# Bible Proclaimer


## Posts

- [Why Use the Bible to Answer Everything?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0000-why-use-the-bible-to-answer-everything/): Question 0. Why do I keep going to the Bible for answers when the world is full of other voices? It is a fair question, and it sits right at the heart of everything we do here. Why not simply reach for common sense, or science, or philosophy, or the accumulated wisdom of clever people,...
- [A Counter-Statement](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10141-a-counter-statement/): 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 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...
- [Why is Jesus called the 'Lamb of God'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3046-why-is-jesus-called-lamb-of-god/): Question 3046. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29). With those words John the Baptist introduced Jesus to Israel, and he chose his image with care. He did not say behold the Lion, or the King, or even the Messiah, though all would have been true. He...
- [Did Jesus claim to be God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3048-did-jesus-claim-to-be-god/): Question 3048. The deity of Christ is often said to be a later invention, a doctrine bolted onto the memory of a humble rabbi by councils and emperors centuries after his death. You will hear it in university seminars, in bestselling novels and from courteous visitors at your door: Jesus himself, we are assured, never...
- [What is the 'blood of Jesus' and why does it matter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3036-what-is-the-blood-of-jesus/): Question 3036. The blood of Jesus is one of the most repeated themes in the New Testament, and yet I find that many Christians are hazy about what it actually means. We sing about it, we hear it invoked in prayer, and some traditions treat it almost as a magic formula. But when Peter writes...
- [Who killed Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3037-who-killed-jesus/): Question 3037. Who killed Jesus? It sounds like a simple historical question, the kind a detective could close in an afternoon. Roman soldiers drove the nails, so surely the case is shut. Yet the Bible refuses to leave it there, and church history shows why the question matters so much. Wrong answers to this question...
- [Why was Jesus crucified? Why that specific method?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3038-why-was-jesus-crucified/): Question 3038. The crucifixion of Jesus raises a question most of us have never stopped to ask: why that particular death? If the Son of God had to die for sinners, He could in principle have been stoned like Stephen, beheaded like James, or killed in a hundred quieter ways. Instead, the eternal plan of...
- [Why did Jesus ascend? Why not stay on earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3041-why-did-jesus-ascend/): Question 3041. The ascension of Jesus is the forgotten doctrine of the Christian faith. We celebrate the incarnation at Christmas and the resurrection at Easter, but Ascension Day passes most evangelical churches without a mention. Yet Luke thought it important enough to record twice, and Jesus told His disciples plainly that His leaving was not...
- [What does Jesus' title 'Lord' (Kyrios) mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3043-what-does-jesus-title-lord-kyrios-mean/): Question 3043. Jesus is Lord. Three words, and the earliest, shortest confession of the Christian faith (Romans 10:9). Long before the creeds of the councils, before the New Testament was even complete, believers were baptised saying it, persecuted for it, and executed rather than transfer it to Caesar. Yet familiarity has flattened it. For many...
- [What does Jesus' resurrection body tell us about ours?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3040-what-does-jesus-resurrection-body-tell-us-about-ours/): Question 3040. The resurrection body of Jesus is the single best piece of evidence for what your own future body will be like. That is not my speculation; it is Paul’s explicit argument. Christ has been raised as ‘the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Corinthians 15:20), and the firstfruits of a harvest...
- [How Is Jesus Different From Angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3031-how-is-jesus-different-from-angels/): Question 3031. Jesus is superior to angels in a way that the New Testament, particularly the opening chapters of Hebrews, takes considerable care to establish, because a persistent confusion in the first century, and in some circles even today, has tried to place Him within the angelic order rather than far above it. Let me...
- [Why Was Jesus Tempted if He Couldn't Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3030-why-did-jesus-need-to-be-tempted-if-he-couldnt-sin/): Question 3030. The impeccability of Christ, the conviction that Jesus was actually unable to sin, raises an honest and important question. If He could not possibly have sinned, were His temptations in the wilderness and throughout His ministry genuine, or simply theatre performed for the disciples’ benefit? I want to take that question seriously rather...
- [What Does 'Firstborn Over All Creation' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3029-what-does-firstborn-over-all-creation-mean/): Question 3029. Firstborn over creation is one of the titles most frequently misused by groups who want to argue that Jesus was God’s first created being. Read the phrase in its actual context in Colossians, however, and it says almost the opposite of what that misreading claims. Let me show you what Paul actually means...
- [How Can Jesus Be Eternal if He Had a Birth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3028-how-can-jesus-be-eternal-if-he-had-a-birth/): Question 3028. Eternal generation is the theological term that answers what sounds, at first, like a contradiction: how can Jesus be eternal, without beginning or end, if He was also born in Bethlehem at a specific point in history? The resolution lies in carefully distinguishing two very different things Scripture affirms about Him. Let me...
- [What Happened to Jesus Between His Death and Resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3025-what-happened-to-jesus-between-death-and-resurrection/): Question 3025. Jesus’ descent into Hades is a phrase drawn from the historic creeds, and it has confused almost as many Christians as it has clarified, because the words can sound as though Jesus spent three days suffering in hell. Scripture actually paints a rather different and far more comforting picture of what happened to...
- [What Is Jesus Doing in Heaven Right Now?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3022-what-is-jesus-doing-in-heaven/): Question 3022. Jesus is not idle in heaven, and His heavenly intercession for believers is only one part, though the most frequently mentioned part, of an active present ministry that Scripture describes in surprising detail. He ascended, but He did not retire. Let me set out the main things the Bible tells us He is...
- [Where Is Jesus Now? Understanding the Session of Christ](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3021-where-is-jesus-now/): Question 3021. Where is Jesus now is a question with a precise biblical answer, and theologians have a specific term for it: the session of Christ, His seated reign at the Father’s right hand following His ascension. This is not a vague spiritual metaphor. Scripture is remarkably concrete about His present location and activity. Let...
- [Is Jesus Still Human Now? Will He Always Be Human?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3027-is-jesus-still-human-now/): Question 3027. Jesus is still human now, and His glorified humanity is not a temporary costume He will one day set aside once His earthly mission is fully wrapped up. The incarnation was permanent. The Son of God became a man at Bethlehem, and He remains a man today, seated in heaven, and He will...
- [Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3019-did-jesus-really-rise-from-the-dead/): Question 3019. Did Jesus really rise from the dead in a bodily resurrection, or is this simply a comforting story the early church told itself? I want to take that question with complete seriousness, because Christianity stands or falls on the answer, and honest people deserve more than a demand that they simply believe. Let...
- [What Happened at the Transfiguration of Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3015-what-happened-at-jesus-transfiguration/): Question 3015. The transfiguration of Jesus is one of the strangest and most wonderful scenes in the Gospels, the moment when the ordinary appearance Jesus had worn for thirty years briefly gave way to something the disciples could barely describe. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record it, and each writer clearly regarded it as too...
- [What does 'Son of God' mean? Is it different from 'Son of Man'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3012-son-of-god-son-of-man-meaning/): Question 3012. Son of Man is the title Jesus used of Himself more often than any other in the Gospels, and it is also the one most commonly misunderstood among ordinary readers today. Many assume it simply balances “Son of God” by emphasising His humanity, as though the two titles divided His two natures neatly...
- [Did Jesus have a sin nature?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3007-did-jesus-have-sin-nature/): Question 3007. The sinlessness of Christ is where this question ultimately lands, though getting there requires asking something quite specific first. When Adam fell, sin entered the human race, and every one of his natural descendants inherits an inward corruption, a bent toward evil, that Scripture sometimes calls the sin nature or indwelling sin, a...
- [Do All Christians Have All the Fruit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4010-do-all-christians-have-all-the-fruit/): Question 4010. The fruit of the Spirit is one of those phrases I hear quoted so easily that we rarely stop and ask what it actually promises about the Christian life. People treat it like a personality test, as though one believer were issued patience while another got kindness and a third somehow missed out...
- [How does the Spirit guide us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4008-how-does-the-spirit-guide-us/): Question 4008. The guidance of the Spirit is one of the dearest privileges of the Christian life, and also one of the most misunderstood. Many believers picture it as a mysterious inner sat-nav that, if only they could tune in finely enough, would dictate every decision from which job to take to which cereal to...
- [What is the still small voice?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4007-what-is-the-still-small-voice/): Question 4007. The still small voice is one of those phrases that has wandered a long way from its home, and I want to walk it back. People use it to mean the gentle inner nudge of God in the quiet of prayer, and they build a whole approach to guidance on it. The phrase...
- [Does the Spirit speak audibly?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4006-does-the-spirit-speak-audibly/): Question 4006. The Spirit’s voice is something believers ask me about constantly, usually after someone has told them that God spoke to them in an audible voice and they are wondering why it has never happened to them. So does the Spirit speak audibly today? Very rarely, if at all, in the way people mean,...
- [Can the Spirit Be Grieved? Understanding Ephesians 4:30](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4004-can-the-spirit-be-grieved/): Question 4004. Can we really grieve the Spirit? Ephesians 4:30 says we can, and it is a command both sobering and, when you stop to think about it, quite remarkable: ‘And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.’ That the Spirit of God can...
- [What Is Being Filled with the Spirit? A Pastoral Answer](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4003-what-is-being-filled-with-the-spirit/): Question 4003. Being filled with the Spirit is one of those phrases that gets pulled in two opposite directions, and I think both of them miss it. Some treat it as a rare, elusive state reserved for the spiritual elite, and others treat it as a synonym for emotional intensity in worship, as though the...
- [When Do We Receive the Holy Spirit? A Careful Answer](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4002-when-do-we-receive-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4002. When do we receive the Holy Spirit? I want to answer that we receive the Holy Spirit at the moment of saving faith, fully and permanently, and not at some later crisis that divides Christians into the haves and the have-nots. That is the short answer, and I am convinced it is the...
- [What is the fruit of the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4009-what-is-the-fruit-of-the-spirit/): Question 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul’s lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer’s life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is one of the best loved passages in the New Testament, and also...
- [Who Is the Holy Spirit? The Person of the Spirit Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4001-who-is-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4001. The person of the Spirit is the first thing I want settled when anyone asks me who the Holy Spirit really is, because almost every mistake people make in this area flows from getting that one point wrong. Is the Spirit a Person, or is He a force? Is He someone I relate...
- [Was Jesus fully human?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3006-was-jesus-fully-human/): Question 3006. We rightly emphasise the deity of Jesus, but the humanity of Jesus receives just as much insistence in Scripture, and I do not think we can afford to let either truth crowd out the other. If Jesus was not genuinely human, He did not genuinely die, and if He did not genuinely die,...
- [Why was Jesus baptized if He was sinless?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3011-why-was-jesus-baptized-if-sinless/): Question 3011. The baptism of Jesus raises an obvious question the moment you think about it seriously. John’s baptism was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4), and people came to the Jordan confessing their sins as they were baptised. Jesus had no sins to confess and needed no forgiveness whatsoever....
- [Did Jesus know He was God from birth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3010-did-jesus-know-he-was-god-from-birth/): Question 3010. Working out the consciousness of Christ during His earthly life pushes us further into the mystery of the incarnation than almost any other question in this series. When exactly did Jesus become aware that He was the eternal Son of God? From the moment of birth? Earlier still, in the womb? Or did...
- [What did Jesus know as a child?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3009-what-did-jesus-know-as-child/): Question 3009. The childhood of Jesus receives only the briefest treatment in the Gospels, and yet those few verses raise questions that repay careful attention. Did the infant Jesus know He was God while lying in a Bethlehem manger? Did the toddler in Nazareth grasp the Trinity? What was actually happening in His developing mind...
- [Could Jesus have sinned?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3008-could-jesus-have-sinned/): Question 3008. Whether the impeccability of Christ is actually true has occupied theologians for most of church history, and I understand why the question keeps resurfacing. If Jesus could not have sinned, was His temptation in the wilderness genuine? If He could have sinned, what does that imply about His deity, and about the security...
- [What is the hypostatic union?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3005-what-is-hypostatic-union/): Question 3005. The hypostatic union is, in my judgment, one of the most profound truths in the whole of Christian theology, and also one of the most practically important. It describes how Jesus Christ can be fully God and fully man at the same time, united inseparably in one Person, without either nature swallowing up...
- [Is Jesus God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3004-is-jesus-god/): Question 3004. The deity of Jesus is the foundation Christianity stands or falls on. If Jesus is not God, Christianity collapses and we remain in our sins. If He truly is God, then His words carry final authority, His death has infinite value, and His promises are as certain as God’s own character. So what...
- [Why "It is finished" Gr: tetelestai (John 19:30)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3076-why-it-is-finished-tetelestai/): Question 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this is a single word, tetelestai (τετέλεσται), and it is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire New Testament. Far from being a...
- [How Many Trials Did Jesus Go Through?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3077-how-many-trials-did-jesus-go-through/): Question 3077. The trials of Jesus, when you lay the four Gospel accounts side by side, turn out to number six distinct hearings, three before Jewish authorities and three before Roman ones, all crammed into the hours between His arrest in Gethsemane and the sentence of crucifixion the next morning. Six hearings, two legal systems,...
- [Who is Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3001-who-is-jesus/): Question 3001. The identity of Jesus is, I think, the one question none of us gets to avoid indefinitely. Jesus put it to His own disciples at Caesarea Philippi, and He still puts it to every person who hears about Him: “But who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). People have offered plenty...
- [Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3002-did-jesus-have-brothers-and-sisters/): Question 3002. Whether there were genuine brothers of Jesus has been argued over for most of Church history, largely because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Once you set that later tradition aside and simply ask what the text says, the answer stops being complicated. The Gospels and epistles speak about siblings...
- [What Does 'Only Begotten Son' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3026-what-does-only-begotten-son-mean/): Question 3026. Only begotten Son is a phrase that has caused more confusion than almost any other title given to Jesus, because in ordinary English “begotten” sounds like it describes a beginning, a moment when the Son came into existence. That is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw, and getting it right matters enormously for...
- [What Does It Mean That Scripture Is Infallible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1000-what-does-scripture-infallible-mean/): Question 01000. To say that Scripture is infallible means that it cannot fail, cannot deceive, and cannot lead astray in anything it sets out to teach us. The word itself reaches back to the Latin for that which does not deceive or fall short, and applied to the Bible it makes the bold claim that...
- [Were the Apostles' Doctrines Shaped by Their Fallen Nature?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1004-were-doctrines-influenced-by-apostles-fallen-nature/): Question 01004. The question of scriptural reliability becomes very pointed when we ask whether the apostles’ fallen nature corrupted the doctrines they taught. It is a fair thing to wonder. Peter, Paul, John and the rest were sinners like us. Paul had been a Pharisee. Peter was impulsive and once had to be rebuked to...
- [How Does False Doctrine Spread Like Gangrene?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0012-false-doctrine-spreads-like-gangrene/): 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 Timothy about a pair of false teachers, he warns that ‘their talk will spread like gangrene’ (2 Timothy 2:17). It is a deliberately ugly comparison,...
- [Equipped for Every Good Work: What 2 Timothy 3:17 Means](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1139-equipped-for-every-good-work/): 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 of one of the most personal and urgent letters in the New Testament. Second Timothy was written from a Roman prison cell, likely during Nero’s...
- [How do we defend the faith?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60001-how-do-we-defend-the-faith/): Question 60001. Nobody teaches most of us how to defend the faith. We learn to pray, we learn to find Habakkuk without the contents page, and then one day a colleague says something about the Bible being edited by emperors and we discover we have nothing to say. Scripture is not vague about this. It...
- [What Is Bibliology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1137-what-is-bibliology/): Question 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly explained to them. See my sermon on this subject here: The Word of God, Our Growing Guide. So what does Bibliology actually mean, and why...
- [What Does Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1138-rightly-dividing-word-of-truth/): 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 important verses in the New Testament for how we approach the text. Paul writes to Timothy, “Do your best to present yourself to God as...
- [Are Christians still under the Mosaic law?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7080-are-christians-under-mosaic-law/): 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 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...
- [What is the difference between Israel and the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10013-difference-between-israel-and-church/): 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 reading of half the Bible. I regard the distinction as one of the clearest results of taking Scripture at face value, and in this article...
- [Can you activate your healing by speaking God's Word?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11040-can-you-activate-healing-by-speaking-gods-word/): Question 11040. The claim that you can activate your healing by speaking God’s Word over your body is one of the most widely taught and most damaging errors circulating in the church today, and it needs answering carefully rather than dismissively. It needs care because the people who teach it use Bible verses, and the...
- [Does “by your stripes I am healed” refer to physical healing?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7079-does-by-your-stripes-i-am-healed-refer-to-physical-healing/): Question 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says that with his stripes we are healed, Peter quotes it, and the conclusion drawn is that sickness in a believer indicates either unconfessed sin or...
- [How Does God's Providence Fit with Human Suffering?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2064-gods-sovereignty-and-human-suffering/): Question 2064. God’s providence raises one of the hardest pastoral questions I ever get asked. If God’s providence extends over everything that happens, does that mean He permits, or even in some sense stands behind, terrible evils like abuse, assault or murder? How can I say that nothing touches your life outside of God’s providence...
- [How Do We Handle Woke Interpretations of Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1097-how-to-handle-woke-interpretations-of-scripture/): Question 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments online but so we can guard the actual meaning of the text we love. What I mean by the phrase is a pattern of reading...
- [Can New Manuscript Discoveries Change Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1107-can-new-manuscript-discoveries-change-doctrine/): Question 1107. Manuscript discoveries make headlines from time to time, a newly identified papyrus fragment, an early codex found in a monastery library, and each one raises the same anxious question in some readers, could a find like this overturn something Christians have always believed? It is worth answering plainly. No genuine manuscript discovery has...
- [How Does Scripture Address Critical Race Theory?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1098-how-does-scripture-address-critical-race-theory/): Question 1098. Critical race theory has become one of the most contested phrases in public conversation, and church members ask me about it often enough that I want to address it directly rather than duck the question because it feels politically charged. Critical race theory is an academic framework, originating in legal scholarship in the...
- [Did God Dictate Scripture Word for Word?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1101-did-god-dictate-scripture-word-for-word/): Question 1101. I hold to verbal plenary inspiration without embarrassment, and it is worth being precise about what the doctrine actually claims, because plenty of people, believers and sceptics alike, picture something closer to the Islamic doctrine of the Qur’an than to what Scripture says about itself. Did God dictate the Bible word for word,...
