Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10022. Critics love to say that the rapture is a nineteenth-century invention, cooked up in a British parlour and unknown to the church before then. It is a confident charge, and it is wrong. The rapture is taught in Scripture with a clarity that only a settled prejudice could miss, and I want to…
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: 16 minutesQuestion 10203. Let me tell you plainly why dispensationalism matters so much to me, because it is not a dry label that I wear but a way of reading the whole Bible that has shaped how I see God, how I read history, and where I rest my hope. Dispensationalism is, at its simplest, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09200. The mystery of Christ is Paul’s own name for a truth he regarded as the hidden centrepiece of his ministry: that Jew and Gentile would be joined in one body, the Church, on completely equal terms. “When you read this,” he wrote, “you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” (Ephesians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10020. Unconditional covenants and conditional covenants are the two hinges on which all of biblical prophecy swings, and learning to tell them apart is, I would argue, the single most clarifying skill a Bible reader can acquire. Get the distinction, and Israel’s history, the security of the believer, and the certainty of the Millennium…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10019. The Mosaic law occupies six hundred and thirteen commandments, three biblical books, and a fair amount of Christian confusion, and the confusion usually begins with a wrong assumption: that the law was given as a ladder to heaven. It was not. Paul asks our exact question, “Why then the law?” (Galatians 3:19), and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10018. The partial hardening of Israel has a terminus, and Paul names it with a phrase that repays careful study: “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25). What is this fullness? A number? A period? An event? The answer touches the length of the Church age, the logic of missions,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10017. “All Israel will be saved” is one of the most argued-over clauses in the New Testament, and no wonder: five Greek words carry the weight of the whole debate about Israel’s future. Paul writes: “a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10016. Will ethnic Israel be saved? I mean the question exactly as it sounds: not whether individual Jewish people can come to faith today, which is happening continually, but whether the nation as a nation, the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has a future national conversion on God’s calendar. Scripture’s answer is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10014. The biblical covenants are the load-bearing walls of eschatology, and once you see how they connect, end-times doctrine stops being a heap of curiosities, beasts here, trumpets there, and becomes what it actually is: the account of God finishing signed commitments. Prophecy is not prediction for its own sake; it is covenant-keeping announced…