Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 same way again. It is easy to speak of the resurrection purely in terms of God’s raw power, and leave the Holy Spirit as a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 they carried in the first century. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its confident assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, but Paul has something more specific in mind when he lists it as a distinct gift in 1 Corinthians 12:8. Getting the distinction right matters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 ever since, not least because charismatic ministry has attached a very specific meaning to it that may or may not reflect what Paul had in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 top of the list of things people misunderstand. Some picture it as a kind of spiritual x-ray vision, a superpower for spotting demons in a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 conversation about God’s oneness: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The name comes from its first Hebrew word,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 – “And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the day” (Genesis 32:24). A man – that is all the narrator will say at first. Yet by sunrise Jacob is limping away from the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 temple, and made Israel unique among all the nations of the earth. Curiously, the word “shekinah” itself never appears in the Bible. It comes from…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 trackless wilderness for forty years, glowing like a furnace by night and standing like a banner by day. Yet ask what the pillar of cloud…