- [Have I Been Misunderstanding Isaiah 64:6 All Along?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1140-have-i-been-misunderstanding-isaiah-64-6/): Question 1140. Filthy rags is the phrase most Christians know from Isaiah 64:6, quoted in countless evangelistic sermons, including plenty of my own over the years, to prove that even our best efforts before salvation are worthless to God. “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment,” the ESV renders it. We use it...
- [Is Social Justice Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1100-is-social-justice-biblical/): Question 1100. Social justice is a phrase that can mean almost anything depending on who is using it, and I think that ambiguity is exactly why the question deserves careful unpacking rather than a reflexive yes or no. Scripture has an enormous amount to say about justice, about the poor, the widow, the orphan and...
- [When Were Hebrew Vowel Points Added to the Old Testament Text?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1108-when-were-vowel-points-added-to-hebrew-text/): Question 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew vowel points were added takes us into one of the more fascinating corners of textual history. If you have ever opened an interlinear Hebrew Old...
- [What Does 'God Is Spirit' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2063-what-does-god-is-spirit-mean/): Question 2063. God is Spirit. When Jesus told the Samaritan woman this in John 4:24, He was making one of the most consequential theological statements in the whole of Scripture, and it is worth slowing down to see exactly why. This simple declaration reshapes how I understand God’s nature, how I approach worship, and what...
- [What About Grammatical Irregularities in the Greek New Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1105-what-about-grammatical-errors-in-greek-nt/): Question 1105. Grammatical irregularities do appear here and there in the Greek New Testament, and the book of Revelation is the most famous case, containing what specialists call solecisms, places where John seems to break standard Greek grammatical agreement, most noticeably around the throne room visions in the early chapters. If Scripture is inspired down...
- [What Is the Textus Receptus and Should We Treat It as Definitive?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1109-what-is-the-textus-receptus/): Question 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and if you have ever heard someone insist that the Textus Receptus is the only trustworthy Greek text, you deserve a clear and honest...
- [Will we recognise people in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10061-will-we-recognise-people-in-heaven/): Question 10061. Will we recognise each other in heaven? I am asked this at gravesides more than anywhere else, usually by someone who has just watched a coffin lowered and needs to know whether the person they loved is gone from them for good. It is not an idle question about the furniture of eternity....
- [What does it mean to love God with all your mind (Mark 12:30)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11041-what-does-it-mean-to-love-god-with-all-your-mind/): Question 11041. When Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, he added a word that was not in the original commandment, and it is worth asking why. Deuteronomy 6:5 says heart, soul and might. In Mark 12:30 Jesus says heart, soul, mind and strength. The mind is...
- [What Made the Noble Bereans Noble? (Acts 17:11)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0024-what-were-the-bereans-doing-that-made-them-noble/): Question 0024. The noble Bereans have become a byword in Christian circles for careful discernment, and rightly so. Whenever someone urges us to check a teaching against the Bible rather than swallowing it whole, the noble Bereans get a mention. But it is worth asking what they actually did, and why Luke thought it worth...
- [Jesus said not one stone would remain, so why is the Western Wall still standing?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60042-western-wall-jesus-prophecy-not-one-stone/): Question 60042. The Western Wall stands in Jerusalem today, some fifty courses of ancient stone, and every year millions of people place prayers into its cracks. Sceptics point at it and ask a reasonable question. Jesus said that not one stone would be left upon another, so how is that wall still there? Either the...
- [Why is Dan not mentioned in Revelation 7?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10174-why-is-dan-not-mentioned-in-revelation-7/): Question 10174. The tribe of Dan is missing from the list of sealed tribes in Revelation 7, and once you notice it you cannot unnotice it. Twelve tribes are named, twelve thousand from each, and Dan is not among them. Manasseh appears instead, and Ephraim is absent too, which means John’s list is not the...
- [What is heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10055-what-is-heaven/): Question 10055. Heaven is the dwelling place of God, the present home of believers who have died, and the sure hope of every soul who trusts in Jesus. When people ask me about it, I find they often carry a thin, cloudy picture in their heads, all harps and idleness and drifting spirits, which owes...
- [What resurrections besides Jesus should I know about?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3062-what-other-resurrections-are-in-the-bible/): Question 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...
- [What is the resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3061-what-is-the-resurrection/): Question 3061. Christianity stands or falls on bodily resurrection, and Paul says so without blinking: ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). Yet ask around, even in churches, and you will find remarkable confusion about what resurrection actually means. Is it the...
- [Did Jesus descend into Hell/Hades?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3063-did-jesus-descend-into-hell/): Question 3063. Few lines in the Apostles’ Creed cause more raised eyebrows than the confession that Jesus did ‘descend into hell’. What can that possibly mean? Between the cross and the empty tomb, did Jesus really go to the place of the damned? Was he suffering there? Preaching there? Triumphing there? And should Christians even...
- [What is believer's baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9000-what-is-believers-baptism/): Question 09000. Believer’s baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains the whole argument, and every phrase in it is doing work. I want to open it up properly, because baptism is one of those subjects...
- [Why Did the Early Church Use Catechisms?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0010-why-did-the-early-church-use-catechisms/): Question 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and useful history. Long before the Reformation produced its famous catechisms, the believers of the first few centuries were carefully instructing new converts in the faith...
- [Can Christians disagree on doctrine and still have fellowship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q009-can-christians-disagree-on-doctrine-and-still-have-fellowship/): Question 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine that to stay in true fellowship everyone must think identically about everything, and so they either paper over real differences or break off from anyone...
- [Which doctrines are essential for salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0008-which-doctrines-are-essential-for-salvation/): Question 8. Which doctrines are essential for salvation is a question that deserves great care, because the wrong answer in either direction is dangerous. Make the list too long and you start barring from heaven people the Lord has welcomed. Make it too short and you empty the gospel of its content until almost anything...
- [How Should I Respond to “Doctrine Divides, but Jesus Unites”?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0048-doctrine-divides-jesus-unites-response/): Question 00048. The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer can be handed. It sounds humble, it sounds loving, and it lands a soft blow against anyone who dares to care about precise belief....
- [What are the elementary doctrines of Christ (Hebrews 6:1-3)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7053-what-are-the-elementary-doctrines-of-christ/): Question 07053 The elementary doctrines of Christ are listed in Hebrews 6:1-3, and the passage has puzzled readers for a long time. The writer tells his readers to leave these teachings behind and press on to maturity, which sounds alarmingly like an instruction to move beyond the basics of the faith. That cannot be what...
- [Did God's forever temple promise fail (1 Kings 9)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10041-did-gods-forever-temple-promise-fail/): 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 all. When the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time He spoke of that house and His name being there for ever, and centuries...
- [If God Is Love, Why Does Hell Exist?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2060-if-god-is-love-why-does-hell-exist/): Question 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...
- [What is the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary doctrines?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0007-difference-between-primary-secondary-tertiary-doctrines/): Question 7. Learning to tell primary truths from secondary doctrines is one of the most useful skills a Christian can develop, and the lack of it has wrecked more friendships and split more churches than I care to count. Some believers treat every conviction they hold as a hill to die on. Others treat nothing...
- [What is angelology and demonology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8000-what-is-angelology-demonology/): Question 8000. Angels and demons are two of the most talked about subjects in our culture and two of the least carefully studied in our churches, which is a strange combination when you think about it. Angelology is the study of angels, and demonology is the study of the fallen angels who followed Satan into...
- [What is Ecclesiology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9001-what-is-ecclesiology/): Question 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated church, which means an assembly, a gathering of those called out. That is a more useful starting point than most people expect, because it means...
- [What is apologetics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60000-what-is-apologetics/): Question 60000. Christian apologetics sounds like something you do when you have offended somebody. It is one of those words that has drifted, because the English apology now means an expression of regret, whereas the Greek behind it means nothing of the sort. So let me clear the ground. Christian apologetics is the work of...
- [What is soteriology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7011-what-is-soteriology/): Question 07011. Soteriology is the theological name for the doctrine of salvation, and it is the part of Christian teaching that answers the question every one of us eventually has to face: how can a guilty person be made right with a holy God? The word comes from the Greek soteria, meaning rescue or deliverance,...
- [What is Hamartiology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6000-what-is-hamartiology/): Question 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, and why the answer shapes everything else we believe. The name comes from the Greek hamartia, the New Testament’s most common word for sin, joined...
- [What Is Pneumatology? A Plain Account of the Doctrine of the Spirit](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4000-what-is-pneumatology/): Question 4000. The doctrine of the Spirit is the part of Christian teaching that asks who the Holy Spirit is, what He does, and what His nearness means for an ordinary believer trying to follow Jesus on an ordinary day. We give it a technical name, pneumatology, and the name can make the whole thing...
- [What is Christology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3000-what-is-christology/): Question 3000. Christology, once you get past the imposing name, is simply the study of Christ, and I want to start there because the word puts people off far more than the subject deserves. It sounds like something reserved for seminary corridors and footnoted journals, when in fact every Christian is already doing Christology every...
- [Can I love Jesus without caring about theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0006-can-i-love-jesus-without-caring-about-theology/): Question 6. Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it. Usually the person is reacting against something cold they have seen, a Christianity that knew all the right answers and somehow loved no one. I...
- [Is everyone a theologian whether they realise it or not?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0005-is-everyone-a-theologian/): Question 5. Everyone is a theologian, whether they realise it or not, and I do not say that to flatter anybody or to play with words. I say it because the moment you form any thought about God, about whether He exists, about what He is like, or about what He might want from you,...
- [Why Does Paul Call It Sound Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0004-why-paul-calls-teaching-sound-healthy-doctrine/): Question 4. Why does Paul call right teaching sound doctrine, and what does the word sound actually mean? When he tells Titus to ‘teach what accords with sound doctrine’ (Titus 2:1), he reaches for a word that might surprise you. The Greek term behind sound is hygiaino, and its plainest meaning is healthy or wholesome....
- [Were there really giants (Nephilim)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8015-were-there-really-giants-nephilim/): Question 8015. Nephilim giants are one of those biblical subjects where sober readers go quiet and speculative readers go loud, and the result is that most Christians have no settled view at all. My position is that the Bible describes real people of unusual size and strength, that it does so without embarrassment, and that...
- [What must I do to be saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7999-what-must-i-do-to-be-saved/): Question 7999 The question of what a person must do to be saved is the most important question anyone ever asks, and Scripture gives an answer so short that people often refuse to believe it. When the Philippian jailer asked it, Paul and Silas said, believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved...
- [What Does Theopneustos (Breathed Out by God) Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0003-what-does-god-breathed-theopneustos-mean/): Question 3. What does it mean that Scripture is breathed out by God? Few verses carry more weight for understanding the Bible than 2 Timothy 3:16, where Paul writes, ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.’ At the centre of that sentence...
- [Does God Exist?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2000-does-god-exist/): Question 2000. God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate...
- [Does Doctrine Divide the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0002-does-doctrine-divide-the-church/): Question 2. Does doctrine divide the church? You have probably heard it stated as though it were settled fact: doctrine divides, but love unites. The idea is that if we would only set aside our tiresome theological differences and concentrate on relationships, the church would be stronger and happier. It sounds gracious, even spiritual. But...
- [What Is Doctrine, and Why Does It Matter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0001-what-is-doctrine-and-why-does-it-matter/): Question 1. If you want to know why doctrine matters, start by noticing how quickly people’s eyes glaze over when the word is mentioned. Doctrine sounds dusty and academic, something best left to theologians in their studies, with no obvious bearing on getting the children to school or holding a marriage together. I understand the...
- [What is Babylon in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10035-what-is-babylon-in-revelation/): Question 10035. Babylon in Revelation is one of the richest and most debated images in the whole book, a figure that appears as a gorgeously dressed prostitute in one chapter and a doomed merchant city in the next. When I speak of Babylon in Revelation I mean the great world system of rebellion against God,...
- [Who Was Martin Luther?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13002-reformation-day-who-was-martin-luther/): Question 13002 Today, October 31st, marks Reformation Day. So who was Martin Luther? Luther was a German monk, tormented by his sin, desperately trying to earn salvation through religious practices and good works. He found no peace. Then, whilst studying Romans 1:17 – “the righteous shall live by faith” – everything changed. He realised salvation...
- [Should Christians celebrate Halloween?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08171-should-christians-celebrate-halloween/): Question 08171. Every October somebody asks whether Christians celebrate Halloween or whether we should have nothing to do with it, and the question usually arrives with a costume already in the hallway and a knock expected at seven. I am going to give you principles rather than a rule, because Scripture gives principles here and...
- [What About the Woman Caught in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1049-woman-caught-adultery-john-7-53-8-11/): Question 1049. Few passages in the Gospels are as beloved as the story of the woman caught adultery, found in John 7:53 through 8:11. Jesus’ words, “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”, have become proverbial even among people who have never opened a Bible...
- [Should Christians Memorise Scripture? How?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1056-should-christians-memorise-scripture-how/): Question 1056. memorising Scripture is one of the most quietly transformative habits available to any Christian, and I say that as someone who finds it genuinely hard work rather than a natural gift. It is not reserved for people with unusually sharp memories or spare time on their hands. It is a discipline, learnable at...
- [What About the Longer Ending of Mark (16:9-20)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1048-longer-ending-mark-16-9-20/): Question 1048. If you open your Bible to the end of Mark’s Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark’s longer ending does not appear in the earliest manuscripts. Some Bibles place these verses in brackets. Others include them with a footnote explaining the uncertainty. This raises an obvious pastoral question about Mark’s...
- [What Is Form Criticism, and Why Does It Trouble Me?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1060-what-is-form-criticism/): Question 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ministers now standing in British and American pulpits. I want to explain plainly what it is, where it came from, and why I regard it...
- [Should Children Use Children's Bibles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1059-should-children-use-childrens-bibles/): Question 1059. children’s Bibles are not simply acceptable for young children, they are, in my experience raising and teaching children over many years, one of the most effective tools available for building early familiarity with Scripture’s great story before a child has the reading stamina or vocabulary to engage the unabridged text directly. The concern...
- [What Is Redaction Criticism, and What Should We Make of It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1062-what-is-redaction-criticism/): Question 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various higher critical methods I have addressed on this site so far, it is the one I find least troubling in itself, even though it grew...
- [What Is Source Criticism, and How Should Christians Weigh It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1061-what-is-source-criticism/): Question 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we identify them? Luke himself tells us plainly that many had undertaken to compile a narrative before he wrote his own Gospel, having followed all things...
- [What Is the Q Source Theory, and Should It Worry Us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1064-what-is-the-q-source-theory/): Question 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark’s Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of Jesus’s sayings, a document scholars have never found and have simply labelled Q, from the German Quelle, meaning source, related to the Greek concept of...
- [What Is the JEDP Theory, and Why Do I Think It Is Wrong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1063-what-is-jedp-theory-and-why-is-it-wrong/): Question 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses at all, but were assembled centuries later from four originally separate, anonymous documents, labelled...
- [What Is the Majority Text Theory of the New Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1110-what-is-the-majority-text-theory/): Question 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving Greek manuscripts, and if you have never met this idea before, it is worth understanding both its genuine strengths and its real limitations before you...
- [How Do We Respond to the Jesus Seminar?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1065-how-do-we-respond-to-the-jesus-seminar/): Question 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around...
- [Why Are There So Many New Testament Papyri Fragments Rather Than Whole Books?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1111-why-are-there-so-many-papyri-fragments/): Question 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes a source of real encouragement rather than concern about how much of the Bible has actually reached us intact. People sometimes hear that we possess...
- [How Do We Handle Harsh Passages in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1115-how-do-we-handle-harsh-passages-in-scripture/): Question 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can...
- [Why Did God Allow Difficult Passages in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1114-why-did-god-allow-difficult-passages-in-scripture/): Question 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern sensibilities, and the honest question worth asking is why a God who wanted to communicate clearly would give us a book containing so much that...
- [What Materials Were Biblical Manuscripts Written On?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1113-what-materials-were-biblical-manuscripts-written-on/): Question 1113. Biblical manuscript materials range from stone and clay to papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and tracing what the prophets and apostles actually wrote on takes us right into the dust and workshops of the ancient world, reminding us that the eternal word of God reached us through thoroughly earthly, physical means. I find this...
- [Scrolls and Codices: How Did the Early Church Read Its Scriptures?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1112-how-were-scrolls-vs-codices-used/): Question 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might expect, because the early church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was one of the most striking cultural decisions the first Christians ever made....
- [Are There Real Contradictions in the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1136-alleged-bible-contradictions/): Question 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost count of the number of conversations that started with someone reciting a list they found online. Two different genealogies for Jesus. Two different numbers for...
- [What Makes Scripture Different from Other "Holy Books"?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1134-scripture-different-from-other-holy-books/): Question 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the Book of Mormon, to name only the most obvious examples of the many holy books competing for allegiance around the world today. So what makes...
- [What's the Difference Between Biblical Literalism and Wooden Literalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1132-biblical-literalism-vs-wooden-literalism/): Question 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe the four winds are held by four literal angels at the four literal corners of a flat earth. I do not believe that, and neither...
- [How Do We Defend Biblical Authority in a Post-Truth Culture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1131-defending-biblical-authority-post-truth-culture/): Question 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about. “Post-truth” was named the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year back in 2016, describing a climate where appeals to emotion and personal conviction carry...
- [Does Dispensational Hermeneutics Require Different Rules for Different Ages?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1130-dispensational-hermeneutics-different-rules/): 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 and switching to symbol whenever a plain reading becomes awkward. I have heard the charge from the pulpit of churches that hold to a very...
- [How Does Biblical Literalism Relate to Scientific Literalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1129-how-does-biblical-literalism-relate-to-scientific-literalism/): Question 1129. Biblical literalism gets blamed for a great deal it never actually claimed, and nowhere is the confusion thicker than in the running argument between Scripture and science. People assume that if I hold to biblical literalism I must also believe the sun is a lamp fixed to a solid dome, because that is...
- [Is It Okay to Skip Boring Genealogies?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1125-is-it-okay-to-skip-boring-genealogies/): Question 1125. Biblical genealogies have glazed over more eyes than almost any other section of Scripture. “And so-and-so fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so,” page after page, and it is entirely fair to ask whether God will be disappointed if you skip past them on your way to the story. Let me put your mind at...
