Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08141. Claims of angelic visitations arrive in pastoral ministry more often than people outside it would guess, and they rarely arrive at a convenient moment. Somebody stays behind after a service, or rings on a weekday evening, and tells you what they saw. How you answer in the next sixty seconds matters enormously, so…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08120. Few questions in pastoral ministry generate as much fear and confusion as whether demon possession is possible for a believer, and few have been answered so badly by so many well-meaning people. My answer is no, and I hold it firmly. But the question deserves more than a flat denial, because the people…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08140. Paul tells the Corinthians that we are to judge angels, and from that single clause a whole industry has grown up teaching that believers hold authority over angels here and now, with instructions on how to exercise it. I want to take the verse seriously and the industry rather less so, because Paul’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08119. Understanding what demons are is not an exercise in morbid curiosity. It is the difference between a believer who takes the enemy seriously without becoming obsessed and one who either dismisses the whole subject or sees a demon behind every difficulty. Scripture is measured on this, which is itself instructive. It tells us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08139. Whether angels experience emotions sounds like a question for a slow afternoon, until you notice how much of the Bible’s angelic material is emotional in tone. They shout, they rejoice, they worship, they cover their faces, and in one case they shudder. I think the answer is plainly yes, and working out what…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08118. The fall of Satan is one of those subjects where Scripture gives us real information without ever supplying a narrative, and the gap between those two things has been filled over the centuries with a great deal of confident material that the Bible never provided. There is no chapter headed The Fall of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08138. The idea of angels at Sinai catches most readers by surprise, because Exodus 19 and 20 describe thunder, smoke, trumpet and the voice of God without mentioning an angelic host at all. Yet three New Testament writers refer to angelic involvement in the giving of the Law as though it were common knowledge….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08117. Knowing who Satan is matters more than most Christians realise, because almost every error in this area comes from a false picture rather than from a false verse. Get his size wrong and you will either live in fear of him or ignore him altogether, and both mistakes suit him perfectly well. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08137. Whether Satan know Scripture is not really in doubt once you have read Matthew 4, because he quotes it there, quotes it accurately, and quotes it to the Son of God. The more useful question is how he uses it, because that is where the danger lies for us. A misquoted Bible is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08115. The idea of guardian angels is one of the most widely held beliefs in popular Christianity and one of the least carefully examined. It appears on nursery walls, in sympathy cards and in the confident assurances people give at funerals, usually without anyone asking what the Bible actually says. My answer is a…