divine accommodation is the term theologians use for a simple but important fact: God, who is infinite, eternal, and utterly beyond our full comprehension, has chosen to reveal ...

Question 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul's letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as ...

Question 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the ...

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 1022. formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence describe two competing philosophies of Bible translation, and understanding the difference will genuinely change how you read the footnotes and prefaces of whatever ...

Question 1160. Aramaic passages appear in the Old Testament at a handful of specific points, and the first time someone notices this in Daniel or Ezra, they usually assume it ...

Question 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus ...

Question 1170. Concursive inspiration is the term theologians use for the way God produced Scripture through human authors without either overriding their personalities or leaving the outcome to human judgement ...

Question 1164. Interpreting biblical prophecy rightly is, I think, one of the more neglected disciplines in the church today, and one of the most abused outside it. Whole sections of ...

Question 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden ...

Question 1177. Old Testament narrative makes up a larger share of Scripture than any other single genre, the accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, the exodus from ...

Question 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I ...

Question 1029. Hebrew poetry does not work the way English poetry does, and readers who go looking for rhyme or a regular metre come away thinking the Psalms and Proverbs ...

Question 1178. New Testament epistles make up a large part of the New Testament, thirteen from Paul alone, plus further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to ...

Question 1023. The ESV translation philosophy is worth understanding on its own terms rather than assuming it works exactly the same way as every other modern English Bible, because the ...

Question 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and ...

Question 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently ...

Question 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted ...

Question 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the ...

Question 1185. What is the book of Jasher mentioned in Joshua and 2 Samuel, and should its brief, tantalising appearances in Scripture make us curious about a lost inspired text? ...

Question 1189. The apostles' handling of prophetic fulfilment can look bewildering to a modern reader trained to expect a strict one to one correspondence between a prediction and its outcome ...

Question 1180. Can an ordinary believer genuinely study the Bible well without ever learning a word of Greek or Hebrew? I get this question often, usually from someone who has ...

Question 1179. Wisdom literature occupies a strange and wonderful middle section of the Old Testament, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, and it is read badly more often ...

Question 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, ...

Question 01152. When the four Gospels were actually written matters more than it might first appear, because a late date, decades after the events described, would leave room for legend ...

Question 1144. Isaiah authorship became a battleground topic the moment nineteenth century scholars noticed that chapters 40 through 66 read differently in tone, vocabulary, and historical setting from chapters 1 ...

Question 1143. Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is one of those questions that sounds academic until you realise how much rests on it. If Moses ...

Question 1158. Petrine authorship of Second Peter has taken more scholarly fire than almost any other claim in the New Testament, and I think the letter deserves better than the ...

Question 01155. Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters bearing Paul's name in the New Testament has been challenged by critical scholarship for well over a century, with roughly half of ...

Question 1174. The Bodmer papyri are, alongside the Chester Beatty collection, among the most significant early witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament, and together these two ...

Question 1171. The Chester Beatty papyri are among the earliest and most significant witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, and I ...

Question 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ ...

Question 1184. What is the book of Enoch, and is it Scripture? This question comes up more often than you might expect, usually prompted by the fact that Jude actually ...

Question 1145. The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship ...

Question 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is ...

Question 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and ...

Question 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the "hidden" or "suppressed" gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is ...

Question 01006. People use the words prophecy and prediction as though they mean the same thing, but prophecy and prediction are not identical, and the difference matters more than you ...

Question 01003. The amount of biblical prophecy in Scripture is one of its most distinctive features, and people are often surprised when they discover just how much of the Bible ...

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 1013. The phrase apocalyptic literature turns up constantly in biblical studies, and if you do not understand what it means you will struggle to read whole stretches of the ...

Question 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what ...

Question 1035. Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has ...

Question 1119. Old Testament prophets received God's word through a range of different means, and Scripture itself is refreshingly candid about how varied that process actually was. Some received visions ...

Question 1141. Misunderstood Bible phrases circulate everywhere, in sermons, in devotionals, on inspirational graphics shared across social media, and popular culture has never been particularly careful about accuracy when it ...

Question 01173. The Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament represent two different approaches to reconstructing the wording of Scripture, and understanding the difference between them clears up ...

Question 01176. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament that stands behind almost every modern English translation, the ESV included, and understanding what it ...

Question 1183. Is the book of Esdras a book we should read, and does it belong anywhere near our study of Scripture? People find the name confusing before they even ...

Question 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown's novel, to have been assembled by the ...

Question 60094. A global flood is what Genesis 6 to 9 appears to describe, and a great many Christians now hold instead that the deluge was a large regional inundation ...

Question 60095. Firmament is a word most people meet only in the King James Version of Genesis 1, and it has generated a surprising amount of argument. Critics of the ...

Question 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with ...

Question 1200. Some of the most commonly misinterpreted verses in the whole Bible are also some of the most quoted, which is exactly why the confusion spreads so widely. A ...

Question 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would ...

Question 01005. If the Bible is clear, why do sincere Christians disagree so often about what it teaches? This is one of the most honest questions believers ask, usually when ...

Question 1008. The question of dreams and visions and prophecy today stirs up real confusion and no small amount of division in the church. Does God still speak through such ...

Question 1079. People ask me what the best Bible translation and the honest answer is that it depends rather a lot on what you are trying to do with it ...

Question 1080. Have we lost books of the Bible? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just read a footnote mentioning the ...

Question 1077. Manuscript transmission is the unglamorous term for a question that genuinely keeps some people awake at night: how do we know the Bible we hold today says what ...

Question 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version ...

Question 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine ...

Question 01068. Biblical inspiration means something far more precise than the loose, everyday sense in which we might call a piece of music or a great novel inspired. It is ...

Question 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only ...

Question 01066. Whether the Bible is really God's Word is, I think, the single most foundational question anyone can ask about the Christian faith, because everything else depends on the ...

Question 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God's Word, and I ...

Question 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak ...

Question 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves ...

Question 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee ...

Question 1074. Why these sixty-six books, and not more, and not fewer? It is a fair question, and one I would rather answer directly than wave away with an appeal ...

Question 1075. The Old Testament Apocrypha sits quietly on the shelf of most study Bibles that include it, and I get asked about it more often than you might expect, ...

Question 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they ...

Question 1081. Prophecy fulfilment is, in my judgement, one of the strongest evidences we have for the divine origin of Scripture, and I do not say that lightly after years ...

Question 1082. Biblical archaeology has quietly become one of the most persuasive answers I can give a sceptical friend, because it deals in something they cannot simply wave away: dirt, ...

Question 1083. Scientific errors are what critics claim to find scattered through the Bible, arguing that Scripture reflects the primitive cosmology of ancient peoples and cannot be trusted as God's ...

Question 1084. Biblical genealogies can seem tedious to modern readers, long lists of unpronounceable names we are tempted to skip on our way to the next narrative section. Yet these ...

Question 1085. Biblical numbers appear throughout Scripture: forty days of flood, seven churches, twelve tribes, 144,000 sealed servants, 666 as the number of the beast. Are these figures meant literally, ...

Question 1086. Numerical patterns in Scripture fascinate people, and I understand why they do. Some claim to have discovered elaborate numerical patterns hidden in the biblical text, patterns they say ...

Question 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church ...

Question 1089. Scripture in counselling is where I keep returning whenever I sit with someone in pain, because the Bible speaks to the whole person, not only to their beliefs ...

Question 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say ...

Question 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word "meditation" now carries associations that have ...

Question 1093. AI Bible study is something I get asked about often now, usually by people who are not sure whether using a tool like this on their Bible reading ...

Question 1094. Bible apps have changed how most of us meet with Scripture each morning, and I think that change deserves more thought than a shrug and a download. I ...

Question 1096. Bible movies and dramatic readings have exploded in popularity over the last few years, and I get asked about them often enough that I think the question deserves ...

Question 1095. Audio Bible listening has become one of the most common ways church members tell me they get through Scripture, usually confessed with a slightly apologetic tone, as though ...

Question 1102. The dual authorship of Scripture is one of those doctrines that sounds like a contradiction until you actually sit with it, because we are so used to thinking ...

Question 1103. Verse divisions feel so permanent, printed neatly into every Bible you own, that it is easy to assume they came down from Sinai along with everything else. They ...

Question 1104. Old Testament quotations in the New Testament rarely match their source word for word, and if you line up Matthew’s citation of Isaiah next to your Old Testament ...

Question 1106. Biblical preservation is a doctrine people often assume promises far more than it actually claims, and getting the scope right matters enormously, especially once you learn that our ...

Question 1036. Creeds and confessions are summaries, not sources. That single sentence answers most of the confusion I encounter around this question. A creed does not add to what Scripture ...

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 1038. Allegorical interpretation treats a biblical text as a coded surface concealing a deeper, often quite different, spiritual meaning beneath it, and it has a long and influential history ...

Question 1039. Biblical typology is the study of persons, events, and institutions in the Old Testament that God designed in advance to prefigure greater realities fulfilled in Christ and the ...

