Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 to answer this carefully, because a wrong answer in either direction causes real pastoral damage. Get this connection wrong one way and you risk anxious…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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, and Scripture’s answer turns out to be more nuanced than either a strict once-off model or a purely gradual one alone. I want to work…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 genuinely do not know what to pray or how to pray it. Intercessory prayer, prayer offered on behalf of someone else, is not primarily a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 is genuinely more varied than a single, simplified formula for how believers receive the Spirit today. Getting this right matters, because some traditions have built…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 New Testaments actually promise about this coming era rather than leaving the question in vague, general terms. Understanding the Spirit’s role in the eternal state…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 a modern invention layered onto the text from outside. It is the reading strategy Jesus Himself modelled and explicitly commanded, and taking it seriously changes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 reading any piece of literature responsibly, biblical or otherwise. Nobody reads a newspaper editorial the same way they read a birthday card, and nobody should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 new covenant. It is one of the most rewarding areas of biblical study once its rules are properly understood, and one of the most abused…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 in the church, particularly through the Alexandrian tradition associated with Origen and later through much of medieval exegesis. The question of whether allegorical interpretation should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 mean something it was never meant to mean. I want to state plainly at the outset what this method actually is, because getting the definition…