Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2029. Is the Trinity in the Old Testament, or does it only appear once the New Testament arrives with Jesus and Pentecost? This question matters more than it might first seem, because if the doctrine of the Trinity suddenly appears out of nowhere in the New Testament, with no anticipation whatsoever in Israel’s own…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been…
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: 5 minutesQuestion 1139. Equipped for every good work is the phrase Paul uses to describe the purpose of Scripture in the life of a believer, and it comes at the climax of one of the most personal and urgent letters in the New Testament. Second Timothy was written from a Roman prison cell, likely during Nero’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1138. Rightly handling Scripture is what the apostle Paul commands every believer who teaches or studies the Bible to do, and the phrase comes from one of the most important verses in the New Testament for how we approach the text. Paul writes to Timothy, “Do your best to present yourself to God as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1130. Dispensational hermeneutics gets accused, fairly often and rather confidently, of playing a shell game with the biblical text: reading the Old Testament literally when it suits the argument and switching to symbol whenever a plain reading becomes awkward. I have heard the charge from the pulpit of churches that hold to a very…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1121. The pretribulational rapture is not, as some of its critics sometimes suggest, a doctrine simply invented out of thin air by nineteenth-century prophecy teachers with no genuine textual foundation behind it. It rests on a specific reading of specific texts, held together by a consistent, literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic applied to prophecy the same way…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1120. Does literal interpretation require a young earth position? I hold both a literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic and a young earth reading of Genesis, and I think the two are connected far more closely than many Christians today assume. This is not a fringe or novel combination. It was the standard reading of Genesis across nearly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4105. laying on hands by the apostles, rather than the moment of their belief, is what Luke tells us the Samaritans in Acts 8 were actually waiting for before they received the Holy Spirit, and the gap between believing and receiving has puzzled careful readers for as long as the passage has been studied….