Question 1040. Biblical genre is the single most overlooked factor in careless Bible reading, and identifying it correctly is not an optional refinement of interpretation but a basic requirement of ...

Question 1031. biblical sufficiency is the settled conviction that Scripture provides everything a believer genuinely needs for faith and godly living, and I want to be precise about exactly what ...

Question 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of ...

Question 1033. Scripture interprets Scripture is one of those phrases preachers use so often that it risks sounding like a slogan rather than a method. In practice it names something ...

Question 1034. Special revelation is not God's only way of making Himself known, but it is His only sufficient way of making Himself known for salvation, and that distinction answers ...

Question 1041. Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not ...

Question 1043. Eisegesis and exegesis sound like a pair of obscure Greek terms you could safely ignore, but the difference between them decides whether a sermon, a Bible study, or ...

Question 1044. Cultural and historical context is not an optional extra for serious Bible readers, it is the very air the text was written to breathe. When Paul wrote to ...

Question 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting ...

Question 1051.The Samaritan Pentateuch sounds like the kind of obscure manuscript detail that only specialists need worry about, but it raises a question worth answering plainly: if the Samaritans have ...

Question 1052.A good commentary is not always easy to spot on a crowded shelf, and that is the honest problem behind this question. Walk into any Christian bookshop, or browse ...

Question 1054.Bible study tools multiply faster than most of us can keep track of, with software, websites and apps proliferating alongside the traditional printed options, and the choice can feel ...

Question 1055. marking your Bible is not only permitted, I would go further and say it is one of the more underused tools available to an ordinary Christian who wants ...

Question 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every ...

Question 1047. Septuagint quotations appear throughout the New Testament far more often than most readers realise, and noticing this raises a fair question. If Jesus and the apostles regarded the ...

Question 1049. Few passages in the Gospels are as beloved as the story of the woman caught adultery, found in John 7:53 through 8:11. Jesus' words, "let him who is ...

Question 1050.The Johannine Comma is the name given to a few extra words that appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and nowhere in modern translations, and ...

Question 1048. If you open your Bible to the end of Mark's Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark's longer ending does not appear in the earliest ...

Question 1056. memorising Scripture is one of the most quietly transformative habits available to any Christian, and I say that as someone who finds it genuinely hard work rather than ...

Question 1059. children's Bibles are not simply acceptable for young children, they are, in my experience raising and teaching children over many years, one of the most effective tools available ...

Question 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ...

Question 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we ...

Question 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various ...

Question 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes ...

Question 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark's Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of ...

Question 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to ...

Question 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving ...

Question 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes ...

Question 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern ...

Question 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads ...

Question 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might ...

Question 1113. Biblical manuscript materials range from stone and clay to papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and tracing what the prophets and apostles actually wrote on takes us right into the ...

Question 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the ...

Question 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost ...

Question 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about ...

Question 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe ...

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 1125. Biblical genealogies have glazed over more eyes than almost any other section of Scripture. "And so-and-so fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so," page after page, and it is entirely ...

Question 1129. Biblical literalism gets blamed for a great deal it never actually claimed, and nowhere is the confusion thicker than in the running argument between Scripture and science. People ...

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 1124. Understanding Scripture is not always straightforward, and if you have ever hit a passage that made no sense at all, read it twice, maybe three times, and remained ...

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 01001.KJV Onlyism is the conviction, held in various strengths by various people, that the King James Version of 1611 is the only Bible English-speaking Christians ought to use, and ...

Question 01002.Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its ...

Question 01007. Do you need scholars to understand Scripture, or can an ordinary believer read the Bible and grasp it for themselves? Christians tend to fall off this horse on ...

Question 01151. Biblical authority runs into the same objection almost every time I discuss it with a thoughtful sceptic: is it not simply circular reasoning to say the Bible is ...

Question 1053.Study Bibles are everywhere you look. Walk into any Christian bookshop and you will find shelves of them, leather-bound, colour-coded, themed for men, women, teenagers and almost every niche ...

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 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and ...

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 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those ...

Question 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how ...

Question 1018. Textual criticism can sound alarming when you first hear the phrase, as though scholars are sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is ...

Question 1204. The faith once delivered to the saints is the phrase Jude reaches for when he explains why his short, urgent letter changed direction partway through the opening line ...

Question 1203. Inspiration and illumination are two words that get used almost interchangeably in casual church conversation, and the blur causes real confusion. People will say a sermon was inspired ...

Question 1020. The Bible's main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching ...

Question 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no ...

Question 60088. Science and Scripture are widely assumed to be locked in permanent conflict, and the assumption does a great deal of quiet damage. It shows up in newspapers, in ...

Question 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them ...

Question 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is ...

Question 1028. The Holy Spirit's role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with ...

Question 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture's own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand ...

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 1142. General revelation is God's self disclosure through the created order, through history, and through the human conscience, available in principle to every person who has ever lived, whether ...

Question 60089. Objective truth has become the one claim you are not allowed to make in polite company. That may be true for you but not for me sounds tolerant ...

Question 60090. Faith and reason are assumed by almost everybody to be opposites, and the assumption has done real damage to Christian witness. On one side stands the believer who ...

Question 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit's genuine, active work in a believer's life gets confused constantly with the very different ...

Question 1149. The Spirit's inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same ...

Question 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt ...

Question 1146. Textual corruption is the accusation I hear most often from people who have never actually looked at how the Bible was copied, only heard somewhere that thousands of ...

Question 1147. The sufficiency of Scripture is a claim that sounds simple until someone asks you to define exactly what it does and does not cover, and I find most ...

Question 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to ...

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 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one ...

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 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I ...

Question 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away ...

Question 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation ...

Question 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in ...

Question 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can ...

Question 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that ...

Question 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from ...

Question 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People ...

Question 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest ...

Question 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems ...

Question 20. How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would ...

Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of ...

Question 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value ...

Question 23. Why did Paul always start his letters with doctrine before application rather than practical instruction? Once you notice this pattern of doctrine before application, you cannot unsee it, ...

Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The ...

Question 01000.To say that Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail, cannot deceive, and cannot lead astray in anything it sets out to teach us. The word itself reaches ...

Question 01004. The question of scriptural reliability becomes very pointed when we ask whether the apostles' fallen nature corrupted the doctrines they taught. It is a fair thing to wonder ...

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 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly ...

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 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments ...

Question 1107. Manuscript discoveries make headlines from time to time, a newly identified papyrus fragment, an early codex found in a monastery library, and each one raises the same anxious ...

Question 1101. I hold to verbal plenary inspiration without embarrassment, and it is worth being precise about what the doctrine actually claims, because plenty of people, believers and sceptics alike, ...

Question 1140. Filthy rags is the phrase most Christians know from Isaiah 64:6, quoted in countless evangelistic sermons, including plenty of my own over the years, to prove that even ...

Question 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew ...

Question 1105. Grammatical irregularities do appear here and there in the Greek New Testament, and the book of Revelation is the most famous case, containing what specialists call solecisms, places ...

Question 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth ...

Question 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather ...

Question 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships ...

Question 6. Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it ...

Question 4. Why does Paul call right teaching sound doctrine, and what does the word sound actually mean? When he tells Titus to 'teach what accords with sound doctrine' (Titus ...

Question 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, 'All ...

Question 0. Why do I keep going to the Bible for answers when the world is full of other voices? It is a fair question, and it sits right at ...

Question 2061. I hear this question often, sometimes gently and sometimes with real frustration: why does God seem so different in the Old Testament, commanding conquest and judgment, compared to ...

Question 2007. Genesis 2:2-3 tells me that God finished His work of creation and rested on the seventh day, and that simple statement about seventh day rest raises an obvious ...

Question 2116. The Shema is Israel's great confession of faith, recited morning and evening by devout Jews for three thousand years, and it stands at the head of every serious ...

Question 2115. The oaks of Mamre witnessed one of the most remarkable afternoons in the Old Testament: the day God came to lunch. Genesis 18 opens without any drumroll - ...

Question 2114. The figure who wrestled with Jacob at Peniel is introduced with deliberate mystery: "And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of ...

Question 2113. The shekinah glory is the visible, radiant presence of God dwelling among His people - the cloud and fire and brightness that filled the tabernacle, settled on the ...

Question 2112. The pillar of cloud and fire is one of the most striking sights in the entire Old Testament: a towering column that led two million people through a ...

Question 2111. The burning bush is one of the most famous scenes in the whole Bible, yet ask who actually spoke to Moses from it and you will get a ...

Question 2109. A Christophany is an appearance of the Son of God before His incarnation - the eternal Christ showing Himself to people in the Old Testament, centuries before Bethlehem ...

Question 2108. A theophany is a visible appearance of God to human beings, and once you know the word you will start spotting them all over your Old Testament. The ...

Question 2107. Eternity and everlastingness sound like two words for the same thing, and most of us use them interchangeably without a second thought. God lives for ever; God is ...