- [What If I Don't Understand What I'm Reading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1124-what-if-i-dont-understand-what-im-reading/): Question 1124. Understanding Scripture is not always straightforward, and if you have ever hit a passage that made no sense at all, read it twice, maybe three times, and remained thoroughly confused, you are in very good company. This is a common experience, and it should not discourage you the way it often does. The...
- [Does Literal Interpretation Require a Young Earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1120-does-literal-interpretation-require-young-earth/): 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 far more closely than many Christians today assume. This is not a fringe or novel combination. It was the standard reading of Genesis across nearly...
- [What is the difference between conditional and unconditional covenants?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10020-conditional-vs-unconditional-covenants/): 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 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...
- [Why Do Textual Variations Exist in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1002-bible-translation-textual-variations/): Question 01002. Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its small traces behind. When a believer first learns that the thousands of surviving New Testament manuscripts do not all read in exactly the same...
- [Should We Only Be Using the King James Version?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1001-kjv-onlyism-examination/): Question 01001. KJV Onlyism is the conviction, held in various strengths by various people, that the King James Version of 1611 is the only Bible English-speaking Christians ought to use, and in its harder forms that it alone is the preserved, error-free word of God in the English tongue. I want to handle this whole...
- [Is Biblical Authority Circular Reasoning?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1151-is-biblical-authority-circular-reasoning/): Question 01151. Biblical authority runs into the same objection almost every time I discuss it with a thoughtful sceptic: is it not simply circular reasoning to say the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true? It sounds like a genuinely decisive objection the very first time you hear it stated plainly, and...
- [Do You Need Scholars to Understand Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1007-do-you-need-scholars-to-understand-scripture/): Question 01007. Do you need scholars to understand Scripture, or can an ordinary believer read the Bible and grasp it for themselves? Christians tend to fall off this horse on one side or the other. Some approach the Bible with a kind of dread, convinced they need academic credentials before they dare interpret a verse....
- [Did God Reveal Truth Gradually](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1014-did-god-reveal-truth-gradually/): 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 know in one go, or unveiled His truth and His purposes step by step across the centuries. It is no dry academic puzzle, because how...
- [Should I Use Study Bibles? Which Ones?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1053-should-i-use-study-bibles-which-ones/): Question 1053. Study Bibles are everywhere you look. Walk into any Christian bookshop and you will find shelves of them, leather-bound, colour-coded, themed for men, women, teenagers and almost every niche imaginable, all promising to make the Bible more accessible and to answer your questions as you read. But are they actually helpful, and if...
- [How Does the Bible Cohere Over 1,500 Years?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1016-how-does-the-bible-cohere-over-1500-years/): Question 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and statesmen, is one of the most striking evidences for Scripture’s divine origin that I know, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves in ordinary...
- [What Is Higher Criticism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1019-what-is-higher-criticism/): Question 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those...
- [Do the Old and New Testaments Contradict?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1015-do-old-and-new-testaments-contradict/): 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 prescribes animal sacrifices, and the New Testament says Jesus has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples,...
- [What Is Textual Criticism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1018-what-is-textual-criticism/): Question 1018. Textual criticism can sound alarming when you first hear the phrase, as though scholars are sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is nearly the opposite. Textual criticism is the disciplined comparison of ancient manuscripts in order to establish, as closely as possible, the original wording of the...
- [Can Unbelievers Understand the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1017-can-unbelievers-understand-the-bible/): Question 1017. Spiritual understanding of the Bible is not the same thing as being able to read it, and the difference has real implications for how we do evangelism, how we engage non-Christian friends around Scripture, and how we understand the Holy Spirit’s own work in a person’s life. Whether an unbeliever can understand the...
- [What Is the Difference Between Inspiration and Illumination?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01203-difference-between-inspiration-and-illumination/): Question 1203. Inspiration and illumination are two words that get used almost interchangeably in casual church conversation, and the blur causes real confusion. People will say a sermon was inspired when they mean it moved them, or that the Spirit inspired their understanding of a verse when they mean he illuminated it. Scripture actually keeps...
- [What Does "the Faith Once Delivered to the Saints" Mean (Jude 3)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01204-faith-once-delivered-to-the-saints/): Question 1204. The faith once delivered to the saints is the phrase Jude reaches for when he explains why his short, urgent letter changed direction partway through the opening line. He had wanted to write about their common salvation, but found it necessary instead to appeal to his readers to contend for this same faith....
- [What Is the Bible's Main Message?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1020-what-is-the-bibles-main-message/): Question 1020. The Bible’s main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching across roughly fifteen hundred years, and I want to state that central message plainly rather than leaving it buried under all that surrounding detail. Getting...
- [What Happened to the Original Manuscripts?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1024-what-happened-to-original-manuscripts/): Question 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no original document written by Moses, Isaiah, Paul or John, survives anywhere in the world today. That fact unsettles some readers when they first encounter it,...
- [What Does the Bible Say About Itself?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1030-what-does-bible-say-about-itself/): Question 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them. That is not circular reasoning. It is the same courtesy you would extend to any significant witness in a courtroom, hearing the testimony in full...
- [Can science contradict the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60088-can-science-contradict-bible/): Question 60088. Science and Scripture are widely assumed to be locked in permanent conflict, and the assumption does a great deal of quiet damage. It shows up in newspapers, in lecture theatres, and in the private worries of Christians who feel caught between the faith they hold and the world the sciences appear to describe....
- [The Holy Spirit's Role in Understanding Scripture](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1028-what-role-holy-spirit-understanding-scripture/): Question 1028. The Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture is something I have watched play out in my own reading more times than I can count. I will sit with a passage I have read a dozen times before, and suddenly it is not the same passage any more. Nothing has changed on the page,...
- [How Can the Bible Be One Book?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1027-how-can-the-bible-be-one-book/): Question 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is worth pausing to ask directly how a collection this large and this diverse manages to read as a single, coherent book rather than a loosely...
- [How Does the Old Testament Relate to the New Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1026-how-does-old-testament-relate-to-new-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 and hit the jarring transition from Malachi’s closing warnings to Matthew’s opening genealogy, and find yourself wondering how these two halves of one book actually...
- [Is the Bible Clear Enough? (Perspicuity)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1025-is-the-bible-clear-enough-perspicuity/): Question 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture’s own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand on my own, or does its meaning stay locked behind specialist training and expert interpretation. The classic Reformation answer, and the one I hold, is...
- [How do we answer the claim that truth is relative?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60089-responding-to-postmodern-truth-relativism/): Question 60089. Objective truth has become the one claim you are not allowed to make in polite company. That may be true for you but not for me sounds tolerant and generous, and it is now the standard response to any statement about God, morality or the resurrection of Jesus. It has moved out of...
- [What Is the Difference Between General and Special Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01142-general-revelation-and-special-revelation/): Question 1142. General revelation is God’s self disclosure through the created order, through history, and through the human conscience, available in principle to every person who has ever lived, whether or not they have ever held a Bible in their hands. From the intricacy of a single living cell to the voice of conscience that...
- [What Is the Difference Between Illumination and New Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01148-illumination-versus-ongoing-revelation/): Question 1148. Ongoing revelation is the phrase I want to handle carefully here, because the Spirit’s genuine, active work in a believer’s life gets confused constantly with the very different claim that God is still adding new binding content to Scripture. Illumination and ongoing revelation sound similar enough that people slide between them without noticing,...
- [Are faith and reason opposed to each other?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60090-faith-reason-and-biblical-authority/): Question 60090. Faith and reason are assumed by almost everybody to be opposites, and the assumption has done real damage to Christian witness. On one side stands the believer who parks his brain at the church door. On the other stands the clear eyed rationalist who has outgrown all that. It is a caricature, and...
- [Personal Experience vs. Biblical Teaching](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01150-responding-to-personal-experience-versus-biblical-teaching/): Question 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt something, whether healing, direction, liberation, or spiritual encounter, and when I gently point out that Scripture seems to say something different, I can watch the...
- [How Does the Spirit's Inspiration Relate to His Work in Interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01149-inspiration-and-the-spirits-work-in-interpretation/): Question 1149. The Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture and His work helping us interpret it are two acts of the same Person, separated by many centuries but joined by the same purpose, and I think keeping that connection in view changes how you approach Bible study. The Spirit who breathed out the text through Moses, Isaiah,...
- [In What Sense Is Scripture Sufficient?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01147-in-what-sense-is-scripture-sufficient/): Question 1147. The sufficiency of Scripture is a claim that sounds simple until someone asks you to define exactly what it does and does not cover, and I find most confusion about this doctrine comes from people assuming it means something the historic Protestant position never actually claimed. It does not mean the Bible tells...
- [Has the Bible Been Corrupted Through Copying and Translation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01146-has-the-bible-been-corrupted-through-copying-and-translation/): Question 1146. Textual corruption is the accusation I hear most often from people who have never actually looked at how the Bible was copied, only heard somewhere that thousands of years of hand copying must have hopelessly garbled the original text. It is a fair question to ask, even if it usually arrives with an...
- [Wisdom Literature: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01154-wisdom-books-job-proverbs-ecclesiastes-redemptive-narrative/): 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 running from Genesis to Revelation, because none of these three books mentions the promised offspring of Genesis 3:15, the covenant with Abraham, or the coming...
- [What the Dead Sea Scrolls Confirm About the Old Testament](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01153-dead-sea-scrolls-old-testament-textual-criticism/): Question 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to compare our modern Old Testament text against manuscripts a thousand years older than anything previously available, and the results overwhelmingly vindicated the accuracy of the...
- [How Progressive Revelation Shapes a Dispensational Reading of Scripture](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01159-progressive-revelation-dispensational-understanding-scripture/): 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 unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been...
- [Imprecatory Psalms and Loving Your Enemies](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01156-imprecatory-psalms-love-your-enemies/): Question 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies...
- [When Scholarship and the Plain Reading of Scripture Disagree](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01157-scholarly-consensus-versus-plain-reading-of-scripture/): Question 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I should usually end up, even when a scholar somewhere is telling me otherwise. I get asked this question more than almost any other, usually by...
- [Have the Dead Sea Scrolls Undermined the Documentary Hypothesis?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01163-dead-sea-scrolls-documentary-hypothesis/): Question 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away at its foundations far more than most textbooks admit. I want to walk through what the hypothesis actually claims, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and...
- [How Should a Church Respond Pastorally to a KJV-Only Member?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01165-church-respond-kjv-only-member/): Question 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation. I want to be honest from the outset: I do not hold the KJV-Only position myself, and I think it rests on claims that do...
- [What Are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and Why Do They Matter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01168-codex-sinaiticus-codex-vaticanus/): Question 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can be in the text of the New Testament sooner or later has to reckon with what these two documents actually say and where they came...
- [Was the Latin Vulgate Once Held as Authoritative as KJV-Onlyists Regard the King James?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01167-latin-vulgate-authority-reformation-kjv-only/): Question 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in English. For roughly a thousand years, the Latin Vulgate held almost exactly that place in the Western church, and watching how that claim was made,...
- [What Are the Major Greek Manuscript Families, and What Are Their Key Differences?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01169-greek-manuscript-families-new-testament/): Question 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from tiny papyrus fragments to complete parchment codices spanning many centuries of careful copying. No single manuscript reads identically to every other, which is exactly what...
- [How should a Christian student handle a university course taught from a higher-critical perspective?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60081-christian-student-higher-critical-university-course/): Question 60081. Higher criticism is the working assumption of almost every university theology and religious studies department in this country, and if you are a believing student walking into that lecture theatre for the first time, it can feel as though the floor has tilted. Isaiah arrives as the work of two or three hands....
- [Academic Theology and Practical Doctrine](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0030-difference-between-academic-theology-and-practical-doctrine/): Question 0030 The difference between academic theology and practical doctrine is one of those distinctions that sounds dry until you realise how much harm comes from getting it wrong. I have met believers who treat theology as a cold intellectual hobby, and others who are suspicious of any teaching that asks them to think hard....
- [Can Unity Exist Without Doctrinal Agreement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0027-can-unity-exist-apart-from-doctrinal-agreement/): Question 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine divides while love unites, so we should keep doctrine to a minimum for the sake of getting along. On the other stand those who treat...
- [Is a Disagreement Worth Breaking Fellowship Over?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q00029-how-do-i-know-if-disagreement-is-worth-breaking-fellowship/): Question 0029. Sooner or later every believer who takes both truth and relationships seriously has to ask whether a disagreement is worth breaking fellowship over. You find yourself genuinely at odds with another Christian over a matter of belief or practice. The difference feels significant. But is it significant enough to part ways? This is...
- [Which Doctrines to Divide Over: A Biblical Guide](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0028-what-doctrines-should-i-be-willing-to-divide-over/): Question 0028. Knowing which doctrines to divide over is one of the most important and most difficult judgements a believer ever has to make. Get it wrong in one direction and you will fracture fellowship over matters that should never have separated you. Get it wrong in the other and you will keep company with...
- [Can Someone Be Doctrinally Correct but Spiritually Dead?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0049-doctrinally-correct-spiritually-dead/): Question 00049. It is entirely possible to be doctrinally correct and spiritually dead at the very same time, and the Bible says so without flinching for a moment. A person can hold the right positions on the Trinity, the cross, and the resurrection, can argue them ably against all comers, and can still carry a...
- [Why Do People Prefer Teachers Who Tell Them What They Want to Hear?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0046-why-people-prefer-ear-tickling-teachers/): Question 0046. The phrase itching ears comes from one of the most honest descriptions of human nature in all of Scripture, and Paul saw it coming with painful accuracy. People would gather teachers to suit their itching ears, choosing voices that scratched the spot rather than told the truth. “The time is coming,” he wrote,...
- [How Did Christians Learn Doctrine Before Complete Bibles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0037-how-did-christians-learn-doctrine-before-complete-bibles/): Question 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest Christians did not walk around with a leather-bound Bible containing all sixty-six books. The church was born at Pentecost, and the Gospels and letters were...
- [The Best Resources for Doctrinal Growth](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0034-what-resources-should-i-use-to-grow-in-doctrinal-understanding/): Question 0034 When people ask me what resources will help their doctrinal growth, I always start in the same place, because the answer matters more than any book list. The single most important resource for doctrinal growth is the Bible itself, read carefully, prayerfully and often. Every other tool is a servant of that one,...
- [Why Can't I Just Read the Bible Without Theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0040-why-cant-i-just-read-bible-without-theology/): Question 0040. It sounds wonderfully humble to say that you just want to read the Bible without theology, taking the plain words at face value and leaving all the systems and arguments to the academics. I have heard it many times, often from sincere believers who are weary of theological squabbling. Yet the more I...
- [How to Grow a Real Appetite for Doctrine](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0033-how-can-i-develop-appetite-for-doctrinal-study/): Question 0033 If you long for an appetite for doctrine that you do not yet feel, take heart, because that very longing is already a seed of the thing you want. Nobody is born hungry for theology. I was not. The desire to know God deeply is something the Spirit grows in a believer over...
- [Why Theology Feels Dry to So Many Christians](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0032-why-do-some-christians-treat-theology-as-dry-or-irrelevant/): Question 0032 I understand exactly why theology feels dry to so many Christians, because I have felt it myself and I have watched it in others for years. The word “theology” conjures up dusty books, abstract debates and lectures that seem to have nothing to do with the ache of an ordinary Tuesday. People associate...
- [Why Does Paul Warn About Itching Ears?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0013-itching-ears-warning/): 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, he warns that ‘the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to...
- [Doctrine as the Soul’s Spiritual Immune System](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0031-how-does-doctrine-function-as-immune-system-for-soul/): Question 0031 Sound doctrine works in the soul rather like a spiritual immune system works in the body, and once you see the picture you cannot unsee it. Your body is surrounded every day by bacteria and viruses that could destroy it, and the only reason you are not constantly ill is that an unseen...
- [How Can I Detect False Teaching?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0016-how-can-i-detect-false-teaching/): Question 16. To detect false teaching is a skill every believer needs, and not only the pastors and scholars among us. Jesus warned that false prophets would come in sheep’s clothing, and the apostles return to the theme again and again, which tells me this is ordinary equipment for ordinary Christians, not a speciality for...
- [What Is Progressive Christianity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0015-progressive-christianity-response/): Question 15. Progressive Christianity is a movement many believers have heard named but few could define clearly, and that vagueness is part of what makes it so difficult to respond to. It presents itself as a kinder, more thoughtful, more inclusive version of the faith, a Christianity finally grown up and freed from embarrassing old...
- [How Studying Doctrine Is an Act of Love](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0020-how-is-studying-doctrine-an-act-of-love/): Question 20. How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would rather be right than be kind. I want to overturn that assumption completely, because I am persuaded that studying doctrine is one of the most...
- [Why Right Belief Leads to Right Behaviour](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0017-why-does-right-belief-lead-to-right-behaviour/): Question 17. Why does right belief lead to right behaviour? I am convinced that right belief is the hidden engine behind a holy life, and that most of our failures in conduct trace back, sooner or later, to a failure in what we actually believe about God. That sounds like a bold claim, so let...
- [Why So Many Christians Stay Spiritual Infants](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q00019-why-are-so-many-christians-still-spiritual-infants/): Question 19. Why are so many Christians still spiritual infants after years of faith? It troubles me, and I suspect it troubles you, that so many believers remain spiritual infants long after they should have grown up. They have been in church for a decade or more, they love the Lord in their way, and...
- [Why the Apostles' Teaching Came First (Acts 2:42)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0025-why-did-early-church-devote-to-apostles-teaching-first/): Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of all to the apostles’ teaching. Three thousand people had been baptised in a single day. A small band of disciples had become a movement overnight....
- [Spiritual Maturity in Hebrews 5 and 6](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0018-what-does-spiritual-maturity-look-like-hebrews-5-6/): Question 18. What does spiritual maturity look like according to Hebrews 5 and 6? I love this passage because the writer to the Hebrews refuses to let spiritual maturity stay vague. He gives us a working definition, a sober warning, and a clear path forward, all in a few verses. If you have ever wondered...
- [Why Paul Put Doctrine Before Application](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0023-why-did-paul-start-letters-with-doctrine-before-application/): Question 23. Why did Paul always start his letters with doctrine before application rather than practical instruction? Once you notice this pattern of doctrine before application, you cannot unsee it, and it will change the way you read the whole New Testament. Paul does not begin his letters with a list of things to do....
