Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10122 Tartarus is the rarest of the New Testament terms for a place of punishment, occurring only once in the entire Bible, in 2 Peter 2:4. It is a word drawn from Greek mythology, and its single New Testament appearance has generated considerable discussion about who is held there, why they are there, and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10119 The word “Sheol” occurs sixty-five times in the Hebrew Old Testament and represents one of the most important concepts in the biblical understanding of death and the afterlife. Yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. English translations have rendered it variously as “the grave,” “the pit,” “hell,” and “the realm of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10120 Hades is one of the most frequently misunderstood terms in the New Testament, largely because English readers associate it automatically with the Greek mythology from which the word originates. But the New Testament writers did not adopt Greek mythology when they used the term. They used the Greek word to express the Hebrew…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10138 Historicism is one of the four major approaches to interpreting the book of Revelation, and for many centuries it was the dominant Protestant reading. It holds that the visions of Revelation describe the broad sweep of church history from the apostolic age to the Second Coming, with the various symbols corresponding to specific…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10118 The phrase “Abraham’s bosom” appears only once in the entire New Testament, in the account of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), and yet it has generated an outsized amount of theological discussion. What did Jesus mean by it? Was He describing an actual location in the afterlife, or was this simply…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10131 The New Testament makes a remarkable promise to believers: they will reign with Christ. This is not metaphorical language for spiritual influence or a poetic way of describing the blessings of salvation. It is a concrete promise about the future role of the redeemed in the administration of Christ’s kingdom. Understanding what this…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10133 The question of whether God will destroy the present creation and replace it with something entirely new, or whether He will renew and transform what already exists, has been debated by careful Bible students for centuries. It is not a question on which the whole of Christian theology hangs, but it touches on…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10129 In the closing chapter of Scripture, the Apostle John describes a vision of breathtaking beauty: a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the centre of the city. The image is not decorative. It draws on a thread of imagery…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10130 The tree of life appears at the very beginning and the very end of the biblical narrative, forming a theological bracket around the entire story of Scripture. What was lost at the fall is restored in the eternal state, and its reappearance in Revelation 22 tells us something profound about what God has…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10128 Few questions in eschatology press as painfully against the human heart as this one. If heaven is the place of perfect joy in the presence of God, how can the redeemed experience that joy while knowing that people they loved on earth are suffering eternal punishment? The question is not academic. It arises…