Question 2106. Was there a "before" before creation? It sounds like a question a child might fire at you over breakfast, and like most children's questions it turns out to ...

Question 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job ...

Question 2020. What does Trinitarian prayer look like, and should we pray to the Father, to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit? This question comes up more than you might ...

Question 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How ...

Question 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within ...

Question 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in ...

Question 2014. Does God hate sinners, or does He only hate sin? It is one of those questions that sounds like a technicality until someone asks it through tears, usually ...

Question 2016. Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for the evil in the first place? This question sits at the bottom of ...

Question 8010. The Angel of the LORD is the most intriguing figure in the Old Testament, and working out who He is has been one of the most rewarding studies ...

Question 2040. Divine omnipresence means that God is fully and equally present everywhere at once, in every place, at every moment, without being spread thin, divided into portions, or contained ...

Question 2041. God's holiness is the attribute Scripture reaches for more often than any other to describe who He is, and it means two things held together, that God is ...

Question 2042. God's love is not primarily a feeling, and it is not the vague affection our culture usually means when it uses the word. It is His settled, active ...

Question 2043. God's justice is His settled commitment always to do what is right, to treat every person exactly as they deserve, and never to let evil go unaddressed forever ...

Question 2044. God's mercy is His compassionate refusal to give sinners what their sin actually deserves, withholding deserved judgement out of tender, active compassion. Lamentations 3:22-23 puts it with unmatched ...

Question 2045. God's wrath is His settled, righteous opposition to sin, not a sudden fit of temper or an emotional outburst He later regrets. Romans 1:18 states plainly that "the ...

Question 2046. Wrath and love feel, to many people, like they must belong to two different gods, one frightening and one kind, rather than to a single, coherent character. I ...

Question 2047. God's supreme rule means that He reigns as King over every person, every nation and every event in history, with nothing genuinely outside His authority or beyond His ...

Question 2048. God's providence is His continuous, active care in directing the events of creation and history toward His good purposes, quietly working through ordinary causes rather than only through ...

Question 2049. Change his mind is a question Scripture answers in two apparently different ways, and I think both answers need to be taken seriously rather than one quietly explained ...

Question 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature ...

Question 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this ...

Question 2059. The Trinity and consciousness is a question that takes me right to the frontier of what can actually be known about God, and it turns out to sit ...

Question 2053. God's attributes are not a set of competing interests inside a divine committee, however often popular preaching makes it sound that way. If God is perfectly holy and ...

Question 2056. God's self-sufficiency is the reason the answer to this question is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us, not for His existence, not for His ...

Question 2051. Divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of separate parts or ingredients the way a created thing is, a portion of love here, a measure of ...

Question 2052. Divine aseity is one of those doctrines that sounds abstract until you actually sit with it, and then it quietly rearranges how you think about everything else you ...

Question 2050. Divine immutability means that God's character, His purposes and His promises never change, improve, decay or shift in any respect. James describes Him as the Father "with whom ...

Question 2072. Divine beauty is not a category Christians spend much time thinking about, next to holiness, love, or justice, yet Scripture reaches for it often enough that I think ...

Question 2069. God's experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, ...

Question 2070. Divine repentance is the term theologians use for those startling verses where God is said to have 'repented' or 'relented' of something, most famously Genesis 6:6, where the ...

Question 2067. Divine eternity is the doctrine underneath one of the most fascinating questions in all of theology, and one with genuinely practical consequences for how I read Scripture's prophetic ...

Question 2068. God's silence is one of the hardest experiences a believer can walk through, that stretch of praying into what feels like an empty room when heaven simply does ...

Question 2062. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in ...

Question 2065. Genuine human freedom sits at the very centre of one of the oldest and hardest questions in theology. Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom ...

Question 2066. The names of God in the Old Testament form one of the richest veins of theological material in all of Scripture, and I never tire of returning to ...

Question 2080. David's child died on the seventh day of his illness, the son born to David and Bathsheba after their affair and the arranged death of her husband Uriah, ...

Question 2077. The death of Uzzah is one of those Old Testament episodes that stops readers cold: a man reaches out to steady the ark of the covenant when the ...

Question 2079. Pharaoh's hardened heart troubles many readers of Exodus for a very understandable reason: if God hardened Pharaoh's heart, how could Pharaoh be justly held responsible for refusing to ...

Question 2075. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, ...

Question 2076. Is God in hell? The question of God in hell sounds like a strange question, almost a trick, but I get asked it seriously and often, usually by ...

Question 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they ...

Question 2073. Changing God's mind through prayer sounds, on the surface, like a contradiction of everything else Scripture teaches about His unchanging character. Yet Scripture itself records instance after instance ...

Question 2078. Abel's offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel ...

Question 2071. Functional subordination is the term I use to describe what Jesus means in John 14:28 when He tells His disciples, 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28) ...

Question 2055. God created us, and the reason why sits underneath most of the anxiety that drives people towards religion in the first place, and towards its alternatives too. Why ...

Question 02085 The term "common grace" describes the benefits God extends to all people regardless of whether they are in a saving relationship with Him. It is distinguished from saving ...

Question 2003. God's will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a ...

Question 2004. Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist ...

Question 2005. God's providence is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole of Theology Proper, largely because two opposite errors keep pulling the conversation off balance. One error ...

Question 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about ...

Question 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture ...

Question 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon's words, "the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the ...

Question 2011. Ask a room of Christians how the persons of Trinity actually communicate with one another, and you will likely get some puzzled looks. The question seems either too ...

Question 2012. The question of the Father's love for ordinary believers, compared with His love for the eternal Son, feels almost presumptuous at first glance, as though we are asking ...

Question 2013. The phrase eternal generation of the Son appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a fair question. Is this a ...

Question 4015. When someone asks me what the procession of the Spirit means, I usually start by admitting that it is one of those phrases the church has used for ...

Question 2015. Is what we call the economic Trinity, the roles the Father, Son and Spirit play toward creation and redemption, essential to who God is, or is it just ...

Question 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text ...

Question 2018. If unlimited atonement really means Christ's death was sufficient for every person, why doesn't an all-loving God simply save everyone? This is one of the oldest objections to ...

Question 2019. What does divine impassibility mean, and is it something the Bible actually teaches or something Greek philosophy smuggled into Christian theology? This is one of those Deep Dive ...

Question 2027. How can the triune God be three persons and yet one God, without that being either a contradiction or three gods wearing a trench coat? This is a ...

Question 2028. Trinity doctrine is, without much question, the single most distinctive claim Christianity makes about the very nature of God, and yet many Christians could not explain it clearly ...

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 2030. God and temptation seem, on the surface, to sit uneasily together in Scripture, since James tells us plainly that God cannot be tempted, and yet the Gospels tell ...

Question 2031. Why does God require worship, and doesn't a God who demands to be worshipped sound uncomfortably like the insecure, glory-hungry rulers Scripture itself condemns? This is a genuinely ...

Question 2032. Divine emotions is a phrase I use carefully, because Scripture clearly describes God loving, grieving, rejoicing and growing angry, yet these responses are not identical to the changeable, ...

Question 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all ...

Question 2038. When people ask me what divine omniscience means, I always start in the same place. It means that God knows everything there is to know, perfectly and all ...

Question 2039. Divine omnipotence means that God is able to do all that He wills to do, without effort, without rival, and without any power outside Himself limiting what He ...

Question 2022. Masculine language for God runs through the whole Bible, "He," "Him," "Father," "King," and I am often asked why, given that God is spirit and not literally male, ...

Question 2021. God's gender is a live question in a culture busy renegotiating what gender even means, and I want to answer it carefully rather than reaching for the nearest ...

Question 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves ...

Question 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy's teeth, to let ...

Question 02084 We live in an age of anxiety. Surveys consistently show rising levels of worry, stress, and fear—about the future, about circumstances beyond our control, about what might happen ...

Question 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both ...

Question 2064. God's providence raises one of the hardest pastoral questions I ever get asked. If God's providence extends over everything that happens, does that mean He permits, or even ...

Question 2063. God is Spirit. When Jesus told the Samaritan woman this in John 4:24, He was making one of the most consequential theological statements in the whole of Scripture, ...

Question 2060. Why hell exists is one of the hardest questions people bring to me, and it deserves a careful, honest answer rather than either a dismissive dodge or a ...

Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because ...

Question 2000. God's existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see ...

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 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted ...

Question 60202. Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used ...

Question 03047 To say that Jesus is our High Priest is to say that He is the one who represents us before God and brings God to us, the mediator ...

Question 60020. Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, ...

Question 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, ...

Question 60019. Jehovah's Witnesses are probably the group my church members ask me about most, for the simple reason that they are the ones who knock. Few movements are so ...

Question 08087 The question of Jesus preaching to demons between his death and resurrection comes up more often than you might expect, usually after somebody has read 1 Peter 3 ...

Question 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, ...

Question 3017. Jesus and Christ get used interchangeably by most Christians, myself included in ordinary conversation, and there is nothing wrong with that shorthand. But the two words are doing ...

