Studying the Person and work of Jesus Christ—His deity, humanity, virgin birth, sinless life, atoning death, resurrection, ascension, and future return.
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, which is rather like apologising for having been shot at. So where does the line fall? And if Jesus was tempted in every respect as…
Reading Time: 17 minutesQuestion 7199. If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things carry on from one age to the next? The question of temple sacrifices after the cross is one of the genuinely hard knots in Scripture,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, 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 earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3017. Jesus and Christ get used interchangeably by most Christians, myself included in ordinary conversation, and there is nothing wrong with that shorthand. But the two words are doing genuinely different jobs, and once you see the distinction between them, several passages of Scripture come into much sharper focus. Let me take each word…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3087. The book of Ruth is only four chapters long, a quiet rural story of famine, bereavement, gleaning, and a wedding, set in the lawless era of the judges. You could read it in fifteen minutes and enjoy it purely as one of literature’s finest short narratives. But the genealogy at its close, running…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3085. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle of Jesus, apart from the resurrection itself, recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-15), and that fourfold attestation is itself worth pausing over. Whatever else the early church wanted the world to know about Jesus, this meal…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3084. Roman crucifixion has a strong claim to being the cruellest method of execution human beings have ever devised, and the question of whether anything since has surpassed it deserves an honest answer rather than a pious one. It is partly a historical question, partly a matter of grim comparison, and behind both stands…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3082. Righteous anger sounds to many people like a contradiction in terms, because most of the anger we have ever seen, or produced, has been anything but righteous. Yet the Gospels record Jesus displaying unmistakable anger on several occasions: overturning tables in the temple, glaring round a synagogue at hard-hearted critics, snorting with indignation…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3081. The fig tree that Jesus cursed has puzzled readers for centuries, and I understand why: at first glance it looks like an overreaction to a piece of vegetation, and Mark even tells us “it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13). Why blast a tree for lacking fruit it was not yet…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3080. The humour of Jesus is a subject that makes some Christians nervous, as though laughter were somehow beneath the Man of Sorrows. Nobody asks this question expecting a catalogue of recorded punchlines, and the Gospels preserve no verse that says “Jesus laughed”. But the question behind the question is a serious one: was…