Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I should usually end up, even when a scholar somewhere is telling me otherwise. I get asked this question more than almost any other, usually by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every act of corporate worship, every song, every prayer, every sermon, teaches something true or false about who God is, whether or not anyone in the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story running from Genesis to Revelation, because none of these three books mentions the promised offspring of Genesis 3:15, the covenant with Abraham, or the coming…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to compare our modern Old Testament text against manuscripts a thousand years older than anything previously available, and the results overwhelmingly vindicated the accuracy of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01151. Biblical authority runs into the same objection almost every time I discuss it with a thoughtful sceptic: is it not simply circular reasoning to say the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true? It sounds like a genuinely decisive objection the very first time you hear it stated plainly, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt something, whether healing, direction, liberation, or spiritual encounter, and when I gently point out that Scripture seems to say something different, I can watch the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1149. The Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same purpose, and I think keeping that connection in view changes how you approach Bible study. The Spirit who breathed out the text through Moses, Isaiah,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit’s genuine, active work in a believer’s life gets confused constantly with the very different claim that God is still adding new binding content to Scripture. Illumination and ongoing revelation sound similar enough that people slide between them without noticing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1147. The sufficiency of Scripture is a claim that sounds simple until someone asks you to define exactly what it does and does not cover, and I find most confusion about this doctrine comes from people assuming it means something the historic Protestant position never actually claimed. It does not mean the Bible tells…