Question 3060. Ask about the appearance of Jesus and most people can supply an answer instantly: long hair, flowing robe, serene European features, perhaps a soft glow. Two thousand years ...

Question 3014. The resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns, and I say that without any exaggeration. Paul makes the same point in blunt ...

Question 3016. Jesus had to rise from the dead, and I mean that word "had" with full theological weight rather than as a loose figure of speech. His resurrection was ...

Question 60022. The resurrection of Jesus is not one Christian belief among many. It is the claim on which everything else stands or falls, and the New Testament says so ...

Question 3065. When Jesus prayed, who was listening? It is one of the sharpest questions a sceptic, or a Muslim friend, or an honest child can put to a Christian ...

Question 3064. The day Jesus died is fixed in the Christian calendar as Good Friday, and most believers have never thought to question it. But some have, and their argument ...

Question 2071. Functional subordination is the term I use to describe what Jesus means in John 14:28 when He tells His disciples, 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28) ...

Question 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a ...

Question 3087. The book of Ruth is only four chapters long, a quiet rural story of famine, bereavement, gleaning, and a wedding, set in the lawless era of the judges ...

Question 7086. The scapegoat theory of atonement is a way of understanding the cross that draws on the ritual of Leviticus 16 and, in its modern form, on sociological accounts ...

Question 3013. Christ our advocate is one of those short phrases that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological all in a single breath. John writes, "My little ...

Question 2013. The phrase eternal generation of the Son appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a fair question. Is this a ...

Question 2030. God and temptation seem, on the surface, to sit uneasily together in Scripture, since James tells us plainly that God cannot be tempted, and yet the Gospels tell ...

Question 3066. Here is a question that sounds mischievous but deserves a careful answer: if Jesus is God, and Scripture says that in him 'all things hold together' (Colossians 1:17), ...

Question 3067. Was Jesus a political revolutionary, executed for taking on an empire? Plenty of voices say so, and every age tries to recruit him; our politicised age has recruited ...

Question 3068. The Jewish identity of Jesus is the plainest fact on the pages of the four Gospels, yet the question in our title still catches people out. Was Jesus ...

Question 3075. That Jesus learned obedience is the startling claim of Hebrews 5:8: "Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered." Read that slowly and the ...

Question 3078. The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world is one of the most arresting phrases in the whole Bible, and depending on which translation you pick up, ...

Question 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New ...

Question 3084. Roman crucifixion has a strong claim to being the cruellest method of execution human beings have ever devised, and the question of whether anything since has surpassed it ...

Question 3085. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle of Jesus, apart from the resurrection itself, recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; ...

Question 3082. Righteous anger sounds to many people like a contradiction in terms, because most of the anger we have ever seen, or produced, has been anything but righteous. Yet ...

Question 3080. The humour of Jesus is a subject that makes some Christians nervous, as though laughter were somehow beneath the Man of Sorrows. Nobody asks this question expecting a ...

Question 3081. The fig tree that Jesus cursed has puzzled readers for centuries, and I understand why: at first glance it looks like an overreaction to a piece of vegetation, ...

Question 3003. The meaning of Christ gets lost the moment we treat the word as though it were simply Jesus' surname, the way we might say John Smith. It is ...

Question 3079. Jesus walking on water tends to provoke one of two responses: straightforward acceptance of a miracle performed by the Son of God, or a hunt for some naturalistic ...

Question 3074. "Jesus wept" is the shortest verse in our English Bibles, and it may be the most surprising, because the One shedding tears at the tomb of Lazarus knew ...

Question 3073. The virgin birth is not a decorative detail on the edge of the Christmas story; it is load-bearing doctrine, and if you remove it the whole structure of ...

Question 3052. The historical Jesus is a phrase you will meet in television documentaries, paperback bestsellers and undergraduate courses, usually delivered with a knowing tone: behind the Christ of the ...

Question 3053. How is Jesus different from other religious leaders? It is one of the most common questions a thoughtful unbeliever asks, and it deserves a serious answer rather than ...

Question 3054. Is Jesus Michael the archangel? If you have ever spent an hour on the doorstep with Jehovah's Witnesses, you will have met this claim, for it is a ...

Question 3056. The genealogies of Jesus look, at first glance, like the least promising material in the New Testament: lists of names, many of them unpronounceable, standing between you and ...

Question 3055. Open Matthew 1 and Luke 3 side by side and you will meet a genuine puzzle: two genealogies of Jesus that do not match. Matthew begins with Abraham ...

Question 3057. The parables of Jesus are among the most famous stories ever told. The prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the sower, the lost sheep, the pearl of great price: ...

Question 3058. People love a gap, and the so-called lost years of Jesus are one of history's most famous. The Gospels give us his birth, the flight to Egypt, one ...

Question 3059. Every few years the claim that Jesus married resurfaces, usually with a book launch attached. Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code sent it round the world: Jesus ...

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 3045. Messiah and Christ both mean the anointed one, and that single fact unlocks more of your Bible than almost any other piece of vocabulary. Many people assume Christ ...

Question 3046. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29). With those words John the Baptist introduced Jesus to Israel, and he chose ...

Question 3048. The deity of Christ is often said to be a later invention, a doctrine bolted onto the memory of a humble rabbi by councils and emperors centuries after ...

Question 3036. The blood of Jesus is one of the most repeated themes in the New Testament, and yet I find that many Christians are hazy about what it actually ...

Question 3037. Who killed Jesus? It sounds like a simple historical question, the kind a detective could close in an afternoon. Roman soldiers drove the nails, so surely the case ...

Question 3038. The crucifixion of Jesus raises a question most of us have never stopped to ask: why that particular death? If the Son of God had to die for ...

Question 3041. The ascension of Jesus is the forgotten doctrine of the Christian faith. We celebrate the incarnation at Christmas and the resurrection at Easter, but Ascension Day passes most ...

Question 3043. Jesus is Lord. Three words, and the earliest, shortest confession of the Christian faith (Romans 10:9). Long before the creeds of the councils, before the New Testament was ...

Question 3040. The resurrection body of Jesus is the single best piece of evidence for what your own future body will be like. That is not my speculation; it is ...

Question 3031. Jesus is superior to angels in a way that the New Testament, particularly the opening chapters of Hebrews, takes considerable care to establish, because a persistent confusion in ...

Question 3030. The impeccability of Christ, the conviction that Jesus was actually unable to sin, raises an honest and important question. If He could not possibly have sinned, were His ...

Question 3029. Firstborn over creation is one of the titles most frequently misused by groups who want to argue that Jesus was God's first created being. Read the phrase in ...

Question 3028. Eternal generation is the theological term that answers what sounds, at first, like a contradiction: how can Jesus be eternal, without beginning or end, if He was also ...

Question 3025. Jesus' descent into Hades is a phrase drawn from the historic creeds, and it has confused almost as many Christians as it has clarified, because the words can ...

Question 3022. Jesus is not idle in heaven, and His heavenly intercession for believers is only one part, though the most frequently mentioned part, of an active present ministry that ...

Question 3021. Where is Jesus now is a question with a precise biblical answer, and theologians have a specific term for it: the session of Christ, His seated reign at ...

Question 3027. Jesus is still human now, and His glorified humanity is not a temporary costume He will one day set aside once His earthly mission is fully wrapped up ...

Question 3019. Did Jesus really rise from the dead in a bodily resurrection, or is this simply a comforting story the early church told itself? I want to take that ...

Question 3015. The transfiguration of Jesus is one of the strangest and most wonderful scenes in the Gospels, the moment when the ordinary appearance Jesus had worn for thirty years ...

Question 3012. Son of Man is the title Jesus used of Himself more often than any other in the Gospels, and it is also the one most commonly misunderstood among ...

Question 3007. The sinlessness of Christ is where this question ultimately lands, though getting there requires asking something quite specific first. When Adam fell, sin entered the human race, and ...

Question 3006. We rightly emphasise the deity of Jesus, but the humanity of Jesus receives just as much insistence in Scripture, and I do not think we can afford to ...

Question 3011. The baptism of Jesus raises an obvious question the moment you think about it seriously. John's baptism was "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark ...

Question 3010. Working out the consciousness of Christ during His earthly life pushes us further into the mystery of the incarnation than almost any other question in this series. When ...

Question 3009. The childhood of Jesus receives only the briefest treatment in the Gospels, and yet those few verses raise questions that repay careful attention. Did the infant Jesus know ...

Question 3008. Whether the impeccability of Christ is actually true has occupied theologians for most of church history, and I understand why the question keeps resurfacing. If Jesus could not ...

Question 3005. The hypostatic union is, in my judgment, one of the most profound truths in the whole of Christian theology, and also one of the most practically important. It ...

Question 3004. The deity of Jesus is the foundation Christianity stands or falls on. If Jesus is not God, Christianity collapses and we remain in our sins. If He truly ...

Question 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this ...

