Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7000. Paul calls our salvation the gift of God in one of the best known sentences he ever wrote, and generations of readers have argued about which part of it he meant. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10202. The last trumpet of 1 Corinthians 15:52 is regularly identified with the seventh trumpet of Revelation 11, and that identification is the single strongest argument the posttribulational position has. If Paul’s trumpet is John’s seventh, the church goes through the Tribulation and the pretribulational rapture collapses. So it deserves a careful answer rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10201. Almost every picture in Revelation is borrowed prophetic imagery, and once you see that, the book stops feeling like a code and starts behaving like a conclusion. Estimates vary, but of the roughly four hundred verses in Revelation something close to two thirds contain an allusion to the Hebrew Scriptures, and John never…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10192. The millennial rebellion is one of the strangest paragraphs in the Bible, and one of the most searching. Jesus has reigned in person from Jerusalem for a thousand years, the earth has been full of the knowledge of the Lord, Satan has been shut away, justice has been swift and honest, and then…
Reading Time: 7 minutesStanding with Israel in Biblical Truth and Justice Q10141 Preamble As an Evangelical Baptist committed to the authority of Scripture and the unchanging promises of God, I find myself compelled to respond to recent statements from Baptists Together, BMS World Mission and Baptist Union of Wales that mischaracterise Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence and misrepresent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10170. A continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel is one of those historical facts that almost everybody in the modern debate assumes away. The popular story says the Romans expelled the Jews in AD 70, the land lay empty of them for nearly nineteen centuries, and then in 1948 a European population…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10162. Modern Israel is the one nation on earth whose reappearance on the map sends people back to their Bibles, and 14 May 1948 is the date that did it. I have lost count of the conversations that begin with someone asking whether that afternoon in Tel Aviv was the fulfilment of prophecy, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10153. The blessed hope is one of those expressions that has been said so often in Christian circles that it can slide past the ear without registering. Paul used it once, with great precision, and he attached it to a very specific event rather than to a general optimism about things working out. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10148. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are among the most searching pages in the New Testament, and also among the most misused. Some readers treat them as a coded map of church history. Others skip them entirely in their hurry to reach the trumpets and bowls. Both approaches miss what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10145. There is an eschatological tension running through the New Testament that trips up almost every new reader of the Bible sooner or later. You are told you have been saved, and then told to work out your salvation. You are told you possess eternal life, and then told to lay hold of it….