- [What Happens When Experience Is Valued Over Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0041-what-happens-when-experience-valued-over-doctrine/): Question 0041. When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value feelings above truth. It happens by a slow shift of weight, where the test of whether something is right gradually moves from what God has...
- [Does Having the Holy Spirit Mean I Do Not Need Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0039-does-having-holy-spirit-mean-no-need-to-study-doctrine/): Question 0039. Some Christians treat the Spirit and study as competitors, as though leaning on the Holy Spirit means I can set aside the effort of learning sound doctrine. The reasoning sounds spiritual. If the Spirit teaches me, why bury my nose in books and arguments? Why not simply trust him to guide me into...
- [What Does the Virgin Birth Accomplish Theologically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3073-what-does-the-virgin-birth-accomplish-theologically/): Question 3073. The virgin birth is not a decorative detail on the edge of the Christmas story; it is load-bearing doctrine, and if you remove it the whole structure of the Gospel begins to crack. Some treat it as a pious legend that grew up around Jesus after the fact, something a modern believer can...
- [What is the study of the 'historical Jesus' all about?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3052-what-is-the-study-of-the-historical-jesus/): Question 3052. The historical Jesus is a phrase you will meet in television documentaries, paperback bestsellers and undergraduate courses, usually delivered with a knowing tone: behind the Christ of the church’s faith, we are told, stands a rather different figure, the real Jesus of Nazareth, whom scholarship must excavate from beneath layers of legend. The...
- [How is Jesus different from other religious leaders?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3053-how-is-jesus-different-from-other-religious-leaders/): Question 3053. How is Jesus different from other religious leaders? It is one of the most common questions a thoughtful unbeliever asks, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a slogan. The world has produced many revered religious leaders: Moses and Muhammad, Buddha and Confucius, gurus and philosophers beyond counting. Popular culture likes to...
- [Is Jesus the angel Michael?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3054-is-jesus-the-angel-michael/): Question 3054. Is Jesus Michael the archangel? If you have ever spent an hour on the doorstep with Jehovah’s Witnesses, you will have met this claim, for it is a load-bearing wall of Watchtower theology: the Son, they teach, is really Michael, the first and greatest created being. The idea also had a home in...
- [What do Jesus' genealogies tell us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3056-what-do-jesus-genealogies-tell-us/): Question 3056. The genealogies of Jesus look, at first glance, like the least promising material in the New Testament: lists of names, many of them unpronounceable, standing between you and the story. I meet plenty of readers who confess they skip them entirely. I understand the temptation, but I want to persuade you that these...
- [Why are there two different genealogies?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3055-why-are-there-two-different-genealogies/): Question 3055. Open Matthew 1 and Luke 3 side by side and you will meet a genuine puzzle: two genealogies of Jesus that do not match. Matthew begins with Abraham and works forward to Joseph. Luke begins with Jesus and works backward all the way to Adam. That difference of direction is easy enough to...
- [Why did Jesus speak in parables?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3057-why-did-jesus-speak-in-parables/): Question 3057. The parables of Jesus are among the most famous stories ever told. The prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the sower, the lost sheep, the pearl of great price: these images have soaked into the world’s imagination for two thousand years, quoted by people who have never opened a Bible. Roughly a third of...
- [What about the 'lost years' of Jesus (12-30 years old)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3058-what-about-the-lost-years-of-jesus/): Question 3058. People love a gap, and the so-called lost years of Jesus are one of history’s most famous. The Gospels give us his birth, the flight to Egypt, one arresting scene in the temple at age twelve, and then silence until his baptism at about thirty (Luke 3:23). Nearly two decades pass without a...
- [Was Jesus married?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3059-was-jesus-married/): Question 3059. Every few years the claim that Jesus married resurfaces, usually with a book launch attached. Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code sent it round the world: Jesus wed Mary Magdalene, fathered a bloodline, and the church buried the evidence. In 2012 a papyrus fragment dubbed the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ made global...
- [What does 'Son of David' mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3044-what-does-son-of-david-mean/): 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 son of Abraham’ (Matthew 1:1). Blind men shouted it in the streets, crowds sang it on Palm Sunday, and the religious leaders bristled every time...
- [What does 'Messiah/Christ' actually mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3045-what-does-messiah-christ-mean/): Question 3045. Messiah and Christ both mean the anointed one, and that single fact unlocks more of your Bible than almost any other piece of vocabulary. Many people assume Christ is simply Jesus’ surname, as though Joseph and Mary were Mr and Mrs Christ of Nazareth. It is nothing of the kind. It is a...
- [What is original sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06074-what-is-original-sin/): Question 6074. Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam’s fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It is one of the few Christian doctrines that can be confirmed by reading a newspaper. The disagreements are not about whether something is wrong with...
- [What Is the Purpose of Life?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05038-what-is-the-purpose-of-life/): Question 5038. The purpose of life is the question every human being carries, whether they ever say it aloud or not. It surfaces at three in the morning, at gravesides, at milestone birthdays, and sometimes in the middle of success, which is often when it bites hardest. What is it all for? The modern world...
- [Do We Have Free Will?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05037-do-we-have-free-will/): Question 5037. Free will is one of those subjects where philosophers tie knots, theologians draw swords, and ordinary believers quietly wonder what they are allowed to think. So let me say at the outset where I stand: yes, we have free will, because the Bible everywhere treats human beings as responsible persons whose choices are...
- [What Is the Difference Between 'Image' and 'Likeness' in Genesis 1:26?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05017-image-and-likeness-genesis-1-26/): Question 5017. The words image and likeness in Genesis 1:26 have generated more theology per syllable than almost any pair in the Bible, and one of the first questions people ask is whether they mean two different things. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, God says. Is image one gift and...
- [What Happens to Babies and Young Children Who Die?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05013-what-happens-to-babies-and-young-children-who-die/): Question 5013. The question of babies who die is not an academic one, and I refuse to treat it academically. It is asked at gravesides small enough to break your heart, in hospital rooms after machines fall silent, and quietly, years later, by parents who have never stopped counting birthdays that were never celebrated. If...
- [What is total depravity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06075-what-is-total-depravity/): Question 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does not teach that human beings are as wicked as they could possibly be. It teaches that sin has reached every part of us, so that...
- [What Does It Mean to Be 'A Little Lower than the Angels'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05018-a-little-lower-than-the-angels/): Question 5018. Psalm 8 begins under a night sky, and you can almost see David leaning on his shepherd’s staff, looking up. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him? Anyone who...
- [What Is the Age of Accountability?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05012-what-is-the-age-of-accountability/): Question 5012. The age of accountability is the idea that a child is not held responsible before God for accepting or rejecting the gospel until they are capable of genuinely understanding it. You will not find the phrase anywhere in your concordance, which makes some people suspicious of the whole concept. But plenty of sound...
- [What Is the Difference Between Human Beings and Angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05020-difference-between-humans-and-angels/): Question 5020. Humans and angels are the Bible’s two great orders of rational creatures, and comparing them is one of the most clarifying exercises in theology. Popular culture muddles them endlessly: films where the dead earn wings, sympathy cards assuring us that heaven has gained another angel. It sounds comforting, but it is not what...
- [Do Animals Have Souls?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05019-do-animals-have-souls/): Question 5019. Whether animals have souls sounds like a child’s question, usually asked through tears over a dead pet, but it opens onto real theology, and the Bible’s answer is more interesting than most people expect. The surprise is in the Hebrew of Genesis itself: the phrase usually translated living creature, applied to animals, is...
- [What Is Personhood?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05023-what-is-personhood/): Question 5023. Human personhood is the question beneath nearly every moral battle of our age, though it rarely gets named. Abortion, euthanasia, embryo research, artificial intelligence, the treatment of the profoundly disabled: scratch any of them and you find the same buried issue. Who counts as a person? Who is a “someone” rather than a...
- [What Does It Mean That We Are 'Fearfully and Wonderfully Made'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05021-fearfully-and-wonderfully-made/): Question 5021. To be wonderfully made is not a compliment David pays himself in Psalm 139; it is worship he pays to his Maker. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) is a sentence about God before it is a sentence about David, and that ordering matters more than almost...
- [What Can an Unregenerate Person Perceive Spiritually?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05008-total-depravity-unregenerate-spiritual-perception/): Question 5008. Spiritual perception is a real capacity, and the Bible is remarkably precise about how much of it an unregenerate person actually has. Get this question wrong in one direction and you will assume the lost can reason their way to God unaided; get it wrong in the other direction and you will treat...
- [What Is Human Dignity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05022-what-is-human-dignity/): Question 5022. Human dignity is the worth that belongs to every human being simply because God made us in His own image, and that single sentence carries more weight than whole libraries of philosophy. Everyone talks about dignity. Politicians invoke it, charters enshrine it, campaigners march for it. But ask the modern world where human...
- [What is the unforgivable sin (blasphemy against the Holy Spirit)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7006-what-is-the-unforgivable-sin/): Question 07006. Few passages have caused more private agony than the one about the unforgivable sin, and I have lost count of the number of believers who have come to me convinced that they have committed it. They are almost always the last people on earth who could have done so, and I want to...
- [Why Did the Samaritans Receive the Spirit Only When Hands Were Laid on Them?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4105-acts-8-delay-of-the-spirit-samaritans/): 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 they received the Holy Spirit, and the gap between believing and receiving has puzzled careful readers for as long as the passage has been studied....
- [Were the Ephesian Disciples in Acts 19 Already Believers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4099-acts-19-disciples-holy-spirit-new-birth/): 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 looking for support for a doctrine Luke was not trying to teach. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Paul asks, and...
- [What Is the Difference Between the Baptism of the Spirit and the Filling of the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4060-spirit-baptism-vs-spirit-filling/): Question 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by...
- [Is the Holy Spirit Actually God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4059-is-the-holy-spirit-fully-god/): Question 4059. The Holy Spirit’s deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and how seriously you take the words Jesus Himself spoke against dishonouring Him. I have met sincere Christians who speak of the Spirit as a kind...
- [What Are the Three Conditions for Spirit-Filled Living?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4063-three-conditions-for-spirit-filled-living/): Question 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than...
- [Is Prophecy the Same Category of Thing as Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4062-is-prophecy-the-same-as-scripture/): Question 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic word as functionally equal to the Bible itself, or dismissing prophecy altogether simply because it is not Scripture. Paul gives us a considerably better way...
- [What Does "When the Perfect Comes" Mean in 1 Corinthians 13:10, and Does It Refer to the Completed Canon?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4061-what-does-the-perfect-mean-in-1-corinthians-13/): Question 4061. Whether spiritual gifts today continue to operate the way they did in the first century turns, for a great many cessationist writers, on a single disputed phrase tucked inside 1 Corinthians 13:10, and I want to examine that phrase carefully rather than simply asserting a conclusion and moving on. Paul writes that when...
- [How can a church honour the Spirit's gifts while avoiding charismatic excess?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9109-honouring-the-spirit-while-avoiding-charismatic-excess/): Question 9109. How does a church honour spiritual gifts without sliding into charismatic excess? That question has followed me through my whole ministry, because I am persuaded that both errors are real and that most congregations have only ever been warned about one of them. Some churches have quietly buried the gifts under a layer...
- [Why Is the Gift of Healing So Rarely Seen the Way the New Testament Describes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4068-why-are-gifts-of-healing-rarely-seen-today/): Question 4068. The gift of healing has not ceased, but it has also never operated the way the New Testament describes at every point in church history since Pentecost, and those two statements are not actually in tension once the New Testament’s own pattern is examined closely. Even within the pages of Acts, healing clusters...
- [How Do You Weigh a Prophetic Word Biblically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4066-how-to-weigh-a-prophetic-word/): Question 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone’s confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy in the gathered church, others are to weigh what has been said, testing it rather than receiving it uncritically. That single instruction from 1 Corinthians...
- [What Is Third Wave Charismatic?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04117-what-is-third-wave-charismatic/): Question 04117. Third wave charismatic is the name usually given to a movement that emerged among evangelical, non-Pentecostal churches in the 1980s, most closely associated with John Wimber and the Vineyard movement, which taught that signs and wonders such as healing and prophecy should accompany ordinary evangelism and church life without requiring the believer to...
- [How Does Every Believer Discover and Use Their Spiritual Gift?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4065-how-to-discover-and-use-spiritual-gifts/): Question 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit...
- [What Is 'Impartation' in Charismatic Circles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04118-critique-impartation-charismatic-circles/): Question 04118. Spiritual impartation is the phrase charismatic circles use so often that many Christians employ it without ever pausing to ask whether it describes something the Bible actually teaches. The idea, in its simplest form, is that a spiritual gift, an anointing, or a measure of the Spirit’s power can be transferred from one...
- [What Is the Sealing of the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04119-what-is-the-sealing-of-the-holy-spirit/): Question 04119. The sealing of the Spirit is the term Paul uses in Ephesians to describe something that happened to you the moment you believed and that nothing since has been able to undo. When he tells the Ephesian believers they were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), he is reaching for language...
- [Does God Have a Gender? What Scripture Teaches](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2021-does-god-have-a-gender/): Question 2021. God’s gender is a live question in a culture busy renegotiating what gender even means, and I want to answer it carefully rather than reaching for the nearest slogan. Does God have a gender in any biological sense, or does He simply speak of Himself in masculine terms as an accommodation to human...
- [Why Is God Referred to as He? Masculine Language Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2022-why-is-god-referred-to-as-he/): Question 2022. Masculine language for God runs through the whole Bible, “He,” “Him,” “Father,” “King,” and I am often asked why, given that God is spirit and not literally male, as I explained in my article on whether God has a gender. This question digs into the small word “He” specifically, the pronoun itself, rather...
- [How Do We Explain the Imprecatory Psalms?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1117-how-do-we-explain-the-imprecatory-psalms/): Question 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us...
- [Are There Different Views on the Trinity Among Trinitarians?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2002-different-views-trinity-among-trinitarians/): Question 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves anything other than mainstream evangelical Christians. This surprises people who assume the Trinity is one settled doctrine with no internal variety at all. It is...
- [How does the doctrine of God's sovereignty bring peace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02084-how-does-doctrine-of-gods-sovereignty-bring-peace/): Question 02084 We live in an age of anxiety. Surveys consistently show rising levels of worry, stress, and fear—about the future, about circumstances beyond our control, about what might happen next. Into this anxious world, the doctrine of God’s sovereignty speaks a profoundly comforting word: God is in control, and nothing escapes His notice or...
- [What is the difference between common grace and saving grace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7063-what-is-the-difference-between-common-grace-and-saving-grace/): Question 07063 Common grace is the undeserved kindness God shows to everybody without exception, and saving grace is the undeserved kindness by which He rescues those who trust Jesus. Both are grace, because neither is earned. They differ in scope, in purpose and in what they accomplish. The distinction is worth getting straight, because a...
- [What was Gnosticism, and which New Testament letters address it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13011-how-did-gnosticism-threaten-the-early-church/): Question 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New Testament itself, and it turns up again every few decades wearing new clothes and promising the same thing: secret knowledge for a special few. I...
- [Was Jesus Crucified Since the Foundation of the World? (Revelation 13:8)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3078-was-jesus-crucified-since-foundation-of-world/): Question 3078. The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world is one of the most arresting phrases in the whole Bible, and depending on which translation you pick up, Revelation 13:8 can sound as though Jesus was actually crucified before the world was even made. That is a staggering thought. Was the cross somehow...
- [Did Jesus Really Feed 5,000+ People?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03085-did-jesus-really-feed-5000-people/): Question 3085. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle of Jesus, apart from the resurrection itself, recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-15), and that fourfold attestation is itself worth pausing over. Whatever else the early church wanted the world to know about Jesus, this meal...
- [Is the Cross Still the Most Cruel Form of Torture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03084-is-the-cross-still-the-most-cruel-form-of-torture/): Question 3084. Roman crucifixion has a strong claim to being the cruellest method of execution human beings have ever devised, and the question of whether anything since has surpassed it deserves an honest answer rather than a pious one. It is partly a historical question, partly a matter of grim comparison, and behind both stands...
- [When Jesus Was Angry, Did He Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03082-when-jesus-was-angry-did-he-sin/): Question 3082. Righteous anger sounds to many people like a contradiction in terms, because most of the anger we have ever seen, or produced, has been anything but righteous. Yet the Gospels record Jesus displaying unmistakable anger on several occasions: overturning tables in the temple, glaring round a synagogue at hard-hearted critics, snorting with indignation...
- [Why Did Jesus Curse the Fig Tree?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03081-why-did-jesus-curse-the-fig-tree/): Question 3081. The fig tree that Jesus cursed has puzzled readers for centuries, and I understand why: at first glance it looks like an overreaction to a piece of vegetation, and Mark even tells us “it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13). Why blast a tree for lacking fruit it was not yet...
- [Did Jesus Laugh or Tell Jokes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03080-did-jesus-laugh-or-tell-jokes/): Question 3080. The humour of Jesus is a subject that makes some Christians nervous, as though laughter were somehow beneath the Man of Sorrows. Nobody asks this question expecting a catalogue of recorded punchlines, and the Gospels preserve no verse that says “Jesus laughed”. But the question behind the question is a serious one: was...
- [Was Jesus Walking on Water Real?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03079-was-jesus-walking-on-water-real/): Question 3079. Jesus walking on water tends to provoke one of two responses: straightforward acceptance of a miracle performed by the Son of God, or a hunt for some naturalistic explanation that keeps the story while quietly removing the supernatural from it. Was He really treading the surface of the Sea of Galilee in a...
- [Why do we often speak about 'Christ' rather than Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03003-why-do-we-speak-about-christ-rather-than-jesus/): Question 3003. The meaning of Christ gets lost the moment we treat the word as though it were simply Jesus’ surname, the way we might say John Smith. It is not a surname, and once you see what the word is actually doing, you hear the New Testament rather differently. “Christ” translates the Hebrew Mashiach,...
- [Why Did Jesus Weep If He Knew He Would Raise Lazarus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3074-why-did-jesus-weep-if-he-knew-he-would-raise-lazarus/): Question 3074. “Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in our English Bibles, and it may be the most surprising, because the One shedding tears at the tomb of Lazarus knew perfectly well that within minutes He would call the dead man out alive. Why cry at a funeral you are about to overturn? If you...