Question 3077. The trials of Jesus, when you lay the four Gospel accounts side by side, turn out to number six distinct hearings, three before Jewish authorities and three before ...

Question 3001. The identity of Jesus is, I think, the one question none of us gets to avoid indefinitely. Jesus put it to His own disciples at Caesarea Philippi, and ...

Question 3002. Whether there were genuine brothers of Jesus has been argued over for most of Church history, largely because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. Once ...

Question 3026. Only begotten Son is a phrase that has caused more confusion than almost any other title given to Jesus, because in ordinary English "begotten" sounds like it describes ...

Question 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says ...

Question 3062. The other resurrections of the Bible are far less famous than the empty tomb, but they are worth knowing well: nine raisings by my count, spread from the ...

Question 3061. Christianity stands or falls on bodily resurrection, and Paul says so without blinking: 'if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in ...

Question 3063. Few lines in the Apostles' Creed cause more raised eyebrows than the confession that Jesus did 'descend into hell'. What can that possibly mean? Between the cross and ...

Question 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and ...

Question 3000. Christology, once you get past the imposing name, is simply the study of Christ, and I want to start there because the word puts people off far more ...

Question 04114. The gift of faith is one of the nine gifts of the Spirit Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, and it is also one of the most misunderstood, ...

Question 4071. When I am asked to compare the doctrine of the Spirit across the Reformed, charismatic and dispensational traditions, I always begin by reassuring people that the disagreements, real ...

Question 4090. People are sometimes genuinely surprised that the gift of administration appears in the Bible at all, as though spreadsheets and rotas and Spirit-given gifts belonged to two entirely ...

Question 4088. I have a real and settled fondness for the gift of helps, because it is the gift that the church most takes for granted and could least possibly ...

Question 4085. When people ask me about the gift of pastoring, I always start with the picture buried right inside the word itself, because the word pastor simply means shepherd ...

Question 4067. Few slogans have travelled further or faster through Christian circles than let go and let God, and I am regularly asked whether it is actually biblical or just ...

Question 4064. Of all the gifts I could be asked about, the gift of teaching is one I hold especially dear, because it is the gift God has largely given ...

Question 4043. In Galatians 5 Paul sets two lists side by side, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, and I cannot think of a passage ...

Question 4030. When I trace the Spirit’s work from the opening chapter of Genesis through to the book of Acts, I find one and the same Person at work throughout, ...

Question 4084. Few questions are as heavy as this one, and I never treat it lightly: is there a point of no return, a place where a person has so ...

Question 4128. The phrase "unction of the Holy One" appears in the King James Version of 1 John 2:20 ("But ye have an unction from the Holy One"), and it ...

Question 4127. The Spirit's anointing is a phrase that is used very freely in contemporary Christian conversation, not always with a great deal of precision. People speak of 'coming under ...

Question 4126. The question of whether martyrdom is a spiritual gift - and whether there is a special grace for martyrdom - is one that requires both honest exegesis and ...

Question 4125. The question of whether celibacy is a spiritual gift tends to generate two opposite responses: either people dismiss it as a peculiarly Roman Catholic concern that has nothing ...

Question 4124. The gift of leadership is one of those gifts about which there is both too much talk and too little clarity in the contemporary church. Leadership has become ...

Question 4122. The phrase "law of the Spirit" appears in one of the most important sentences Paul ever wrote. Romans 8:2 reads: "For the law of the Spirit of life ...

Question 4115. The gift of hospitality is one that sits interestingly between what we would normally classify as a spiritual gift and what Scripture presents as a universal Christian obligation ...

Question 4112. The gift of exhortation is one of the motivational gifts Paul lists in Romans 12, and it is worth spending some time on the Greek behind it before ...

Question 4110. The gift of giving is one of those spiritual gifts that Christians sometimes speak about nervously, as though naming it might somehow absolve the rest of us of ...

Question 4091. The gift of mercy is one of the spiritual gifts listed by Paul in Romans 12, and it is perhaps the easiest to overlook and the hardest to ...

Question 4138. "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Romans 8:16). This verse is one of the most personally assuring statements in all ...

Question 4137. Three times in the farewell discourse of Jesus, recorded in John 14-16, the Holy Spirit is called "the Spirit of truth." The first occurrence is in John 14:17, ...

Question 4136. "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper" (John 14:16). The phrase "another Helper in John 14" is one of the richest descriptions ...

Question 4135. "Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’" (John 7:38). The rivers of living water are Jesus’s ...

Question 4134. The power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1:8 is Jesus’s last commission before His ascension, and it is often misread. We tend to hear "power" and imagine ...

Question 4133. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts" (Zechariah 4:6). Of all the Spirit passages in the Old Testament prophets, this ...

Question 4132. The valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is one of the most dramatic and theologically charged visions in all of Scripture. Bones scattered across an open valley, ...

Question 4131. The new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36 stand at the very heart of what the new covenant promises and the Spirit accomplishes. "I will give you ...

Question 4130. The Joel 2 Holy Spirit prophecy is one of the most significant in the entire Old Testament. "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour ...

Question 4129. The sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah 11 is not a reference to seven separate spirits but to the Holy Spirit in the fullness of His Person and ministry, described ...

Question 4148. The Spirit symbolised by fire is one of the most dramatic and recurring pictures in Scripture, reaching its most famous expression at Pentecost, where "divided tongues as of ...

Question 4147. The Spirit symbolised by a dove is one of the most visually arresting pictures in the whole New Testament, appearing at the precise moment of Jesus' baptism when ...

Question 4146. The names and titles of the Holy Spirit in Scripture are far more numerous, and far more theologically loaded, than most believers realise, and working through them carefully ...

Question 4145. The liberty of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is the freedom Paul says belongs to everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, a freedom from the old ...

Question 4144. The ministry of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3 is Paul's description of the new covenant he has been entrusted to preach, a covenant written not on stone ...

Question 4143. The spiritual man and natural man in 1 Corinthians 2 are Paul's two categories for describing how human beings relate to the things of God, and the difference ...

Question 4142. The continuous filling of the Spirit is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes "be filled with the Spirit" in Ephesians 5:18, and the Greek grammar ...

Question 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it ...

Question 4140. The Spirit of adoption is Paul's name in Romans 8:15 for the Holy Spirit in His specific work of bringing us, as believers, into the felt reality of ...

Question 4139. The groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26 is Paul's description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us with what he calls "groanings too deep for words", at ...

Question 4150. The Spirit symbolised by oil is one of the oldest pictures in the Bible, and it carries a weight that is easy to miss if we only think ...

Question 4149. There is a reason the Spirit symbolised by wind runs all the way through the Bible, from the second verse of Genesis to the upper room at Pentecost, ...

Question 4158. The Lakeland Outpouring was a series of nightly meetings held in Lakeland, Florida, in 2008, led by a travelling evangelist and broadcast widely over Christian television and the ...

Question 4157. The Brownsville Revival was a sustained season of intense meetings that began on Father's Day in 1995 at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, and continued for ...

Question 4156. The Toronto Blessing is the name given to a wave of unusual religious phenomena that began in 1994 at a church near Toronto airport and spread to thousands ...

Question 4155. This is one of the genuinely puzzling sayings of Jesus, and blasphemy against the Spirit seems at first to be ranked as worse than blasphemy against the Son ...

Question 4154. The fear of the unforgivable sin is one of the heaviest burdens I am ever asked to help carry, and it tends to settle on the most sensitive ...

Question 4153. Can a true Christian commit the unforgivable sin? I want to answer that plainly at the very start, because leaving it hanging only prolongs the fear: no, a ...

Question 4152. Few questions arrive in a pastor's study carrying more fear than this one, and the unforgivable sin has tormented more tender consciences than almost any other phrase in ...

Question 4151. The Spirit symbolised by water is a picture that would have spoken instantly to people who knew what it was to be thirsty. We turn a tap and ...

Question 4161. Soaking prayer is a style of prayer that grew up in renewal and charismatic circles, in which a person lies down or sits quietly, often with gentle worship ...

Question 4160. Grave soaking, sometimes called grave sucking or mantle grabbing, is the practice in some charismatic circles of lying on or beside the grave of a famous dead preacher ...

Question 4159. The holy laughter movement is the label attached to a wave of charismatic experience that surged through certain churches from the early 1990s onward, in which whole congregations ...

Question 4168. The Holy Spirit empowers elders for the work of leading a local church, and the New Testament shows us how, in the appointing of overseers, in the gifts ...

Question 4167. Anointing oil runs right through the Bible, from the consecration of priests and kings in the Old Testament to the instruction in James that the elders anoint the ...

Question 4166. The doctrine of initial evidence is the classic Pentecostal teaching that speaking in tongues is the necessary first sign that a person has been baptised in the Holy ...

Question 4165. The Word of Faith movement is the stream of teaching, popularised through prosperity preachers and broadcast ministries, that treats faith as a creative force released by spoken words ...

Question 4164. Kenneth Hagin, who died in 2003, was the man more than any other who gave the Word of Faith movement its shape, and his teaching on the Holy ...

