Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1188 If we want to learn how to read the Old Testament, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled them is not one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1160 Most readers know that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the language of Abraham’s descendants and the tongue of Moses, David and the prophets. Fewer realise that a small but real portion of it was written in another language altogether, namely Aramaic. When this is first noticed it can come as a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1161 Jesus and his first followers were Jewish men who spoke Aramaic in their daily lives and read the Hebrew Scriptures in the synagogue. It seems natural, then, to expect that the books written about them and by them would be set down in Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet the entire New Testament has come…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1170 When we say that the Bible is the Word of God, we at once raise a question about the men who actually wrote it. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people who lived in real times and wrote with their own hands. How then can the words they wrote be at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1164 Prophecy fills a great portion of the Bible. Whole books of the Old Testament are given over to it, the Gospels record the words of Jesus about things yet to come, and the book of Revelation closes the canon with a sweeping vision of the end. Yet prophecy is also the part of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1162 The parables of Jesus are among the best loved and most quoted parts of the Bible. The lost sheep, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan and the sower have shaped the imagination of believers for two thousand years. Yet for all their familiarity, the parables are often badly handled. People squeeze meanings out…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1177 A great deal of the Old Testament comes to us in the form of story. The accounts of Abraham and Sarah, of Joseph and his brothers, of the exodus from Egypt, of David and Saul, of Elijah and the kings of Israel, all of these are narrative, the telling of things that happened….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1175 One of the questions people often raise about the Bible is how the church decided which books belonged in the New Testament. Was the list settled late, by the vote of a council centuries after the apostles, as some popular books and films have claimed? The Muratorian fragment is one of the pieces…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1029 A third of the Old Testament is poetry. The Psalms, much of Job, the Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Lamentations, and great stretches of the prophets were written not as plain prose but as carefully crafted verse. Many Christians read these books the same way they read a narrative or an epistle, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1178 A large part of the New Testament is made up of letters. Paul wrote thirteen of them, and there are further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to the Hebrews. These epistles contain some of the richest teaching in all of Scripture, the great expositions of grace, the calls to…