Dispensationalism

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 11092 Saturday or Sunday is a question that arrives in two very different tones. Sometimes it comes from a believer who has been challenged by a Seventh-day Adventist or ...

Question 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 ...

Question 11089 The law of Christ is the phrase Paul uses when he wants to say that a believer released from the Mosaic covenant is not therefore released from moral ...

Question 10065. Is modern Israel prophetically significant? My answer is a carefully qualified yes. I believe the return of Jewish people to the land, and the existence of a Jewish ...

Question 10008. The Land covenant of Deuteronomy 29-30 is the least known of Israel's great covenants, and the old label "Palestinian covenant" has not helped it, since the covenant concerns ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10024. The pretribulational rapture is the view I hold, and it is simply this: Jesus will catch His Church up to Himself before the seven-year Tribulation begins, not partway ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10023. The second coming of Jesus and the rapture of the Church are often folded into a single event, and that folding causes more confusion in prophecy than almost ...

Question 10094. Historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism agree on the headline. Jesus returns bodily to the earth before a literal thousand year reign, and He reigns in person over a ...

Question 10136. The preterist view holds that most or all of biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the first century, chiefly in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the ...

Question 10137. The futurist view holds that the visions of Revelation from chapter 4 onwards describe events still to come, and that the great bulk of unfulfilled biblical prophecy will ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10132. The eternal state follows the Millennium, and confusing the two accounts for a remarkable number of muddles in popular teaching about the future. They are consecutive periods with ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10144. Inaugurated eschatology is the most widely held framework in evangelical scholarship today, and if you have read almost any modern commentary on the Gospels you have met it ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10142. Is God's kingdom something I am living in now, or something I am waiting for? I get asked that more often than you might think, usually by someone ...

Question 10143. Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10009. Replacement theology, the teaching that the Church has permanently superseded Israel in God's purposes and inherited her promises in spiritualised form, is one of the oldest and, I ...

Question 10140. The kingdom of God is one of those phrases I hear used constantly and defined almost never. It turns up in prayers, in hymns, on conference banners and ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10007. The New Covenant is announced in Jeremiah with a named addressee, "the house of Israel and the house of Judah," and yet the Lord Jesus lifted the cup ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10006. The Davidic covenant is God's sworn commitment that a descendant of David will sit on David's throne for ever, and I want to show you why this promise, ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Why we should believe in the 'Rapture' (from the Latin for 'caught up') ...

Question 10050.Premillennialism is the view that Jesus will return before the thousand-year reign described in Revelation 20, coming in glory to establish His kingdom on the earth in person. The ...

Question 10068. The covenants with Israel are the backbone of biblical prophecy, and if you get them right a great deal else falls into place. There are five of them, ...

Question 10067. Does God still have a plan for Israel? Yes, and I hold that with more confidence than almost anything else I teach about prophecy, because Paul devotes three ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 60071. Christian Zionism has become a term of abuse in a good deal of Christian writing, used to describe a caricature that almost nobody actually holds. Before I defend ...

Question 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits ...

Question 60066. British Israelism is the claim that the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples of north-western Europe are the physical descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, lost after the ...

Question 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 ...

Question 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest ...

Question 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 ...

Question 60098. Peter's gospel and Paul's gospel are treated by some teachers as two different messages, with the consequence that only Paul's letters, and in the more extreme versions only ...

Question 9002 The word "church" is thrown around quite loosely today. People talk about "going to church" as if it were simply a building or a Sunday morning activity. But ...

Question 3039. How were Old Testament believers saved, when the cross lay centuries in their future? It is one of the best questions a thoughtful reader of Scripture can ask ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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" ...

Question 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: ...

Question 12046. Is Christian nationalism biblical? My short answer is no, though the question deserves a great deal more care than the shouting on either side usually allows. Some of ...

Question 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 ...

Question 60091. The Canaanite conquest is the passage in the Old Testament I am asked about more than any other, and it deserves better than the two standard responses. One ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10029. Are the Jewish people still God's chosen people, or did their election end when the nation rejected its Messiah? I answer without hesitation that Israel remains God's chosen ...

Question 10082. The Holy Spirit will not be removed from the earth during the Tribulation, and I want to say that at the outset because few end times questions produce ...

Question 10036. The times of the Gentiles and the fullness of the Gentiles sound almost identical, and they are constantly confused, yet they describe two quite different things in Scripture ...

Question 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, ...

Question 11056. The geographical progression of Acts 1:8, from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and on to the end of the earth, is often read as a pleasant piece of ...

Question 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 ...

Question 4058. The Spirit in the Millennium is a subject Scripture addresses more directly, and more beautifully, than most believers realise, and I want to trace what the Old and ...

Question 10066. Replacement theology is the view that the Church has taken Israel's place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to the nation now belong to ...

Question 12045. Defending religious liberty while believing that idolatry is a sin against God feels, to a lot of people, like holding two contradictory positions at once. I get asked ...

Question 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 ...

Question 4099.Receiving the Spirit is exactly what Paul asks these Ephesian men about in Acts 19:2, and the answer they give has been fought over ever since, mostly by people ...

Question 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 ...

Question 1037. Literal interpretation is the single most misunderstood term in the whole discussion of how we read the Bible, mostly because critics and defenders alike often use it to ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to ...

Question 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament ...

Question 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 13. Itching ears is one of Paul's most quietly devastating phrases, and it describes a danger that is more alive today than ever. Writing his final letter to Timothy, ...

Question 3044. Son of David is the very first title given to Jesus in the New Testament: 'The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the ...

Question 12. False doctrine spreads like gangrene. That is not my phrase but Paul's, and it is one of the most arresting medical images in all his letters. Writing to ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 10013. The Church and Israel are the two peoples at the centre of God's dealings with humanity, and whether you distinguish them or merge them will quietly determine your ...

Question 10041.Sceptics love to wave 1 Kings 9 in my face and claim the temple promise God made to Solomon collapsed in ruins, so the Bible cannot be trusted after ...

Standing 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 ...