Question 4163. The Latter Rain movement was a revival that broke out in 1948 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and although it was formally disowned by the main Pentecostal denominations within ...

Question 4162. Bethel Church in Redding, California, has become one of the most influential charismatic ministries in the world, and its doctrine of the Holy Spirit shapes the worship, expectations, ...

Question 4178. How does the Holy Spirit guide a believer in vocational discernment, in those large decisions about what work to take up, where to live, and how to spend ...

Question 4177. What is the Spirit's role in a person's calling to ministry, and how can anyone be sure that the call is from God rather than from their own ...

Question 4176. When Paul tells Timothy to stir up the gift that is in him, what exactly is he asking his young colleague to do? The phrase has a vivid ...

Question 4175. Can a believer today receive a spiritual gift through the laying on of hands, the way Timothy seems to have received something through Paul's hands? This is a ...

Question 4174. When it comes to identifying spiritual gifts, believers often reach first for a questionnaire, tick a few boxes, and come away with a printout telling them their top ...

Question 4173. Do spiritual gifts change over time, or once the Spirit gives a gift is it fixed for life like the colour of your eyes? This is a question ...

Question 4172. Can a Christian have more than one gift from the Holy Spirit, or are we each handed a single speciality and told to stay in our lane? The ...

Question 4171. The difference between spiritual gifts and talents, and between both of those and a learned ability, is a question I am asked more often than almost any other ...

Question 4170. The difference between Spirit-led preaching and emotion-led preaching is one of the most practically important things a preacher can learn, and one of the easiest to get wrong ...

Question 4169. The Holy Spirit and ordination are joined together in the New Testament far more closely than our tidy modern ceremonies sometimes let on. We tend to picture ordination ...

Question 4188. Anyone who has preached for long comes to feel the weight of this question, because the work of the Spirit in preaching is the difference between words that ...

Question 4187. There is no hour in which the ministry of the Spirit is more precious than the last, and to ask how He will comfort a dying believer is ...

Question 4186. The ministry of the Spirit in doubt is something I wish more Christians understood, because doubt frightens believers far more than it needs to. A question rises that ...

Question 4184. Most believers, if they walk with God long enough, come to know what I call the dry places, and the ministry of the Spirit in wilderness seasons is ...

Question 4183. When we talk about the Spirit in suffering, we are touching one of the most tender places in the Christian life, because suffering is where our theology either ...

Question 4182. Almost every Christian I have ever pastored has had at least one sin that seems to cling closer than the rest, and the longing to overcome a besetting ...

Question 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong ...

Question 4180. When people ask me how the Spirit and marriage decisions relate, they usually want one of two things. Either they are single and longing to know whether a ...

Question 4179. Few questions touch daily Christian living as closely as the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience, because both of them speak to us from within and we ...

Question 4198. We talk a great deal about famous missionaries and almost never about the fact that the Holy Spirit is the primary missionary of the church, and I am ...

Question 4197. We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul's warning was written to a whole ...

Question 4196. The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the ...

Question 4195. When Paul calls the Philippians to be of one mind, he is not asking a roomful of different people to think identical thoughts, and a great deal of ...

Question 4194. When Paul tells the Ephesians to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3), he hands the church one of ...

Question 4193. Nothing wounds a congregation quite like church division, and nothing exposes how badly we need the Holy Spirit more clearly than the way a fellowship can tear itself ...

Question 4192. Few subjects make a congregation more uneasy than church discipline, and almost no one stops to ask what the Holy Spirit has to do with it. We tend ...

Question 4191. Ask most people what the Holy Spirit has to do with believer's baptism and they will picture the water and stop there, as though the Spirit were a ...

Question 4190. We rarely stop to ask what the Holy Spirit is doing at the Lord's Supper, and I think that is because we have quietly assumed He is not ...

Question 4189. There is a world of difference between reading the Bible and meeting God in it, and that difference is the whole point when we ask how the Spirit ...

Question 4199. The bond between the Spirit and resurrection is one of the richest truths the New Testament holds out to us, and it answers a question that sits quietly ...

Question 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers ...

Question 4021. How does the Spirit sanctifies us? I love the question because the answer takes us straight to the heart of how God changes a person. To say that ...

Question 04123. Speaking in tongues today divides opinion in the church perhaps more sharply than any other single spiritual gift, and I want to give this question the space a ...

Question 4019. What is the difference between carnal and spiritual Christians? The contrast between carnal and spiritual believers comes straight out of Paul's letter to a church that was behaving ...

Question 4100.The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is ...

Question 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like ...

Question 4014. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the modern church, and few subjects have caused more confusion, division and quiet discouragement ...

Question 04038.Being drunk in the Spirit describes a state, claimed in some charismatic meetings, in which believers stagger, slur their words, laugh uncontrollably, or behave as though intoxicated, all of ...

Question 4079. Whether losing the filling of the Spirit happens through a single, dramatic act of sin or through a slower, more gradual drift is a genuinely practical pastoral question, ...

Question 4077. The laying on hands appears repeatedly in the Acts narratives connected to the Spirit's reception, and I want to work through those specific passages carefully, because the pattern ...

Question 4078. How the Spirit's filling relates to intercessory prayer is a connection Scripture draws explicitly, and understanding it will change how you approach prayer for others, particularly when you ...

Question 4075. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related but distinct realities, and confusing the two has caused more pastoral trouble in Baptist churches than almost any other misunderstanding in ...

Question 4076. Second blessing language has circulated in evangelical churches for well over a century, usually describing a dramatic, identifiable post-conversion experience in which a believer receives a fuller measure ...

Question 4073. The Spirit's distinct personhood is one of those doctrines that sounds like abstract technical furniture until you try to pray, worship, or teach without a clear grasp of ...

Question 4074. The counsel of God is not a phrase Scripture uses lightly. It describes the settled purpose and plan that God formed within Himself before He ever spoke creation ...

Question 4072. The deep things of God are the subject of one of Paul's boldest claims about the Holy Spirit, made in passing in a letter to a fractious, spiritually ...

Question 4069. The Spirit before Pentecost operated on a genuinely different basis from His ministry today, and understanding that difference clears up a great deal of confusion about how Old ...

Question 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must ...

Question 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit's leading strikes many believers as an ...

Question 4089. I get asked about this more than almost anything else in pastoral conversation, so let me say plainly that guidance through dreams is something Scripture treats with real ...

Question 4086. Spirit's conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person ...

Question 4082. Spirit's intercession is one of the most quietly comforting truths in the whole of Romans 8, and it is worth asking directly whether grieving the Spirit through unconfessed ...

Question 4083. Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences a Christian can go through, the sense that yesterday's warmth in prayer has gone cold overnight and nothing you ...

Question 4080. Does the filling and assurance of a believer's salvation genuinely connect to one another, or are they two entirely separate matters that should never be confused. I want ...

Question 4081. Grieving the Spirit is one of two warnings Paul gives about how believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit, and the other, quenching the Spirit, gets ...

Question 4096. I get asked fairly often whether the fruit of Spirit in Galatians 5 and the character Jesus describes in the Beatitudes are really describing the same thing, and ...

Question 4097.Character formation is a phrase psychologists reach for almost as often as pastors do, and that overlap is worth pausing on before going any further. Anyone who has watched ...

Question 4098.The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of ...

Question 4094. Gideon's fleece has become popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as confirmation of His ...

Question 4095. Scripture does not specify which career I should pursue, which city I should live in, or which of two apparently godly people I should marry. That silence is ...

Question 4093. Learning to discern Spirit's leading from my own preferences, fears and appetites is, in my experience, one of the hardest and most necessary skills in the Christian life ...

Question 4092. Elijah's journey to Horeb is one of the most emotionally honest passages in the entire Old Testament, and I think that is exactly why so many believers find ...

Question 04116. Whether spiritual gifts today remain a genuine part of the church's life is one of the most practically consequential questions in modern evangelicalism, because the answer shapes what ...

Question 04113. Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television ...

Question 4109. Sign gifts are often assumed, even by thoughtful Christians, to have belonged exclusively to the twelve apostles, as a kind of one-off credential to authenticate their unique office ...

Question 4111. Water baptism does not sit in the same fixed relationship to the Holy Spirit's coming everywhere we look in Acts, and that surprises people the first time they ...

Question 4107. Simon Magus is one of the more unsettling figures in the book of Acts, precisely because he looks, for one brief moment, like a genuine convert. Luke tells ...

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 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them ...

Question 4106. Philip the evangelist is one of my favourite characters in the whole book of Acts, and I suspect he does not get nearly the attention he deserves. He ...

Question 4101.Spirit indwelling and whether it can ever be lost is not an abstract puzzle for theologians to argue over on a wet afternoon. It reaches directly into how a ...

Question 4103. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related closely enough in the New Testament that Christians regularly confuse the two, but they are not the same event, and keeping ...