- [Why Do Christians Disagree About What the Bible Teaches?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1005-why-do-christians-disagree-about-bible-teaching/): Question 01005. If the Bible is clear, why do sincere Christians disagree so often about what it teaches? This is one of the most honest questions believers ask, usually when they are genuinely trying to understand God’s Word and find themselves surrounded by conflicting interpretations. It can be unsettling. If Scripture really is God’s clear...
- [Dreams, Visions and Prophecy Today](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1008-what-about-dreams-visions-prophecy-today/): Question 1008. The question of dreams and visions and prophecy today stirs up real confusion and no small amount of division in the church. Does God still speak through such means? Should I expect them, seek them, or be suspicious of them? I want to think this through carefully, because the two easy answers, an...
- [Are There Lost Books of the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1080-are-there-lost-books-of-the-bible/): Question 1080. Have we lost books of the Bible? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just read a footnote mentioning the Book of Jashar, or heard a documentary claim that whole gospels were suppressed by a jealous church hierarchy centuries ago. It is a fair question,...
- [What Is the Best Bible Translation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1079-what-is-the-best-bible-translation/): Question 1079. People ask me what the best Bible translation and the honest answer is that it depends rather a lot on what you are trying to do with it that week. For preaching, teaching, and serious study, I have a clear answer, and I will give it to you directly. For reading through a...
- [Can We Trust the Manuscript Transmission of the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1077-can-we-trust-manuscript-transmission/): Question 1077. Manuscript transmission is the unglamorous term for a question that genuinely keeps some people awake at night: how do we know the Bible we hold today says what was originally written, given that the ink on the original pages dried out and turned to dust many centuries ago? It is a fair question,...
- [What Is Biblical Inerrancy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1070-what-is-biblical-inerrancy/): Question 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine the fuller Deep Dive treatment it deserves, because it sits underneath almost every other confidence a Christian holds. If the Bible cannot be trusted in...
- [What About the Gnostic Gospels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1076-what-about-the-gnostic-gospels/): Question 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version of Jesus that these texts supposedly preserve. It is a compelling story, and I understand why it sells books. It is also, on the actual...
- [What Is Verbal Plenary Inspiration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1069-what-is-verbal-plenary-inspiration/): Question 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only view that actually matches the way Jesus and the apostles treated the biblical text in practice. The phrase packs two distinct claims into two words:...
- [What Is Biblical Inspiration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1068-what-is-biblical-inspiration/): Question 01068. Biblical inspiration means something far more precise than the loose, everyday sense in which we might call a piece of music or a great novel inspired. It is a technical theological term describing exactly how God produced Scripture through human authors, and getting biblical inspiration right matters enormously, because it determines what kind...
- [How Do We Know the Bible Is True?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1067-how-do-we-know-the-bible-is-true/): Question 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God’s Word, and I think it can bear the weight of honest scrutiny very well indeed. In a sceptical age, people rightly ask how we can trust a set...
- [Is the Bible Really God's Word?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1066-is-the-bible-really-gods-word/): Question 01066. Whether the Bible is really God’s Word is, I think, the single most foundational question anyone can ask about the Christian faith, because everything else depends on the answer. If Scripture is not what it claims to be, our faith rests on nothing sturdier than human opinion and inherited tradition. If it is...
- [Are There Contradictions in the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1072-are-there-contradictions-in-the-bible/): Question 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves no favours by either dismissing the question too quickly or panicking as though the whole edifice of Scripture rests on winning every single one of...
- [What Is Biblical Infallibility?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1071-what-is-biblical-infallibility/): Question 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak carefully about what kind of trust Scripture actually deserves. When we say the Bible is infallible, we are making a statement about its complete trustworthiness...
- [Why These Sixty-Six Books? Understanding the Bible's Canon](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1074-why-these-66-books/): Question 1074. Why these sixty-six books, and not more, and not fewer? It is a fair question, and one I would rather answer directly than wave away with an appeal to church tradition alone, since tradition, however venerable, is not itself the final ground of biblical authority. Having already looked at how the canon of...
- [How Was the Canon of Scripture Formed?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1073-how-was-the-canon-of-scripture-formed/): Question 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about...
- [What About the Apocrypha?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1075-what-about-the-apocrypha/): Question 1075. The Old Testament Apocrypha sits quietly on the shelf of most study Bibles that include it, and I get asked about it more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just noticed that a Catholic or Orthodox friend’s Bible is a good deal thicker than their own. The question behind...
- [What Does Scripture Say About Prophecy Fulfilment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1081-what-does-scripture-say-about-prophecy-fulfilment/): Question 1081. Prophecy fulfilment is, in my judgement, one of the strongest evidences we have for the divine origin of Scripture, and I do not say that lightly after years of studying the alternatives on offer. No other sacred text in human history contains anything remotely comparable to the Bible’s record of specific predictions made...
- [Should We "Claim" Verses in Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1091-should-we-claim-verses-in-prayer/): Question 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they claimed never arrived. I understand the instinct. When life is hard, a promise like “I know the plans I have for you” feels like exactly...
- [What About Supposed Scientific Errors in the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1083-what-about-supposed-scientific-errors-in-the-bible/): Question 1083. Scientific errors are what critics claim to find scattered through the Bible, arguing that Scripture reflects the primitive cosmology of ancient peoples and cannot be trusted as God’s Word on anything else either. They point to passages about the sun standing still, a solid dome over the earth, or the earth resting on...
- [How Does Archaeology Confirm Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1082-how-does-archaeology-confirm-scripture/): Question 1082. Biblical archaeology has quietly become one of the most persuasive answers I can give a sceptical friend, because it deals in something they cannot simply wave away: dirt, pottery, inscriptions, and dated strata pulled directly out of the ground. For centuries critics dismissed much of the Bible as myth and legend, claiming that...
- [Are Biblical Numbers Literal or Symbolic?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1085-are-biblical-numbers-literal-or-symbolic/): Question 1085. Biblical numbers appear throughout Scripture: forty days of flood, seven churches, twelve tribes, 144,000 sealed servants, 666 as the number of the beast. Are these figures meant literally, symbolically, or sometimes both at once? Understanding how biblical numbers function in Hebrew and Greek literature helps us interpret Scripture accurately, avoiding both wooden literalism...
- [How Accurate Are Biblical Genealogies?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1084-how-accurate-are-biblical-genealogies/): Question 1084. Biblical genealogies can seem tedious to modern readers, long lists of unpronounceable names we are tempted to skip on our way to the next narrative section. Yet these genealogies serve real theological and legal purposes in Scripture, and they have been the subject of long-running debate regarding their completeness and their historical accuracy....
- [How Does Scripture Function in Worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1087-how-does-scripture-function-in-worship/): Question 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church gathers before the Lord. I have led enough services now to know how easy it is to let worship drift into a performance of moods...
- [What About Numerical Patterns in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1086-what-about-numerical-patterns-in-scripture/): Question 1086. Numerical patterns in Scripture fascinate people, and I understand why they do. Some claim to have discovered elaborate numerical patterns hidden in the biblical text, patterns they say prove divine authorship beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. Others dismiss all such claims outright as misguided numerology dressed up in scholarly-sounding language. What are we...
- [How Does Scripture Relate to Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1090-how-does-scripture-relate-to-prayer/): Question 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say this from experience as much as from study. There have been stretches of ministry where my Bible reading thinned out, and without my quite noticing,...
- [What Role Does Scripture Play in Counselling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1089-what-role-does-scripture-play-in-counselling/): Question 1089. Scripture in counselling is where I keep returning whenever I sit with someone in pain, because the Bible speaks to the whole person, not only to their beliefs about God. I am not a trained clinical psychologist, and I refer people to good professional help when a situation calls for it. But as...
- [Can AI Help With Bible Study? Should It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1093-can-ai-help-with-bible-study/): Question 1093. AI Bible study is something I get asked about often now, usually by people who are not sure whether using a tool like this on their Bible reading is clever stewardship or a shortcut around the very discipline that forms the soul. I do not come to this question as a technophobe. My...
- [What Does It Mean to Meditate on Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1092-what-does-it-mean-to-meditate-on-scripture/): Question 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word “meditation” now carries associations that have very little to do with what the Bible means by it. When people hear “meditate”, many picture emptying the mind, sitting cross-legged, chasing a blank...
- [Bible Movies and Dramatic Readings: How Should We Watch Them?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1096-bible-movies-and-dramatic-readings/): Question 1096. Bible movies and dramatic readings have exploded in popularity over the last few years, and I get asked about them often enough that I think the question deserves a proper answer rather than a shrug from the pulpit. Series like The Chosen have brought Jesus and the disciples into millions of living rooms...
- [Bible Apps or a Physical Bible: Which Should I Use?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1094-bible-apps-vs-physical-bibles/): Question 1094. Bible apps have changed how most of us meet with Scripture each morning, and I think that change deserves more thought than a shrug and a download. I use a Bible app most days myself, so this is not a piece written from the safety of a leather-bound pulpit Bible looking down its...
- [Audio Bibles: Are They as Good as Reading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1095-audio-bibles-are-they-as-good-as-reading/): Question 1095. Audio Bible listening has become one of the most common ways church members tell me they get through Scripture, usually confessed with a slightly apologetic tone, as though listening were a lesser cousin of proper reading. I want to put that apology to rest, because for most of human history, hearing the word...
- [What About Errors in Old Testament Quotations Within Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1104-what-about-errors-in-quotations-within-scripture/): Question 1104. Old Testament quotations in the New Testament rarely match their source word for word, and if you line up Matthew’s citation of Isaiah next to your Old Testament text, you will often notice small differences in wording almost immediately. Sceptics sometimes present this as proof of error somewhere in Scripture. It is nothing...
- [Does Inspiration Extend to Chapter and Verse Divisions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1103-does-inspiration-extend-to-chapter-verse-divisions/): Question 1103. Verse divisions feel so permanent, printed neatly into every Bible you own, that it is easy to assume they came down from Sinai along with everything else. They did not. The chapter and verse numbers you use to find John 3:16 or Romans 8:28 are a human study aid added many centuries after...
- [How Can Scripture Be Fully Human and Fully Divine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1102-how-can-scripture-be-fully-human-and-fully-divine/): Question 1102. The dual authorship of Scripture is one of those doctrines that sounds like a contradiction until you actually sit with it, because we are so used to thinking of authorship as a single, exclusive category. Either Paul wrote Romans or God wrote Romans, surely, not both at once. But Scripture itself insists on...
- [How Detailed Is Biblical Preservation Promised?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1106-how-detailed-is-biblical-preservation-promised/): Question 1106. Biblical preservation is a doctrine people often assume promises far more than it actually claims, and getting the scope right matters enormously, especially once you learn that our thousands of New Testament manuscripts contain small variations between copies. Does that discovery threaten biblical preservation as a doctrine? Not once you understand what the...
- [What Is Literal Interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1037-what-is-literal-interpretation/): 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 mean something it was never meant to mean. I want to state plainly at the outset what this method actually is, because getting the definition...
- [What Role Do Creeds and Confessions Play Alongside Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1036-role-of-creeds-and-confessions-alongside-scripture/): Question 1036. Creeds and confessions are summaries, not sources. That single sentence answers most of the confusion I encounter around this question. A creed does not add to what Scripture has revealed, and it does not carry authority independent of Scripture. What it does is state, in careful and tested language, what a body of...
- [What Is Typology, and How Do We Identify Types?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1039-what-is-typology-how-identify-types/): Question 1039. Biblical typology is the study of persons, events, and institutions in the Old Testament that God designed in advance to prefigure greater realities fulfilled in Christ and the new covenant. It is one of the most rewarding areas of biblical study once its rules are properly understood, and one of the most abused...
- [What Is Allegorical Interpretation, and Should We Use It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1038-what-is-allegorical-interpretation/): Question 1038. Allegorical interpretation treats a biblical text as a coded surface concealing a deeper, often quite different, spiritual meaning beneath it, and it has a long and influential history in the church, particularly through the Alexandrian tradition associated with Origen and later through much of medieval exegesis. The question of whether allegorical interpretation should...
- [What Is Biblical Sufficiency?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1031-what-is-biblical-sufficiency/): Question 1031. biblical sufficiency is the settled conviction that Scripture provides everything a believer genuinely needs for faith and godly living, and I want to be precise about exactly what that claim covers, because it is regularly misunderstood in both directions at once. Some treat biblical sufficiency as though the Bible should directly answer every...
- [How Do We Identify Genre in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1040-how-identify-genre-in-scripture/): Question 1040. Biblical genre is the single most overlooked factor in careless Bible reading, and identifying it correctly is not an optional refinement of interpretation but a basic requirement of reading any piece of literature responsibly, biblical or otherwise. Nobody reads a newspaper editorial the same way they read a birthday card, and nobody should...
- [What Does "Scripture Interprets Scripture" Mean Practically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1033-scripture-interprets-scripture-practically/): Question 1033. Scripture interprets Scripture is one of those phrases preachers use so often that it risks sounding like a slogan rather than a method. In practice it names something quite specific. When a passage is unclear, ambiguous, or genuinely difficult, I let clearer passages elsewhere in the Bible set the boundaries for how the...
- [Is Scripture Our Only Authority or Our Final Authority?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1032-scripture-only-or-final-authority/): Question 1032. When I say Scripture is my final authority, people sometimes hear something I have not actually said. They hear a claim that Scripture is the only source of guidance a Christian ever consults, as though reason, experience, and the accumulated wisdom of other believers count for nothing. That is not the claim, and...
- [What Is Christocentric Interpretation of Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1041-what-is-christocentric-interpretation-of-scripture/): Question 1041. Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not a modern invention layered onto the text from outside. It is the reading strategy Jesus Himself modelled and explicitly commanded, and taking it seriously changes...
- [Why Is Scripture Necessary? Could Not God Reveal Himself Other Ways?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1034-why-is-scripture-necessary/): Question 1034. Special revelation is not God’s only way of making Himself known, but it is His only sufficient way of making Himself known for salvation, and that distinction answers most of what lies behind this question. God has genuinely revealed something of Himself through creation, through conscience, and through the ordinary unfolding of history....
- [How Important Is Cultural and Historical Context in Interpreting Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1044-how-important-is-cultural-historical-context/): Question 1044. Cultural and historical context is not an optional extra for serious Bible readers, it is the very air the text was written to breathe. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about head coverings, was he addressing a timeless principle or a local custom peculiar to that city? When Jesus told the rich young...
- [The Dangers of Eisegesis Versus Exegesis](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1043-what-are-the-dangers-of-eisegesis-vs-exegesis/): Question 1043. Eisegesis and exegesis sound like a pair of obscure Greek terms you could safely ignore, but the difference between them decides whether a sermon, a Bible study, or your own private reading actually hears God or simply hears an echo of your own opinions dressed up in religious language. Have you ever heard...
- [What Role Does Archaeology Play in Understanding Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1045-what-role-does-archaeology-play-in-understanding-scripture/): Question 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting rather than threatening. In 1868 a German missionary named Frederick Klein discovered a black basalt stone in Jordan bearing an inscription from Mesha, king of...
- [What Makes a Good Commentary?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1052-what-makes-a-good-commentary/): Question 1052. A good commentary is not always easy to spot on a crowded shelf, and that is the honest problem behind this question. Walk into any Christian bookshop, or browse online, and you will find hundreds of commentaries on every book of the Bible, from slim paperbacks to multi-volume sets that could double as...
- [How Do We Handle the Samaritan Pentateuch?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1051-how-do-we-handle-the-samaritan-pentateuch/): Question 1051. The Samaritan Pentateuch sounds like the kind of obscure manuscript detail that only specialists need worry about, but it raises a question worth answering plainly: if the Samaritans have their own version of the first five books of the Bible, and it differs here and there from the Hebrew text we use, how...
- [Is It Okay to Mark in My Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1055-is-it-okay-to-mark-in-my-bible/): Question 1055. marking your Bible is not only permitted, I would go further and say it is one of the more underused tools available to an ordinary Christian who wants to grow in their understanding of Scripture over years of reading rather than simply months. Some believers were taught, often by a well-meaning parent or...
- [What Bible Study Tools Are Essential?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1054-what-bible-study-tools-are-essential/): Question 1054. Bible study tools multiply faster than most of us can keep track of, with software, websites and apps proliferating alongside the traditional printed options, and the choice can feel overwhelming if you are serious about going deeper than devotional reading alone. You want to understand what passages really mean, trace themes across Scripture,...
- [Why Did Jesus and the Apostles Quote from the Septuagint?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1047-why-did-jesus-apostles-quote-septuagint/): Question 1047. Septuagint quotations appear throughout the New Testament far more often than most readers realise, and noticing this raises a fair question. If Jesus and the apostles regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the very word of God, why do so many of their citations follow the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text underlying...
- [Septuagint vs Masoretic Text: Which Is Authoritative?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1046-septuagint-vs-masoretic-text-which-is-authoritative/): Question 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every English version on my shelf, including the ESV. But it is not the only ancient witness to the Old Testament, and understanding how it relates...
- [What About 1 John 5:7 and the Johannine Comma (Comma Johanneum)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1050-1-john-5-7-johannine-comma/): Question 1050. The Johannine Comma is the name given to a few extra words that appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and nowhere in modern translations, and if you have ever noticed the difference and wondered what happened to the Trinity, you are asking exactly the right question. The King James...
- [What Do the Compound Names of God Reveal About Him?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2066-compound-names-of-god-el-shaddai-el-elyon-adonai/): Question 2066. The names of God in the Old Testament form one of the richest veins of theological material in all of Scripture, and I never tire of returning to them. These are not arbitrary labels attached to God the way a nickname might be attached to a person. Each one emerged from a specific...
- [Could God Have Created a World Without Evil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2065-could-god-have-created-world-without-evil-and-given-humanity-genuine-freedom/): Question 2065. Genuine human freedom sits at the very centre of one of the oldest and hardest questions in theology. Could God have created a world where genuine human freedom existed but evil never entered it? The question deserves more than a quick answer, because it touches the nature of freedom itself, why God chose...
- [What Does 'God Is Light' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2062-what-does-god-is-light-mean/): Question 2062. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Those words from 1 John 1:5 are among the most compact and striking theological statements in all of Scripture. They arrive without qualification, without hedging, and without any parallel phrase to soften them. I want to work through what John actually...
