Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11044. Whether Christians should keep the Jewish festivals has moved from a fringe question to a live one, as the Hebrew Roots movement grows and believers who love Israel start wondering whether they have been missing something God commanded. It is a fair question and it deserves a full answer rather than a dismissal….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9112. The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of the most liberating ideas in the New Testament. Paul uses the word repeatedly in Ephesians and Colossians, and he treats it as the thing that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09038. Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary conversation. People speak of kingdom work when they mean church work, and of building the kingdom when they mean growing a congregation. The New Testament…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09045. Messianic Jews are Jewish people who have come to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and who continue to live as Jews, often worshipping in congregations that keep the Sabbath, mark the biblical feasts and use Hebrew in their services. Some evangelicals regard the movement with suspicion, as though a believer who…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09044. Replacement theology, sometimes called supersessionism, teaches that the church has taken Israel’s place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to Abraham and David now belong to believers in Jesus and there is no distinct future for the Jewish people as a nation. It has been the majority Christian position…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09043. The church began on a particular day, in a particular city, at a particular hour, and I think you can put your finger on it. That claim sounds oddly confident to anyone who has been taught that the church is simply the people of God in every age, stretching back to Adam. But…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7083. Old Testament believers were saved in exactly the same way we are, by grace through faith, and it is worth saying that plainly at the outset because a good deal of confusion surrounds this question. Some assume they were saved by keeping the law, which would make the Old Testament a different religion…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7081. Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument and a great deal of pastoral wreckage. I want to suggest instead that they are two instruments with different jobs, given by the same God,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7080. The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will hear permission to sin. Say that Christians are bound by it and you have contradicted Paul on almost every page of Galatians. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07037. The phrase eternal covenant appears at several points in Scripture, and the question it raises is a fair one: what makes a covenant eternal, and which covenant is being spoken of? The answer matters more than it might first appear, because covenants are the framework on which the whole storyline of the Bible…