Question 4102. receiving the Spirit is exactly what the disciples appear to be doing on resurrection evening, when Jesus breathes on them behind locked doors and says, 'Receive the Holy ...

Question 4050. The interpretation of tongues is the gift that quietly does the heavy lifting whenever tongues are used in the gathered church, and yet it is the one we ...

Question 4051. Few subjects in the church today generate more heat and less light than the gift of healing. On one side the airwaves are filled with dramatic claims and ...

Question 4052. The gift of miracles tends to be handled in one of two unhappy ways. Either it is inflated into something sensational, a kind of spiritual circus act, or ...

Question 4054. The word of knowledge appears exactly once in Paul's list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, and that single appearance has carried an enormous amount of theological weight ...

Question 4053. I get asked about the gifts of the Spirit more than almost any other subject in pastoral ministry, and the gift of discernment of spirits sits near the ...

Question 4055. The word of wisdom is easy to confuse with wisdom in the broad biblical sense, the kind James promises every believer may ask God for in James 1:5, ...

Question 4056. Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion, and in some quarters more dangerous claims, than whether apostles and prophets still function today with the same authority ...

Question 4057. The Spirit and resurrection are linked in Scripture far more tightly than most Christians realise, and once you see the connection you will not read Romans 8 the ...

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 04028 The work of the Spirit in evangelism is the most overlooked factor in the whole business of telling people about Jesus. We fret about our nerves, our lack ...

Question 04029 The role of the Spirit in worship is something I wish more congregations understood, because so much confusion about worship comes from forgetting it. We argue endlessly about ...

Question 04026 When I think about the Spirit in prayer, I am always brought back to a verse that quietly demolishes a lot of false confidence about my own praying ...

Question 04027 The assurance of salvation is one of the sweetest gifts the Holy Spirit gives, and one of the most attacked. I have lost count of the believers who ...

Question 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit's ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, ...

Question 04025. There is a real and felt difference between reading the Bible as a piece of ancient literature and reading it as the living word of God speaking into ...

Question 04022. When Paul tells us to walk by the Spirit in Galatians 5:16, he is not handing us a slogan or a mood. "Walk by the Spirit, and you ...

Question 04023. Almost every honest believer eventually asks whether they are walking in the Spirit or the flesh, and means it as a real question and not a rhetorical one ...

Question 04020. The difference between the fruit and gifts of the Spirit is one of those quiet distinctions that keeps a church honest about itself. Both the fruit and gifts ...

Question 04039.The relationship between the Spirit and unbelievers touches something basic about who the Holy Spirit is and what He came into the world to do. If His indwelling is ...

Question 04036. The phrase second blessing describes the belief that there is a definite work of grace beyond conversion, a later crisis experience in which the believer is lifted onto ...

Question 04037.Being slain in the Spirit is one of the most familiar sights in charismatic worship, and one of the most easily misread. A preacher lays a hand on someone, ...

Question 04034. Follow the Gospels closely and you cannot miss how often the Spirit and Jesus appear side by side. From the announcement of his conception to the power of ...

Question 04035. Few areas cause more confusion than the Spirit's ministries to the believer, because the New Testament uses four different pictures that are easy to run together. We are ...

Question 04032. When I open the Bible at its first page I find that the Spirit in creation is already there, before light, before land, before a single living thing ...

Question 04033. Ask where the Bible comes from and you cannot answer well without speaking of the Spirit and inspiration in the same breath. The Scriptures did not fall from ...

Question 04031 The day of Pentecost is one of those hinge moments in the Bible where the whole story turns. Before that morning the disciples were a frightened, waiting handful; ...

Question 4049. The gift of tongues has caused more heat and less light than almost any subject I deal with as a minister. In some circles it is treated as ...

Question 04046. When Paul calls the Spirit's guarantee a deposit on our inheritance, he reaches for a word straight out of the ancient marketplace, and once you see what it ...

Question 04047. The variety of spiritual gifts in the New Testament is wider and richer than most believers realise, and learning what Scripture actually lists is one of the most ...

Question 4048. The gift of prophecy is one of the most discussed and most misunderstood of all the gifts the Spirit gives to the church, and I want to take ...

Question 04044. Becoming more sensitive to the Spirit's leading is something many believers long for and few feel they have grasped. The phrase itself can sound mystical, as though some ...

Question 04045. To call your body the Spirit's temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 ...

Question 04042. Paul tells us not to grieve the Spirit, and I have noticed over the years that most believers nod at that instruction without ever asking what it actually ...

Question 04040.The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle ...

Question 04041.Few questions unsettle a tender conscience like falling away, and few passages of Scripture stir more argument than Hebrews 6:4-6. There the writer describes people who were once enlightened, ...

Question 4017. What is resisting the Holy Spirit, and is it something a Christian can do? The phrase comes to us from a tense and dramatic moment in the book ...

Question 4018. Can you lose the Holy Spirit once you have Him? This is a tender question, and it is usually asked by someone who is frightened rather than curious ...

Question 4011. The role of the Spirit in prayer is one of the most comforting truths I know, and also one of the most neglected. We talk a great deal ...

Question 4012. To quench the Spirit is a phrase Paul drops into a single short verse, and yet it carries a warning every believer needs to hear. We can, by ...

Question 4013. Praying in the Spirit is a phrase that has been pulled in two very different directions, and I want to bring it back to what Scripture actually means ...

Question 04120. The Spirit's illuminating work inside a believer and His convicting work upon an unbeliever are close cousins in Scripture, yet they are not the same ministry, and mixing ...

Question 04121. Laying on hands for the sick is one of those practices that can provoke suspicion in one congregation and warm expectation in another, and I think both reactions ...

Question 4016. Can we pray to the Holy Spirit, or should we only ever pray to the Father or the Son? I get asked this more than you might think, ...

Question 4005. Giving glory to the Spirit is something many believers feel oddly uncertain about, and the question deserves a straight answer. We sing freely to the Father and to ...

Question 4015. When someone asks me what the procession of the Spirit means, I usually start by admitting that it is one of those phrases the church has used for ...

Question 07006. Few passages have caused more private agony than the one about the unforgivable sin, and I have lost count of the number of believers who have come to ...

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 4059. The Holy Spirit's deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and ...

Question 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has ...

Question 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked ...

Question 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic ...

Question 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for ...

Question 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and ...

Question 9109. How does a church honour spiritual gifts without sliding into charismatic excess? That question has followed me through my whole ministry, because I am persuaded that both errors ...

Question 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone's confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy ...

Question 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded ...

Question 04117. Third wave charismatic is the name usually given to a movement that emerged among evangelical, non-Pentecostal churches in the 1980s, most closely associated with John Wimber and the ...

Question 04118. Spiritual impartation is the phrase charismatic circles use so often that many Christians employ it without ever pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches ...

Question 04119. The sealing of the Spirit is the term Paul uses in Ephesians to describe something that happened to you the moment you believed and that nothing since has ...

Question 1008. The question of dreams and visions and prophecy today stirs up real confusion and no small amount of division in the church. Does God still speak through such ...

Question 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how ...

Question 1028. The Holy Spirit's role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with ...

Question 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit's genuine, active work in a believer's life gets confused constantly with the very different ...

Question 1149. The Spirit's inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same ...

Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The ...

Question 4010. The fruit of the Spirit is one of those phrases I hear quoted so easily that we rarely stop and ask what it actually promises about the Christian ...

Question 4008. The guidance of the Spirit is one of the dearest privileges of the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. Many believers picture it as a ...

Question 4007. The still small voice is one of those phrases that has wandered a long way from its home, and I want to walk it back. People use it ...

Question 4006. The Spirit's voice is something believers ask me about constantly, usually after someone has told them that God spoke to them in an audible voice and they are ...

Question 4004. Can we really grieve the Spirit? Ephesians 4:30 says we can, and it is a command both sobering and, when you stop to think about it, quite remarkable: ...

Question 4003. Being filled with the Spirit is one of those phrases that gets pulled in two opposite directions, and I think both of them miss it. Some treat it ...

Question 4002. When do we receive the Holy Spirit? I want to answer that we receive the Holy Spirit at the moment of saving faith, fully and permanently, and not ...

Question 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul's lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer's life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he ...

Question 4001. The person of the Spirit is the first thing I want settled when anyone asks me who the Holy Spirit really is, because almost every mistake people make ...

Question 4000. The doctrine of the Spirit is the part of Christian teaching that asks who the Holy Spirit is, what He does, and what His nearness means for an ...

Question 12027 Whether sex is a biological reality or a social construct has moved from academic seminars to primary schools in about two decades, which is remarkably fast for an ...

Question 11059. Psychology and Scripture is a subject that produces more heat than light in most Christian conversations, and I have watched believers land in two equally unhelpful ditches. On ...

Question 5011.Can we trust our hearts? Our culture answers before the question is finished: follow your heart, be true to yourself, you do you. It is the closest thing the ...

Question 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never ...

Question 5007. Ask me when human life begins and I will not reach first for a laboratory or a law court. I will reach for the Bible, because the question ...