- [Why Did David and Bathsheba's Baby Die?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02080-why-did-david-and-bathshebas-baby-die/): Question 2080. David’s child died on the seventh day of his illness, the son born to David and Bathsheba after their affair and the arranged death of her husband Uriah, and the story in 2 Samuel 12 remains one of the most emotionally difficult passages many parents ever read. Why would God take the life...
- [Why Did God Harden Pharaoh's Heart?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02079-why-did-god-harden-pharaohs-heart/): Question 2079. Pharaoh’s hardened heart troubles many readers of Exodus for a very understandable reason: if God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, how could Pharaoh be justly held responsible for refusing to let Israel go? This question sits at the intersection of divine action and human responsibility, and I want to walk through it honestly rather than...
- [Why Did God Kill Uzzah for Touching the Ark?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02077-why-did-god-kill-uzzah-for-touching-the-ark/): Question 2077. The death of Uzzah is one of those Old Testament episodes that stops readers cold: a man reaches out to steady the ark of the covenant when the oxen stumble, and God strikes him dead on the spot (2 Samuel 6:6-7). It looks, at first read, like a wildly disproportionate response to an...
- [Is God in Hell?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02076-is-god-in-hell/): Question 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...
- [Why Did God Command the Canaanite Conquest?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02075-why-did-god-command-genocide-in-the-old-testament/): Question 2075. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, women and children, to complete destruction. I will not soften this question or rush past it, because I think it deserves the same honesty I...
- [Does God Hear the Prayers of Unbelievers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02074-does-god-hear-unbelievers/): Question 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they cried out to a God they were not otherwise sure they believed in. Did God hear that? I want to answer honestly rather than with...
- [Does Prayer Change God's Mind?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02073-does-prayer-change-gods-mind/): Question 2073. Changing God’s mind through prayer sounds, on the surface, like a contradiction of everything else Scripture teaches about His unchanging character. Yet Scripture itself records instance after instance of prayer altering what happens next, and I think the honest answer requires us to hold prayer’s real effectiveness together with God’s fixed, trustworthy nature...
- [Can You Lose the Holy Spirit Once You Have Him?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04018-can-you-lose-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4018. Can you lose the Holy Spirit once you have Him? This is a tender question, and it is usually asked by someone who is frightened rather than curious. They have sinned badly, or they have gone through a cold and prayerless season, and they wonder whether the Spirit has quietly slipped away. So...
- [What Is Resisting the Holy Spirit? A Biblical Answer](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04017-what-is-resisting-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4017. What is resisting the Holy Spirit, and is it something a Christian can do? The phrase comes to us from a tense and dramatic moment in the book of Acts, and it carries a sharp edge. To understand resisting the Holy Spirit we have to watch where the Bible actually uses the language,...
- [What Is Praying in the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04013-what-is-praying-in-the-spirit/): Question 4013. Praying in the Spirit is a phrase that has been pulled in two very different directions, and I want to bring it back to what Scripture actually means by it. For some it conjures speaking in tongues and little else. For others it sounds so mystical that they assume it is for spiritual...
- [Can the Spirit Be Quenched?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04012-can-the-spirit-be-quenched/): Question 4012. To quench the Spirit is a phrase Paul drops into a single short verse, and yet it carries a warning every believer needs to hear. We can, by our own choices, smother the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the way a bucket of water smothers a fire. That is a...
- [What Is the Role of the Spirit in Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04011-what-is-the-role-of-the-spirit-in-prayer/): Question 4011. The role of the Spirit in prayer is one of the most comforting truths I know, and also one of the most neglected. We talk a great deal about praying to the Father through the Son, which is right, but we often forget that the third Person of the Trinity is just as...
- [Why Did God Accept Abel's Offering but Not Cain's?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02078-why-did-god-accept-abels-offering-but-not-cains/): Question 2078. Abel’s offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel both brought something to the LORD. Only one offering was accepted. Understanding why gets to the very heart of what worship has always actually been...
- [What Does It Mean That the Father Is Greater Than the Son?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2071-father-greater-than-son-john-14-28-eternal-functional-subordination/): Question 2071. Functional subordination is the term I use to describe what Jesus means in John 14:28 when He tells His disciples, ‘the Father is greater than I’ (John 14:28). It is one of the more delicate corners of Trinitarian doctrine, because getting it wrong in either direction leads somewhere heretical, and I want to...
- [Why Did God Create Us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02055-why-did-god-create-humans/): Question 2055. God created us, and the reason why sits underneath most of the anxiety that drives people towards religion in the first place, and towards its alternatives too. Why am I here. What am I actually for. Scripture answers this not as an abstract puzzle to be solved but as a statement of identity,...
- [How Does the Spirit's Illuminating Work Differ From His Convicting Work?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04120-spirit-illuminating-work-vs-convicting-work/): Question 04120. The Spirit’s illuminating work inside a believer and His convicting work upon an unbeliever are close cousins in Scripture, yet they are not the same ministry, and mixing them up has left more than one Christian either doubting a salvation that is perfectly secure or misreading how God deals with people who do...
- [Can We Pray to the Holy Spirit, or Only the Father?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04016-can-we-pray-to-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4016. Can we pray to the Holy Spirit, or should we only ever pray to the Father or the Son? I get asked this more than you might think, often by thoughtful believers who have noticed that the Bible’s prayers are nearly always addressed to the Father, and who wonder whether the Spirit has...
- [Is Laying on Hands for Healing a Legitimate Biblical Practice?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04121-is-laying-on-of-hands-for-healing-biblical/): Question 04121. Laying on hands for the sick is one of those practices that can provoke suspicion in one congregation and warm expectation in another, and I think both reactions usually owe more to cultural memory than to careful exegesis. Before we let televangelist excess on one side, or stiff cessationist caution on the other,...
- [Can you give glory to the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04005-can-you-give-glory-to-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4005. Giving glory to the Spirit is something many believers feel oddly uncertain about, and the question deserves a straight answer. We sing freely to the Father and to the Son, yet when it comes to the third Person of the Trinity a strange shyness sets in, as though praising Him might somehow be...
- [What was Paul's thorn in the flesh?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06076-what-was-pauls-thorn-in-the-flesh/): Question 6076. Paul’s thorn in the flesh is one of the great unanswered questions of the New Testament, and I have come to think the silence is deliberate. We are told what it did, why it was given and what God said about it. We are never told what it was. That combination is unusual...
- [Where did Cain's wife come from?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60093-where-did-cains-wife-come-from/): Question 60093. Cain’s wife has been produced as a knockout blow against Genesis since at least the seventeenth century, and she is still being produced today, usually with an air of having settled the matter. Cain kills Abel, is driven out, goes to the land of Nod, and there he knows his wife. Where, the...
- [What is Noah's nakedness in Genesis 9?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13012-noahs-nakedness-genesis-9/): Question 13012. Noah’s nakedness is one of those passages people read quickly and hope nobody asks about. A righteous man plants a vineyard, gets drunk, lies uncovered in his tent, and his grandson ends up cursed. Even by the standards of Genesis it is an odd few verses. It has also attracted some of the...
- [What Is the Significance of Ruth in Israel's Story and the Davidic Royal Line?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03087-significance-of-ruth-in-davidic-royal-line/): Question 3087. The book of Ruth is only four chapters long, a quiet rural story of famine, bereavement, gleaning, and a wedding, set in the lawless era of the judges. You could read it in fifteen minutes and enjoy it purely as one of literature’s finest short narratives. But the genealogy at its close, running...
- [Where did the Word of Faith movement come from, and what shaped its theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60082-word-of-faith-historical-origin-theological-genealogy/): Question 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissive one. Its distinctive claims are familiar even to people who have never set foot in one of its churches: that faith is a force,...
- [What does it mean that Christ is our advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3013-christ-as-advocate-1-john-2-1/): Question 3013. Christ our advocate is one of those short phrases that manages to be both deeply pastoral and precisely theological all in a single breath. John writes, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the...
- [What is the Scapegoat theory of atonement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7086-scapegoat-theory-of-atonement/): Question 7086. The scapegoat theory of atonement is a way of understanding the cross that draws on the ritual of Leviticus 16 and, in its modern form, on sociological accounts of how communities discharge their violence onto a chosen victim. It has become influential in academic theology over the last fifty years, and it contains...
- [What Is Open Theism, and Is It Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2004-what-is-open-theism-and-is-it-biblical/): Question 2004. Open theism is the teaching that God does not exhaustively know the future, particularly the future free choices of human beings, because those choices do not yet exist to be known even by an omniscient God. On this view, the future is genuinely "open," not yet settled, and God discovers what happens alongside...
- [What Is the Difference Between God's Will and God's Desire?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2003-what-is-the-difference-between-gods-will-and-gods-desire/): Question 2003. God’s will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a child walks away from the faith, or a nation legalises something Scripture calls sin, people sometimes ask in genuine distress whether all of that happened...
- [What is common grace, and what can unbelievers genuinely perceive through it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02085-what-is-common-grace/): Question 02085 The term “common grace” describes the benefits God extends to all people regardless of whether they are in a saving relationship with Him. It is distinguished from saving grace, which transforms the soul and brings about new birth, and it raises a genuine question: can someone who has never trusted Christ still perceive...
- [Does God Control or Permit Evil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2006-does-god-control-or-merely-permit-evil/): Question 2006. Whenever I sit with someone walking through real suffering, I find that the honest answer to whether God permits evil or actively causes it decides everything else about how we cope with what has happened to them. Does the Lord control every wicked act in this world down to the last detail, or...
- [Does God Ordain Everything That Happens?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2005-does-god-ordain-everything-that-happens/): Question 2005. God’s providence is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the whole of Theology Proper, largely because two opposite errors keep pulling the conversation off balance. One error makes God the direct author of literally everything that happens, including sin and atrocity, as though every act of cruelty, every natural disaster, every child’s...
- [How Does God Speak Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2008-how-does-god-speak-today/): Question 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where...
- [How Do the Persons of the Trinity Communicate with Each Other?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2011-how-do-the-persons-of-the-trinity-communicate/): Question 2011. Ask a room of Christians how the persons of Trinity actually communicate with one another, and you will likely get some puzzled looks. The question seems either too obvious to bother with or too speculative to answer at all. In reality it touches something genuinely profound about the nature of God, and Scripture...
- [What Does It Mean to Fear God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2010-what-does-it-mean-to-fear-god/): Question 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon’s words, “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying...
- [The Procession of the Spirit: What Does It Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04015-what-does-procession-of-the-spirit-mean/): Question 4015. When someone asks me what the procession of the Spirit means, I usually start by admitting that it is one of those phrases the church has used for centuries while ordinary believers were left wondering whether it mattered at all. It does matter, and I want to show you why. The procession of...
- [What Does 'Eternal Generation of the Son' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2013-what-does-eternal-generation-of-the-son-mean/): Question 2013. The phrase eternal generation of the Son appears in no single verse of Scripture in those exact words, and that immediately raises a fair question. Is this a doctrine the church developed to explain what Scripture teaches, or is it an addition that goes beyond what Scripture actually says? The answer matters a...
- [Does the Father Love the Son More Than He Loves Us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2012-does-the-father-love-the-son-more-than-he-loves-us/): Question 2012. The question of the Father’s love for ordinary believers, compared with His love for the eternal Son, feels almost presumptuous at first glance, as though we are asking to be measured against the Son of God Himself. But the reason people keep asking me this is usually deeply personal. Does God’s love for...
- [Does God Have Favourites? Divine Favouritism Examined](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2017-does-god-have-favourites/): Question 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text actually teaches? I ask this because Scripture does describe God choosing Israel out of all the nations, calling David “a man after his own heart,”...
- [Is the Economic Trinity Essential or Just a Role?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2015-are-the-roles-of-the-trinity-essential-or-just-economic/): Question 2015. Is what we call the economic Trinity, the roles the Father, Son and Spirit play toward creation and redemption, essential to who God is, or is it just a convenient arrangement they could have swapped around? This question sounds abstract until you notice how much of the gospel depends on the answer. The...
- [What Does Divine Impassibility Mean? A Deep Dive](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2019-what-does-divine-impassibility-mean/): Question 2019. What does divine impassibility mean, and is it something the Bible actually teaches or something Greek philosophy smuggled into Christian theology? This is one of those Deep Dive questions where I want to slow down and take my time, because the traditional answer and the biblical data sit in real, sustained tension with...
- [If God Is All-Loving, Why Doesn't He Save Everyone?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2018-if-god-is-all-loving-why-doesnt-he-save-everyone/): Question 2018. If unlimited atonement really means Christ’s death was sufficient for every person, why doesn’t an all-loving God simply save everyone? This is one of the oldest objections to the Christian faith, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissive one, because the logic behind it feels tight. If God...
- [Is the Trinity in the Old Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2029-is-the-trinity-in-the-old-testament/): 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 first seem, because if the doctrine of the Trinity suddenly appears out of nowhere in the New Testament, with no anticipation whatsoever in Israel’s own...
- [What Is Trinity Doctrine? A Full Deep Dive](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2028-what-is-the-doctrine-of-the-trinity/): Question 2028. Trinity doctrine is, without much question, the single most distinctive claim Christianity makes about the very nature of God, and yet many Christians could not explain it clearly if asked. This Deep Dive sets out, at proper length and without shortcuts, what Trinity doctrine actually asserts, how it differs from the various errors...
- [How Can the Triune God Be Three Persons Yet One?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2027-how-can-god-be-three-persons-yet-one-god/): Question 2027. How can the triune God be three persons and yet one God, without that being either a contradiction or three gods wearing a trench coat? This is a Deep Dive question because the honest answer requires more than a slogan. I want to walk through what Scripture actually claims, why it is not...
- [Why Does God Require Worship? A Full Answer](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02031-why-does-god-require-worship/): Question 2031. Why does God require worship, and doesn’t a God who demands to be worshipped sound uncomfortably like the insecure, glory-hungry rulers Scripture itself condemns? This is a genuinely fair question, and I think it deserves a far better answer than the tired “because He’s God and He said so” that so often gets...
- [Can God Be Tempted? God and Temptation Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02030-can-god-be-tempted/): Question 2030. God and temptation seem, on the surface, to sit uneasily together in Scripture, since James tells us plainly that God cannot be tempted, and yet the Gospels tell us just as plainly that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. How do both of these claims stand together without contradiction? This question comes up...
- [If God knows everything, do we have free will?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02033-if-god-knows-everything-do-we-have-free-will/): Question 02033 The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all of time — then in what meaningful sense are those choices really free? When you sat down this morning and decided what to have for...
- [Does God Experience Emotions Like We Do?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02032-does-god-experience-emotions/): Question 2032. Divine emotions is a phrase I use carefully, because Scripture clearly describes God loving, grieving, rejoicing and growing angry, yet these responses are not identical to the changeable, often involuntary feelings that sweep over us. Genesis 6:6 says God “was grieved… and it grieved him to his heart” over human wickedness before the...
- [What Does Divine Omnipotence Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02039-what-does-omnipotence-mean/): Question 2039. Divine omnipotence means that God is able to do all that He wills to do, without effort, without rival, and without any power outside Himself limiting what He can accomplish. When Job finally answers God out of the whirlwind, he says “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose...
- [What Does Divine Omniscience Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02038-what-does-omniscience-mean/): Question 2038. When people ask me what divine omniscience means, I always start in the same place. It means that God knows everything there is to know, perfectly and all at once, without ever having to work anything out, look anything up, or wait for events to unfold before He understands them. There is no...
- [If Jesus is God, who ran the universe while He was dead?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3066-if-jesus-is-god-who-ran-the-universe-while-he-was-dead/): Question 3066. Here is a question that sounds mischievous but deserves a careful answer: if Jesus is God, and Scripture says that in him ‘all things hold together’ (Colossians 1:17), then who kept the universe running between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? Did the divine nature lie dead in a tomb outside Jerusalem while the...
- [Was Jesus a political revolutionary?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3067-was-jesus-a-political-revolutionary/): Question 3067. Was Jesus a political revolutionary, executed for taking on an empire? Plenty of voices say so, and every age tries to recruit him; our politicised age has recruited him with both hands. To some he is a first-century liberation leader, a political revolutionary confronting Roman oppression and economic injustice. To others he is...
- [Was Jesus a Jew or a Christian?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3068-was-jesus-a-jew-or-a-christian/): Question 3068. The Jewish identity of Jesus is the plainest fact on the pages of the four Gospels, yet the question in our title still catches people out. Was Jesus a Jew or a Christian? Put simply: Jesus was a Jew, with a Jewish identity as thorough as any man who ever lived, and he...
- [What Is the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, and Why Does It Matter for Translation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01176-nestle-aland-greek-new-testament/): Question 01176. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament that stands behind almost every modern English translation, the ESV included, and understanding what it actually is clears up a great deal of confusion about why contemporary Bibles sometimes differ from the King James at particular verses. It is not...
- [What Is the Difference Between the Textus Receptus and a Critical Greek New Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01173-critical-edition-vs-received-text/): Question 01173. The Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament represent two different approaches to reconstructing the wording of Scripture, and understanding the difference between them clears up a great deal of confusion that otherwise fuels needless suspicion between believers who love the same Bible. Neither approach is a conspiracy against the other....
- [Did Constantine create the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60087-did-constantine-create-the-bible/): Question 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown’s novel, to have been assembled by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325, with inconvenient gospels burned and a divine Jesus voted into existence. It is a marvellous story....
- [Is Esdras a Book We Should Read?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01183-is-esdras-a-book-we-should-read/): Question 1183. Is the book of Esdras a book we should read, and does it belong anywhere near our study of Scripture? People find the name confusing before they even reach the content, since several ancient books share it, and I want to sort out both the confusion and the underlying canonical question clearly. The...
- [What is the firmament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60095-what-is-the-firmament/): Question 60095. Firmament is a word most people meet only in the King James Version of Genesis 1, and it has generated a surprising amount of argument. Critics of the biblical account claim it reveals a primitive cosmology in which the sky was a solid metal dome holding back an ocean, with the stars fixed...
- [Was Noah's flood global?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60094-was-noahs-flood-global/): Question 60094. A global flood is what Genesis 6 to 9 appears to describe, and a great many Christians now hold instead that the deluge was a large regional inundation in Mesopotamia. This is not a question about ancient geography alone. What is at stake is how we read the text, how Jesus and Peter...
