Biblical prophecy and the last days: the rapture, tribulation, second coming, millennium, and final judgment.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10005. The Abrahamic covenant is the backbone of biblical eschatology, and I choose the word backbone deliberately: remove it and the entire prophetic skeleton collapses into a heap of disconnected hopes. Made four thousand years ago with one man from Ur, this covenant governs the storyline of Scripture from Genesis 12 to Revelation 22,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10004. Progressive dispensationalism is the name of a revision movement that arose among dispensational scholars in the late twentieth century, and if you have heard the term and wondered whether it is a refinement or a retreat, you are asking the right question. The movement’s leading names are Craig Blaising, Darrell Bock, and Robert…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10003. Covenant theology and dispensational theology are the two great rival frameworks by which evangelical Christians organise the storyline of Scripture, and the difference between them is not a quarrel over charts; it decides how you read prophecy, how you understand Israel, how you relate law to grace, and what you expect God to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10002. The seven dispensations of the classic dispensational scheme raise an immediate question for anyone new to this subject: does the Bible actually number them, or is seven a human tidy-up? Let me be straight with you from the start. Scripture never says, there are seven dispensations, any more than it says, there is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10001. Dispensational theology is one of the most misrepresented frameworks in the modern church, dismissed by critics who have rarely read its careful exponents and caricatured as a novelty invented in the nineteenth century. So let me tell you plainly what it actually is. Dispensational theology is, at heart, a commitment to reading the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5026. Resurrection bodies are the great forgotten hope of the Christian faith. Ask the average believer what happens after death and you will hear about souls going to heaven, which is true as far as it goes, but it is only the interval, not the finale. The Bible’s final hope is not disembodied souls…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3062. The other resurrections of the Bible are far less famous than the empty tomb, but they are worth knowing well: nine raisings by my count, spread from the days of Elijah to the ministry of Paul. People genuinely dead were genuinely restored to life, and each account is told with the Bible’s characteristic…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2076. Is God in hell? The question of God in hell sounds like a strange question, almost a trick, but I get asked it seriously and often, usually by someone trying to work out whether hell means total abandonment by God or something else. The honest answer depends entirely on what we mean by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2060. Why hell exists is one of the hardest questions people bring to me, and it deserves a careful, honest answer rather than either a dismissive dodge or a callous shrug. The difficulty most people feel is reconciling the love of God with the reality of eternal punishment. So let me walk through what…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1122. The amillennial hermeneutic is the method of reading Scripture, particularly Revelation 20, that leads a great many sincere and careful Christians to conclude there is no future, earthly, thousand year reign of Jesus. I want to walk through how that method actually works, because it is not laziness or unbelief that produces amillennialism….