Question 5045 Whether human beings consist of two parts — body and soul/spirit — or three distinct parts — body, soul, and spirit as separate entities — is a question ...

Question 2055. God created us, and the reason why sits underneath most of the anxiety that drives people towards religion in the first place, and towards its alternatives too. Why ...

Question 60093. Cain's wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air ...

Question 13012. Noah's nakedness is one of those passages people read quickly and hope nobody asks about. A righteous man plants a vineyard, gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, ...

Question 5000. Biblical anthropology sounds like an intimidating phrase, but it names one of the most practical questions theology ever asks: what, exactly, is a human being? The word comes ...

Question 5001. The mind and brain question sits at one of the most interesting crossroads of science and Scripture. Neuroscience has mapped the brain in astonishing detail, tracing the neural ...

Question 5004.Ask ten people to define biblical masculinity and you will get a dozen answers, most of them borrowed from culture rather than Scripture. One camp gives us the swaggering ...

Question 5005.Biblical femininity is one of those subjects where the caricatures arrive before the Bible does. One stereotype paints the godly woman as a doormat, decorative and silent; the reaction ...

Question 5006.God created us male and female, and Genesis announces it not as biology trivia but as theology of the highest order. The statement sits inside the Bible's very first ...

Question 5010.How the church treats people with disabilities reveals what it really believes about the image of God. Not what it prints in its statement of faith, but what it ...

Question 05039. Why did God create us? Scripture answers that God created us out of the overflow of His own love, for His glory and for our joy, and I ...

Question 05041. The imago Dei is the doctrine that determines how a Christian should think about the environment, and I want to show you why it steers us safely between ...

Question 05042. Human longevity is one of those subjects where the Bible’s early chapters startle the modern reader, and the questions they raise deserve straight answers. Methuselah lived 969 years ...

Question 05043. Human consciousness has become an urgent theological topic, because machines now imitate so much of what we do that many people are asking whether anything distinguishes us at ...

Question 05044. The relationship between brain and soul becomes intensely practical the day someone you love starts to disappear behind dementia, a stroke, or a brain injury. The face is ...

Question 05045. Are soul and spirit two words for one thing, or two distinct parts of you? That is the heart of the long debate between dichotomy, the view that ...

Question 5024. To be made from dust is Scripture's blunt, unflattering, and strangely comforting description of what we are. "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ...

Question 5025. The breath of life is what turned a beautifully shaped pile of dust into a living man. "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ...

Question 5026. Resurrection bodies are the great forgotten hope of the Christian faith. Ask the average believer what happens after death and you will hear about souls going to heaven, ...

Question 5028. Body and soul belong together; that is the short answer to the body and soul question, and almost every error on this subject comes from pulling them apart ...

Question 5029. God's image is the single most important truth about you that you did not choose, earn, or vote on. "So God created man in his own image, in ...

Question 5030. The human soul is spoken of everywhere and defined almost nowhere. We say a singer has soul, that a ship sank with all souls aboard, that someone sold ...

Question 5031. The human spirit is the dimension of you that was made for God Himself, and it is the least understood part of human nature. We hear plenty about ...

Question 5033. The human conscience is the courtroom God built into every human heart. Long before a missionary arrives or a Bible is opened, something inside a person prosecutes and ...

Question 6074. Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam's fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It ...

Question 5035. Are we born sinners, or do we become sinners later by imitation and bad choices? Stand in any toddler group for an afternoon and you will have empirical ...

Question 5037. Free will is one of those subjects where philosophers tie knots, theologians draw swords, and ordinary believers quietly wonder what they are allowed to think. So let me ...

Question 5038. The purpose of life is the question every human being carries, whether they ever say it aloud or not. It surfaces at three in the morning, at gravesides, ...

Question 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does ...

Question 5013.The question of babies who die is not an academic one, and I refuse to treat it academically. It is asked at gravesides small enough to break your heart, ...

Question 5017.The words image and likeness in Genesis 1:26 have generated more theology per syllable than almost any pair in the Bible, and one of the first questions people ask ...

Question 5012.The age of accountability is the idea that a child is not held responsible before God for accepting or rejecting the gospel until they are capable of genuinely understanding ...

Question 5018.Psalm 8 begins under a night sky, and you can almost see David leaning on his shepherd's staff, looking up. When I look at your heavens, the work of ...

Question 5019.Whether animals have souls sounds like a child's question, usually asked through tears over a dead pet, but it opens onto real theology, and the Bible's answer is more ...

Question 5020.Humans and angels are the Bible's two great orders of rational creatures, and comparing them is one of the most clarifying exercises in theology. Popular culture muddles them endlessly: ...

Question 5021. To be wonderfully made is not a compliment David pays himself in Psalm 139; it is worship he pays to his Maker. "I praise you, for I am ...

Question 5023. Human personhood is the question beneath nearly every moral battle of our age, though it rarely gets named. Abortion, euthanasia, embryo research, artificial intelligence, the treatment of the ...

Question 5022. Human dignity is the worth that belongs to every human being simply because God made us in His own image, and that single sentence carries more weight than ...

Question 5008.Spiritual perception is a real capacity, and the Bible is remarkably precise about how much of it an unregenerate person actually has. Get this question wrong in one direction ...

Question 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How ...

Question 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like ...

Question 6021. To harden your heart, in biblical language, is to make yourself progressively less responsive to God. It is not usually a decision anyone announces. It is the cumulative ...

Question 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned ...

Question 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion ...

Question 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, ...

Question 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and ...

Question 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain ...

Question 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence ...

Question 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many ...

Question 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent ...

Question 6030. Envy and jealousy get used interchangeably in ordinary speech, and Scripture is more careful than we are. One of them is always sinful. The other can be a ...

Question 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God ...

Question 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, ...

Question 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that ...

Question 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks ...

Question 2014. Does God hate sinners, or does He only hate sin? It is one of those questions that sounds like a technicality until someone asks it through tears, usually ...

Question 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by ...

Question 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because ...

Question 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer's spare room. He is describing the person you used ...

Question 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is ...

Question 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something ...

Question 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us ...

Question 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul's blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary ...

Question 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is ...

Question 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up ...

Question 6063. Wilful sin is sin committed with open eyes. Not the sin that overtakes you, not the sin you regret before you have finished it, but the sin you ...

Question 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who ...

Question 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, ...

Question 6071. Scripture defines sexual sin with considerable care, and masturbation is never named among the things it defines. That silence is the first fact any honest answer has to ...

Question 6072. Lust and attraction are not the same thing, and a great many sincere Christians have been tormented by the assumption that they are. Noticing that someone is beautiful ...

Question 6069. Are there degrees of sin? Yes and no, and both halves of that answer need holding at once or you will end up in one of two ditches ...

Question 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what ...

Question 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and ...

Question 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, ...

Question 08084 Satan's role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything ...

Question 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two ...

Question 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never ...

Question 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the ...

Question 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the ...

Question 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have ...

Question 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been ...

Question 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval ...

Question 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, ...

Question 2078. Abel's offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel ...

Question 6076. Paul's thorn in the flesh is one of the great unanswered questions of the New Testament, and I have come to think the silence is deliberate. We are ...

Question 6001. The nature of sin is the first thing we must get clear if the gospel is ever going to make sense, and yet our culture has almost lost ...

Question 6002. The origin of sin is one of the deepest questions a believer can ask, because it presses on the character of God Himself. If God is good, and ...

Question 6003. The consequences of sin reach further than most people ever suspect, and understanding them is essential if we are to grasp what the Lord Jesus actually accomplished on ...

Question 6004. Sin, transgression and iniquity appear together so often in Scripture that many readers assume they are interchangeable, but each word carries its own weight, and together they diagnose ...

Question 6005. Are all sins equal in God’s eyes? You have probably heard it claimed; it usually surfaces when someone wants to stop a comparison in its tracks, and it ...

Question 6006. The sin nature is the Bible’s explanation for a fact every honest person has noticed: we do not become sinners by sinning; we sin because something in us ...

Question 6007. Sinless perfection has been promised by more than one movement in church history: the claim that a Christian can reach a point in this life where sinning stops ...

Question 6008. Confession of sin is one of those practices every Christian knows they should maintain and many quietly find confusing. What exactly are we doing when we confess? Is ...

Question 6009. Overcoming sin is the daily concern of every genuine believer, and the honest ones will tell you how the usual methods have gone: willpower failed, resolutions broke, promises ...

Question 6010. Presumptuous sins are singled out in one of David’s best-known prayers, and the singling out is deliberate: "Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not ...

Question 6073. Unintentional sin is a genuine biblical category, and the answer to whether we are responsible for it is yes, with a very large mercy attached. Scripture is clear ...

Question 11068. Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded ...

Question 6074. Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam's fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It ...

Question 5035. Are we born sinners, or do we become sinners later by imitation and bad choices? Stand in any toddler group for an afternoon and you will have empirical ...

Question 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does ...

Question 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, ...