- [Verses Commonly Misinterpreted](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01200-verses-commonly-misinterpreted/): Question 1200. Some of the most commonly misinterpreted verses in the whole Bible are also some of the most quoted, which is exactly why the confusion spreads so widely. A phrase gets lifted out of its setting, repeated in a sermon illustration or a social media post, and eventually acquires a popular meaning that the...
- [Who Wrote Hebrews?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01197-who-wrote-hebrews/): Question 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with certainty. The book itself is anonymous. Unlike Paul’s letters, which open by naming their author, Hebrews simply begins with a majestic statement about God speaking...
- [Why Is the Greek of Revelation So Bad?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01205-why-is-the-greek-of-revelation-so-bad/): Question 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would be marked down for. Cases fail to agree, participles hang without a clear subject, and in one notorious verse a preposition governs a nominative instead...
- [What Does It Mean That Jesus Learned Obedience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3075-what-does-it-mean-that-jesus-learned-obedience/): Question 3075. That Jesus learned obedience is the startling claim of Hebrews 5:8: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” Read that slowly and the questions crowd in. If Jesus is God, and God knows everything, what was left for Him to learn? And if He learned obedience, does that...
- [What does touch not my anointed mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09114-what-does-touch-not-my-anointed-mean/): Question 9114. Touch not my anointed is one of the most misused sentences in the English Bible, and I have heard it deployed to shut down every kind of legitimate question. A leader is challenged about money, doctrine, or conduct, and someone stands up to warn the congregation that they are touching God’s anointed. The...
- [Where did sin come from?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6002-where-did-sin-come-from/): Question 6002. The origin of sin is one of the deepest questions a believer can ask, because it presses on the character of God Himself. If God is good, and God created everything, where did evil come from? Did He make it? Did it surprise Him? Scripture does not hand us a philosophical treatise, but...
- [What is sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6001-what-is-sin/): Question 6001. The nature of sin is the first thing we must get clear if the gospel is ever going to make sense, and yet our culture has almost lost the word. People speak of mistakes, poor choices, unhealthy patterns, or trauma responses, anything but sin. Even Christians can grow vague here. So what exactly...
- [What is the difference between sin, transgression, and iniquity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6004-difference-between-sin-transgression-iniquity/): Question 6004. Sin, transgression and iniquity appear together so often in Scripture that many readers assume they are interchangeable, but each word carries its own weight, and together they diagnose us more thoroughly than any one of them alone. When David poured out Psalm 51 after his fall with Bathsheba, he reached for all three:...
- [What are the consequences of sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6003-what-are-the-consequences-of-sin/): Question 6003. The consequences of sin reach further than most people ever suspect, and understanding them is essential if we are to grasp what the Lord Jesus actually accomplished on the cross. God warned Adam plainly: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, and did not...
- [Can Christians live without sinning?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6007-can-christians-live-without-sinning/): Question 6007. Sinless perfection has been promised by more than one movement in church history: the claim that a Christian can reach a point in this life where sinning stops altogether. Others swing to the opposite corner and treat ongoing sin so casually that holiness hardly seems worth pursuing. Can Christians live without sinning or...
- [What is the 'sin nature'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6006-what-is-the-sin-nature/): Question 6006. The sin nature is the Bible’s explanation for a fact every honest person has noticed: we do not become sinners by sinning; we sin because something in us leans that way from the start. Why does no parent need to teach a toddler selfishness? Why do my best resolutions bend towards self so...
- [Are all sins equal?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6005-are-all-sins-equal/): Question 6005. Are all sins equal in God’s eyes? You have probably heard it claimed; it usually surfaces when someone wants to stop a comparison in its tracks, and it sounds humble. But is it true? Does Scripture really teach that a white lie weighs the same as murder, or a flash of envy the...
- [How do we overcome sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6009-how-do-we-overcome-sin/): Question 6009. Overcoming sin is the daily concern of every genuine believer, and the honest ones will tell you how the usual methods have gone: willpower failed, resolutions broke, promises to God lasted a fortnight. If that is your testimony too, take heart; the New Testament describes a different strategy altogether, and it begins in...
- [What is confession?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6008-what-is-confession/): Question 6008. Confession of sin is one of those practices every Christian knows they should maintain and many quietly find confusing. What exactly are we doing when we confess? Is it grovelling? A ritual formula? Informing God of things He somehow missed? And if the cross has already dealt with my sin, why confess at...
- [Are we responsible for sins we commit unknowingly?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06073-are-we-responsible-for-sins-we-commit-unknowingly/): Question 6073. Unintentional sin is a genuine biblical category, and the answer to whether we are responsible for it is yes, with a very large mercy attached. Scripture is clear that ignorance does not simply cancel guilt. It is equally clear that God made specific provision for the person who sinned without realising it, and...
- [What are presumptuous sins?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6010-what-are-presumptuous-sins/): Question 6010. Presumptuous sins are singled out in one of David’s best-known prayers, and the singling out is deliberate: “Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me!” (Psalm 19:13). David has just prayed about hidden faults, the sins he cannot even see in himself. Then he turns to...
- [Is it a sin to feel angry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11068-is-it-a-sin-to-feel-angry/): Question 11068. Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded that anger must therefore be its opposite. Many believers carry a low grade guilt about an emotion they cannot switch off. Scripture takes a different...
- [What Is Anthropology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5000-what-is-anthropology/): Question 5000. Biblical anthropology sounds like an intimidating phrase, but it names one of the most practical questions theology ever asks: what, exactly, is a human being? The word comes from the Greek anthropos, man, and logos, word or study; the study of man. Universities have anthropology departments that examine cultures, bones, and languages, and...
- [What Is the Relationship Between the Mind and the Brain?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5001-relationship-between-mind-and-brain/): Question 5001. The mind and brain question sits at one of the most interesting crossroads of science and Scripture. Neuroscience has mapped the brain in astonishing detail, tracing the neural correlates of memory, emotion, and decision, and treating disorders of thought with increasing skill. Every Christian should be thankful for that work. But none of...
- [What Is Biblical Masculinity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5004-what-is-biblical-masculinity-2/): Question 5004. Ask ten people to define biblical masculinity and you will get a dozen answers, most of them borrowed from culture rather than Scripture. One camp gives us the swaggering strongman who mistakes volume for strength; another gives us the apologetic male who treats his own masculinity as a problem to be managed. The...
- [What Does It Mean That God Created Us Male and Female?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05006-what-does-it-mean-god-created-us-male-and-female/): Question 5006. God created us male and female, and Genesis announces it not as biology trivia but as theology of the highest order. The statement sits inside the Bible’s very first chapter, in the verse that tells us we bear the image of God. Whatever else that pairing means, it means this: sexual difference is...
- [What Is Biblical Femininity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5005-what-is-biblical-femininity-2/): Question 5005. Biblical femininity is one of those subjects where the caricatures arrive before the Bible does. One stereotype paints the godly woman as a doormat, decorative and silent; the reaction against it dismisses any created distinction at all. Scripture is more interesting than both. The women of the Bible are strong, intelligent, courageous, and...
- [How Should Christians View Those with Disabilities?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05010-how-should-christians-view-those-with-disabilities/): Question 5010. How the church treats people with disabilities reveals what it really believes about the image of God. Not what it prints in its statement of faith, but what it believes in practice, in the car park, the pew, and the membership roll. Scripture speaks to this with surprising directness, and its verdict is...
- [How does the imago Dei bear on the Christian's responsibility toward the environment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05041-imago-dei-christian-responsibility-environment/): Question 05041. The imago Dei is the doctrine that determines how a Christian should think about the environment, and I want to show you why it steers us safely between two very real ditches. Some believers treat ecological concern as warmed-over secular politics and dismiss it entirely. Others drift the opposite way until the natural...
- [Why did God create us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05039-why-did-god-create-us/): Question 05039. Why did God create us? Scripture answers that God created us out of the overflow of His own love, for His glory and for our joy, and I want to show you why that answer changes everything about how you see your own life. This is not an abstract puzzle for philosophers. It...
- [What distinguishes human consciousness from artificial intelligence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05043-human-consciousness-artificial-intelligence/): Question 05043. Human consciousness has become an urgent theological topic, because machines now imitate so much of what we do that many people are asking whether anything distinguishes us at all. Artificial intelligence writes essays, composes music, holds conversations, and passes examinations. The question I am asked with increasing frequency, sometimes anxiously, is whether Scripture...
- [What does Scripture say about human longevity and ageing?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05042-human-longevity-ageing-bible/): Question 05042. Human longevity is one of those subjects where the Bible’s early chapters startle the modern reader, and the questions they raise deserve straight answers. Methuselah lived 969 years. Adam reached 930, Noah 950. Yet within a few generations of the flood the numbers collapse, until Moses can write of seventy or eighty years...
- [What Does It Mean to Be 'Dust'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05024-what-does-it-mean-to-be-dust/): Question 5024. To be made from dust is Scripture’s blunt, unflattering, and strangely comforting description of what we are. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). No marble, no gold, no stardust poetry. Dust. The stuff you sweep off...
- [Body, soul and spirit: are we two parts or three?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05045-body-soul-spirit-dichotomy-trichotomy/): Question 05045. Are soul and spirit two words for one thing, or two distinct parts of you? That is the heart of the long debate between dichotomy, the view that a human being consists of body plus one immaterial element, and trichotomy, the view that we are body, soul, and spirit as three genuinely distinct...
- [The brain and the soul: what does disease mean for identity and accountability?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05044-brain-soul-disease-personal-identity/): Question 05044. The relationship between brain and soul becomes intensely practical the day someone you love starts to disappear behind dementia, a stroke, or a brain injury. The face is familiar, the body is present, and yet memory, personality, and recognition seem to be draining away. What is actually happening to the person? Is the...
- [What Will Our Resurrection Bodies Be Like?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05026-what-will-our-resurrection-bodies-be-like/): Question 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...
- [What Is the Breath of Life?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05025-what-is-the-breath-of-life/): Question 5025. The breath of life is what turned a beautifully shaped pile of dust into a living man. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). One verse, two movements: forming, then...
- [What Is the Relationship Between Body and Soul?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05028-what-is-the-relationship-between-body-and-soul/): Question 5028. Body and soul belong together; that is the short answer to the body and soul question, and almost every error on this subject comes from pulling them apart. Some treat the body as the whole story, so that man is a biochemical machine and the soul a comforting fiction. Others treat the soul...
- [What Is the Soul?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05030-what-is-the-soul/): Question 5030. The human soul is spoken of everywhere and defined almost nowhere. We say a singer has soul, that a ship sank with all souls aboard, that someone sold his soul for success. Behind the loose talk sits one of the deepest questions a person can ask: is there something to me beyond my...
- [What Does It Mean to Be Made in God's Image?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05029-what-does-it-mean-to-be-made-in-gods-image/): Question 5029. God’s image is the single most important truth about you that you did not choose, earn, or vote on. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Everything the Bible says about human worth, human sin, and...
- [What Is the Conscience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05033-what-is-the-conscience/): Question 5033. The human conscience is the courtroom God built into every human heart. Long before a missionary arrives or a Bible is opened, something inside a person prosecutes and defends, applauds and condemns. Paul describes it precisely: the Gentiles “show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience...
- [What Is the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05031-what-is-the-spirit/): Question 5031. The human spirit is the dimension of you that was made for God Himself, and it is the least understood part of human nature. We hear plenty about the body from the gym and the doctor, plenty about the soul from the therapist and the poet, but the spirit rarely gets a mention,...
- [Are We Born Sinners?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05035-are-we-born-sinners/): Question 5035. Are we born sinners, or do we become sinners later by imitation and bad choices? Stand in any toddler group for an afternoon and you will have empirical data; no one teaches a child to snatch, lie, or scream “mine”. But the question deserves a better answer than anecdote, because what you believe...
- [Is Spiritual Dryness a Sign I Have Grieved the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4083-spirit-grief-and-spiritual-dryness/): Question 4083. Spiritual dryness is one of the most disorienting experiences a Christian can go through, the sense that yesterday’s warmth in prayer has gone cold overnight and nothing you do brings it back. The instinct to read that dryness as proof you have grieved the Holy Spirit is understandable, and sometimes it is exactly...
- [Does Grieving the Spirit Affect His Intercession?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4082-grieving-the-spirit-and-intercession/): Question 4082. Spirit’s intercession is one of the most quietly comforting truths in the whole of Romans 8, and it is worth asking directly whether grieving the Spirit through unconfessed sin switches it off. If it did, the very moments when we most need the Spirit interceding for us, our weakest and most compromised seasons,...
- [Grieving the Spirit vs Quenching the Spirit](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4081-grieving-the-spirit-vs-quenching-the-spirit/): Question 4081. Grieving the Spirit is one of two warnings Paul gives about how believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit, and the other, quenching the Spirit, gets confused with it so often that most Christians I talk to treat the two as interchangeable. They are not. I want to show you why...
- [Does the Filling of the Spirit Affect My Assurance of Salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4080-filling-of-the-spirit-and-assurance-of-salvation/): Question 4080. Does the filling and assurance of a believer’s salvation genuinely connect to one another, or are they two entirely separate matters that should never be confused. I want to answer this carefully, because a wrong answer in either direction causes real pastoral damage. Get this connection wrong one way and you risk anxious...
- [Why Does Paul Use a Fruit Metaphor Rather Than Virtues?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04098-why-paul-uses-fruit-metaphor-not-virtues-or-disciplines/): Question 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the...
- [How Does the Fruit of the Spirit Relate to Character Formation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04097-fruit-of-spirit-character-formation-psychological-maturity/): Question 4097. Character formation is a phrase psychologists reach for almost as often as pastors do, and that overlap is worth pausing on before going any further. Anyone who has watched a believer grow steadily kinder, calmer and more self-controlled over years of walking with Jesus has watched something that both categories, the psychological and...
- [What Is the Relationship Between the Fruit of the Spirit and the Beatitudes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4096-fruit-of-spirit-and-the-beatitudes/): Question 4096. I get asked fairly often whether the fruit of Spirit in Galatians 5 and the character Jesus describes in the Beatitudes are really describing the same thing, and my answer is yes, with one qualification worth unpacking. Paul is describing what the Spirit produces in a believer from the inside out. Jesus is...
- [How Does the Spirit Guide Where Scripture Gives No Direct Instruction?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04095-how-spirit-guides-where-scripture-gives-no-direct-instruction/): Question 4095. Scripture does not specify which career I should pursue, which city I should live in, or which of two apparently godly people I should marry. That silence is not an oversight, and understanding why it exists is the key to understanding Spirit’s guidance in the vast majority of ordinary decisions, where the Bible...
- [Should Believers Today "Put Out a Fleece" Like Gideon?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04094-is-it-valid-to-put-out-a-fleece-like-gideon/): Question 4094. Gideon’s fleece has become popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as confirmation of His will. “I am putting out a fleece” has entered the vocabulary of Christian decision making as though it described an approved biblical method. Whether the...
- [How Do I Distinguish My Own Desires from the Spirit's Leading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04093-distinguishing-desires-from-spirit-leading/): Question 4093. Learning to discern Spirit’s leading from my own preferences, fears and appetites is, in my experience, one of the hardest and most necessary skills in the Christian life. It is not a question of doubt or weak faith. It is the honest recognition that I am a fallen man with complicated motives, entirely...
- [What Is the Significance of Elijah's Journey to Horeb?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04092-theological-significance-elijah-journey-horeb/): Question 4092. Elijah’s journey to Horeb is one of the most emotionally honest passages in the entire Old Testament, and I think that is exactly why so many believers find themselves drawn back to it. Here is a prophet who had just called down fire from heaven on Carmel, who had watched the prophets of...
- [Biblical Phrases We Have Misunderstood](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01141-biblical-phrases-misunderstood-popular-meanings/): Question 1141. Misunderstood Bible phrases circulate everywhere, in sermons, in devotionals, on inspirational graphics shared across social media, and popular culture has never been particularly careful about accuracy when it borrows from Scripture. The result is a collection of widely repeated phrases that sound biblical, and sometimes bear some real resemblance to biblical language, but...
- [How Did God Communicate with Old Testament Prophets?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01119-how-did-god-communicate-with-old-testament-prophets/): Question 1119. Old Testament prophets received God’s word through a range of different means, and Scripture itself is refreshingly candid about how varied that process actually was. Some received visions in the night. Some heard an audible or inwardly perceived voice. Some acted out symbolic dramas in public. What unites every genuine case is that...
- [Are the Gifts of the Holy Spirit Still Active Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04116-gifts-holy-spirit-for-today/): Question 04116. Whether spiritual gifts today remain a genuine part of the church’s life is one of the most practically consequential questions in modern evangelicalism, because the answer shapes what happens on a Sunday morning, how a church trains its members, and how it responds when someone claims to have prophesied or been healed. I...
- [Are televised faith healers genuine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60023-are-faith-healers-on-tv-real/): Question 60023. Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And...
- [Why does the geographical sequence in Acts 1:8 matter theologically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11056-acts-1-8-geographical-progression-church-expansion/): 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 missionary geography and then left there. I think that undersells it considerably, because Luke has built his entire second volume around that sentence and expects...
- [Does God Still Do Miracles Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04113-does-god-still-do-miracles-today/): Question 04113. Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television healing programme with deep suspicion or just heard a testimony from a friend that they cannot quite explain away. My answer is a careful yes,...
- [What does Philip’s mission to Samaria tell us about cross-cultural ministry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11081-samaritan-mission-cross-cultural-ministry-acts/): Question 11081 Cross-cultural ministry has a founding case study in Acts 8, and it is not the one most people expect. Before Peter went to Cornelius and long before Paul set out for Asia, a deacon named Philip walked into Samaria and preached to people his own nation had despised for centuries. What happened there...
- [How Water Baptism and the Spirit's Coming Relate Across the Book of Acts](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04111-water-baptism-spirit-baptism-acts-patterns/): Question 4111. Water baptism does not sit in the same fixed relationship to the Holy Spirit’s coming everywhere we look in Acts, and that surprises people the first time they notice it. Sometimes the Spirit falls before water baptism, sometimes after, and once, through the laying on of apostolic hands, considerably after. If you try...
- [Does Philip's Healing in Samaria Prove Sign Gifts Were Never Just for Apostles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04109-philip-healing-ministry-samaria-sign-gifts/): Question 4109. Sign gifts are often assumed, even by thoughtful Christians, to have belonged exclusively to the twelve apostles, as a kind of one-off credential to authenticate their unique office. Philip’s ministry in Samaria makes that assumption very hard to sustain. Luke tells us plainly that unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed,...
- [Reading Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 Together: The Spirit's Pattern of Reception](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04108-acts-2-8-10-19-spirit-pattern/): 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 is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four...
- [Simon Magus and the Danger of Treating the Spirit's Power as a Commodity](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04107-simon-magus-spirit-gifts-purchase/): Question 4107. Simon Magus is one of the more unsettling figures in the book of Acts, precisely because he looks, for one brief moment, like a genuine convert. Luke tells us plainly that Simon believed and was baptised along with the rest of the Samaritans who responded to Philip’s preaching (Acts 8:13). And yet within...
- [Philip the Evangelist and the Spread of the Gospel Beyond the Apostles](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04106-philip-evangelist-spiritual-gifts-acts-8/): Question 4106. Philip the evangelist is one of my favourite characters in the whole book of Acts, and I suspect he does not get nearly the attention he deserves. He was not one of the twelve apostles. He held no office higher than deacon, appointed in Acts 6 to wait on tables so the apostles...
- [Why Are We Commanded to Walk by the Spirit If We Already Have Him?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4104-walk-by-spirit-be-filled-command/): Question 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them is where most of ordinary Christian struggle actually lives. Every believer already possesses the Spirit permanently from the moment of conversion. Not every believer, on...
- [How Does Water Baptism Relate to Spirit Baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04103-water-baptism-spirit-baptism-relationship/): Question 4103. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related closely enough in the New Testament that Christians regularly confuse the two, but they are not the same event, and keeping them distinct actually protects both doctrines rather than diminishing either. Spirit baptism is the Spirit’s own act, placing every believer into the body of Christ...
- [Can the Spirit's Indwelling Ever Be Lost?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04101-can-spirit-indwelling-be-lost/): Question 4101. Spirit indwelling and whether it can ever be lost is not an abstract puzzle for theologians to argue over on a wet afternoon. It reaches directly into how a believer sleeps at night. Someone who believes their salvation depends on sustained spiritual performance lives in a fundamentally different psychological and spiritual state from...
- [What Did Jesus Mean in John 20:22, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04102-john-2022-receive-holy-spirit/): Question 4102. receiving the Spirit is exactly what the disciples appear to be doing on resurrection evening, when Jesus breathes on them behind locked doors and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ and yet the scene raises a genuine puzzle that deserves careful, patient handling rather than a quick answer. John records the moment in a...
- [The Gift of Healing](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04051-what-is-the-gift-of-healing/): Question 4051. Few subjects in the church today generate more heat and less light than the gift of healing. On one side the airwaves are filled with dramatic claims and conference stages where healing is promised on demand. On the other side many cautious evangelicals quietly file the whole category under “things that stopped with...
- [The Gift of Interpretation of Tongues](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04050-what-is-the-gift-of-interpretation-of-tongues/): Question 4050. The interpretation of tongues is the gift that quietly does the heavy lifting whenever tongues are used in the gathered church, and yet it is the one we hear about least. It sounds technical, and because it is tied so closely to tongues themselves, many believers pass over it without realising that Paul...
- [What Is the Gift of Word of Knowledge?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04054-what-is-the-gift-of-word-of-knowledge/): Question 4054. The word of knowledge appears exactly once in Paul’s list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, and that single appearance has carried an enormous amount of theological weight ever since, not least because charismatic ministry has attached a very specific meaning to it that may or may not reflect what Paul had in...
- [The Gift of Miracles](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04052-what-is-the-gift-of-miracles/): Question 4052. The gift of miracles tends to be handled in one of two unhappy ways. Either it is inflated into something sensational, a kind of spiritual circus act, or it is quietly ignored in churches that feel awkward about anything they cannot tidily explain. Neither response does justice to what the New Testament plainly...
- [What Is the Gift of Word of Wisdom?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04055-what-is-the-gift-of-word-of-wisdom/): Question 4055. The word of wisdom is easy to confuse with wisdom in the broad biblical sense, the kind James promises every believer may ask God for in James 1:5, but Paul has something more specific in mind when he lists it as a distinct gift in 1 Corinthians 12:8. Getting the distinction right matters...
- [What Is the Gift of Discernment of Spirits?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04053-what-is-the-gift-of-discernment-of-spirits/): Question 4053. I get asked about the gifts of the Spirit more than almost any other subject in pastoral ministry, and the gift of discernment of spirits sits near the top of the list of things people misunderstand. Some picture it as a kind of spiritual x-ray vision, a superpower for spotting demons in a...
- [What Is the Spirit's Role in Resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04057-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-resurrection/): Question 4057. The Spirit and resurrection are linked in Scripture far more tightly than most Christians realise, and once you see the connection you will not read Romans 8 the same way again. It is easy to speak of the resurrection purely in terms of God’s raw power, and leave the Holy Spirit as a...
- [Are Apostles and Prophets Still Given Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04056-are-apostles-and-prophets-still-given-today/): Question 4056. Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion, and in some quarters more dangerous claims, than whether apostles and prophets still function today with the same authority they carried in the first century. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its confident assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to...
- [What Will the Spirit's Role Be in the Millennium and Eternal State?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04058-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-the-millennium-and-eternal-state/): 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 New Testaments actually promise about this coming era rather than leaving the question in vague, general terms. Understanding the Spirit’s role in the eternal state...
- [Who are the Nicolaitans?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60104-who-were-the-nicolaitans/): Question 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century. That has not stopped people writing confidently about them,...
- [The Spirit in Worship: How God Makes Praise Real](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04029-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-worship/): Question 04029 The role of the Spirit in worship is something I wish more congregations understood, because so much confusion about worship comes from forgetting it. We argue endlessly about styles, instruments, song choices and volume, as though worship were a matter of getting the externals right. Jesus cut straight past all of that in...
- [The Spirit in Evangelism: The Real Worker in Witness](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04028-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-evangelism-witness/): Question 04028 The work of the Spirit in evangelism is the most overlooked factor in the whole business of telling people about Jesus. We fret about our nerves, our lack of training, our awkward attempts to steer a conversation toward the gospel, and all the while we forget that the decisive worker in any conversion...
- [Assurance of Salvation: The Spirit Who Makes Us Sure](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04027-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-assurance-of-salvation/): Question 04027 The assurance of salvation is one of the sweetest gifts the Holy Spirit gives, and one of the most attacked. I have lost count of the believers who love the Lord yet lie awake wondering whether they are truly His. They are not careless people. They are tender consciences who long to know...
- [The Spirit in Prayer: How God Helps Us Pray](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04026-what-does-the-spirit-do-in-prayer-intercession/): Question 04026 When I think about the Spirit in prayer, I am always brought back to a verse that quietly demolishes a lot of false confidence about my own praying. Most of us assume that prayer is a skill we slowly master, like learning an instrument, so that the longer we walk with God the...
- [The Spirit's Illumination: Teaching Us the Scriptures](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04025-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-illumination-teaching-scripture/): Question 04025. There is a real and felt difference between reading the Bible as a piece of ancient literature and reading it as the living word of God speaking into your actual situation, and that difference is the Spirit’s illumination at work. It is not chiefly a matter of intelligence or education. The most learned...
- [The Spirit's Role in Conviction of Sin Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04024-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-conviction-of-sin/): Question 04024. Few aspects of the Spirit’s ministry are as misunderstood as the conviction of sin. In common Christian speech it has shrunk to a vague feeling of spiritual unease, something close to guilt with the lights off. But the way Jesus describes conviction of sin in John 16 is far more specific and far...
- [Walking in the Spirit or the Flesh: How to Tell](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04023-how-do-we-know-if-walking-in-spirit-or-flesh/): Question 04023. Almost every honest believer eventually asks whether they are walking in the Spirit or the flesh, and means it as a real question and not a rhetorical one. Am I being led by the Spirit here, or am I following my own appetite and dressing it up as the will of God? That...
- [What Does It Mean to Walk by the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04022-what-does-it-mean-to-walk-by-the-spirit/): Question 04022. When Paul tells us to walk by the Spirit in Galatians 5:16, he is not handing us a slogan or a mood. “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” is a precise instruction with real content, and it shapes the whole texture of ordinary Christian living....
- [Can Unbelievers Experience the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04039-can-unbelievers-experience-the-holy-spirit/): Question 04039. The relationship between the Spirit and unbelievers touches something basic about who the Holy Spirit is and what He came into the world to do. If His indwelling is the very mark of belonging to Jesus, as Romans 8:9 insists, does that mean the Spirit has no dealings at all with those who...
- [Fruit and Gifts of the Spirit: The Difference](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04020-difference-between-fruit-and-gifts-of-the-spirit/): Question 04020. The difference between the fruit and gifts of the Spirit is one of those quiet distinctions that keeps a church honest about itself. Both the fruit and gifts come from the same Spirit, and yet they are doing two very different things, and when we blur them we start measuring one another by...
- [What Does It Mean to Be Slain in the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04037-slain-in-the-spirit/): Question 04037. Being slain in the Spirit is one of the most familiar sights in charismatic worship, and one of the most easily misread. A preacher lays a hand on someone, or sometimes only sweeps an arm in their direction, and the person topples backward into the arms of a waiting catcher. I have watched...
- [The 'Second Blessing' Doctrine](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04036-second-blessing-doctrine/): Question 04036. The phrase second blessing describes the belief that there is a definite work of grace beyond conversion, a later crisis experience in which the believer is lifted onto a higher plane of the Christian life, often identified with a baptism in the Spirit understood as separate from and after salvation. The idea has...
- [Born, Baptised, Filled and Sealed by the Spirit](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04035-born-baptised-filled-sealed-by-spirit/): Question 04035. Few areas cause more confusion than the Spirit’s ministries to the believer, because the New Testament uses four different pictures that are easy to run together. We are born of the Spirit, baptised in the Spirit, sealed by the Spirit, and filled with the Spirit, and a great deal of unnecessary anxiety comes...
- [The Holy Spirit's Role in Jesus' Life and Ministry](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04034-spirits-role-in-jesus-life-and-ministry/): Question 04034. Follow the Gospels closely and you cannot miss how often the Spirit and Jesus appear side by side. From the announcement of his conception to the power of his rising, the Holy Spirit is present at every hinge of the Lord’s earthly life. This is not a minor thread running quietly in the...
- [The Holy Spirit's Role in the Inspiration of Scripture](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04033-spirits-role-in-inspiration/): Question 04033. Ask where the Bible comes from and you cannot answer well without speaking of the Spirit and inspiration in the same breath. The Scriptures did not fall from the sky finished, nor were they invented by clever men who wanted to control others. They were breathed out by God through human writers whom...
- [The Holy Spirit's Role in Creation](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04032-spirits-role-in-creation/): Question 04032. When I open the Bible at its first page I find that the Spirit in creation is already there, before light, before land, before a single living thing. We are used to speaking of the Father who decrees and the Son through whom all things were made, and that is right and good....
- [The Gift of Tongues](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04049-what-is-the-gift-of-tongues/): Question 4049. The gift of tongues has caused more heat and less light than almost any subject I deal with as a minister. In some circles it is treated as the badge that proves a person has truly received the Holy Spirit. In others it is written off entirely as a first century oddity that...
- [What Happened on the Day of Pentecost?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04031-what-happened-at-pentecost/): Question 04031 The day of Pentecost is one of those hinge moments in the Bible where the whole story turns. Before that morning the disciples were a frightened, waiting handful; after it they were a Spirit-filled church preaching Christ to the nations. Something happened on the day of Pentecost that had never happened before, and...
- [The Gift of Prophecy](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04048-what-is-the-gift-of-prophecy/): Question 4048. The gift of prophecy is one of the most discussed and most misunderstood of all the gifts the Spirit gives to the church, and I want to take my time with it. Some believers treat every passing impression as a word from the Lord, while others are convinced that genuine prophecy stopped dead...
- [What Are the Different Spiritual Gifts Listed in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04047-what-are-the-different-spiritual-gifts-listed-in-scripture/): Question 04047. The variety of spiritual gifts in the New Testament is wider and richer than most believers realise, and learning what Scripture actually lists is one of the most freeing studies a Christian can undertake. When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:7 that to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the...
- [What Is the Spirit's Guarantee or Deposit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04046-what-is-the-spirits-guarantee-deposit/): Question 04046. When Paul calls the Spirit’s guarantee a deposit on our inheritance, he reaches for a word straight out of the ancient marketplace, and once you see what it meant, something genuinely wonderful opens up. He uses it three times. In 2 Corinthians 1:22 God has put His Spirit in our hearts as a...
- [What Does It Mean That Our Body Is the Temple of the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04045-what-does-it-mean-that-our-body-is-the-temple-of-the-holy-spirit/): Question 04045. To call your body the Spirit’s temple is one of the most startling things the New Testament says about you, and Paul says it without flinching in 1 Corinthians 6:19: do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? That a...
- [How Can I Be More Sensitive to the Spirit's Leading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04044-how-can-i-be-more-sensitive-to-the-spirits-leading/): Question 04044. Becoming more sensitive to the Spirit’s leading is something many believers long for and few feel they have grasped. The phrase itself can sound mystical, as though some Christians possess a spiritual sixth sense the rest of us lack, and I want to take the mystery out of it without taking away the...
- [How Do You Grieve the Spirit in Practice?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04042-how-do-you-grieve-the-spirit-in-practice/): Question 04042. Paul tells us not to grieve the Spirit, and I have noticed over the years that most believers nod at that instruction without ever asking what it actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The command sits in Ephesians 4:30, tucked into a passage about how we speak to one another and...
- [What Is the Spirit's Work in Those Who Fall Away?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04041-what-is-the-spirits-work-in-those-who-fall-away/): Question 04041. Few questions unsettle a tender conscience like falling away, and few passages of Scripture stir more argument than Hebrews 6:4-6. There the writer describes people who were once enlightened, who tasted the heavenly gift, who shared in the Holy Spirit, and who tasted the goodness of the word of God, and yet fell...
- [What Is the Spirit's Role in Regeneration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04040-what-is-the-spirits-role-in-regeneration/): Question 04040. The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle that no preacher can perform and no sinner can manufacture for himself, the giving of new life to a soul that was spiritually dead....
- [What Is the Difference Between Jesus and Christ?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3017-what-is-the-difference-between-jesus-and-christ/): Question 3017. Jesus and Christ get used interchangeably by most Christians, myself included in ordinary conversation, and there is nothing wrong with that shorthand. But the two words are doing genuinely different jobs, and once you see the distinction between them, several passages of Scripture come into much sharper focus. Let me take each word...
- [What is replacement theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10066-what-is-replacement-theology/): 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 believers in Jesus and nothing distinctive remains for the physical descendants of Abraham. It is also called supersessionism, because on this reading the Church supersedes...
- [What did Jesus look like?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3060-what-did-jesus-look-like/): Question 3060. Ask about the appearance of Jesus and most people can supply an answer instantly: long hair, flowing robe, serene European features, perhaps a soft glow. Two thousand years of paintings, icons and films have fixed an image in the world’s mind. There is only one problem with it. Not a single detail of...
- [What Is Significant About the Resurrection of Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03014-what-is-significant-about-jesus-resurrection/): Question 3014. The resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns, and I say that without any exaggeration. Paul makes the same point in blunt terms in 1 Corinthians 15: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. He is not softening the...
- [Why Did Jesus Have to Rise From the Dead?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q03016-why-did-jesus-have-to-rise-from-the-dead/): Question 3016. Jesus had to rise from the dead, and I mean that word “had” with full theological weight rather than as a loose figure of speech. His resurrection was not a fortunate rescue after a plan that had somehow gone wrong at the cross. It was the necessary and always intended second half of...
- [What is the evidence for Jesus' resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60022-what-is-the-evidence-for-jesus-resurrection/): Question 60022. The resurrection of Jesus is not one Christian belief among many. It is the claim on which everything else stands or falls, and the New Testament says so with a bluntness that always surprises people who expect religion to hedge. Paul writes that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is...
- [Is purgatory biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10115-is-purgatory-biblical/): Question 10115. The doctrine of purgatory teaches that those who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins, or with temporal punishment still owing, undergo a purifying process after death before entering heaven. It is not biblical. It rests on a text outside the canon, on inferences from passages that will not...
- [What About the Silent Years Between the Testaments?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1118-what-about-the-silent-years-between-testaments/): Question 1118. The silent years sit between Malachi, the last prophetic voice of the Old Testament, and the opening pages of Matthew, roughly four centuries in which the Bible itself records no new inspired prophecy. People sometimes assume this means God simply went quiet, stepped back from history, and left His people to manage without...
- [What did Bultmann mean by demythologisation, and why is it incompatible with orthodoxy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60083-what-did-bultmann-mean-by-demythologisation/): Question 60083. Bultmann’s demythologisation is one of those pieces of academic vocabulary that sounds harmless and turns out to be anything but. Rudolf Bultmann, who lived from 1884 to 1976 and taught New Testament at Marburg, argued that the message of the New Testament is wrapped in a picture of the world that no modern...
- [What is the Catholic view of salvation versus the Protestant view?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7069-what-is-the-catholic-view-of-salvation-versus-the-protestant-view/): Question 07069 The Catholic and Protestant accounts of salvation differ at the point where it matters most: whether a sinner is declared righteous once and for all on the basis of what Jesus has done, or is gradually made righteous through a process the church administers. Everything else in the debate follows from that. I...
- [How can Baptists defend religious liberty when Islam is on the rise?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12045-baptists-religious-liberty-islam-and-idolatry/): 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 this most often when the conversation turns to Islam in Britain, and the question underneath it is usually sharper than the words used: why should...
- [What did the Reformers teach about salvation (the five solas)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13013-what-did-the-reformers-teach-about-salvation-five-solas/): Question 13013. The five solas are the shorthand history has given us for what the Reformers recovered about salvation. Sola is simply Latin for alone, and each one is a small word with a very large fence around it, because in every case the argument was about what else might be allowed to stand alongside....
- [How can Jesus be God if He prayed to God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3065-how-can-jesus-be-god-if-he-prayed-to-god/): Question 3065. When Jesus prayed, who was listening? It is one of the sharpest questions a sceptic, or a Muslim friend, or an honest child can put to a Christian. If Jesus is God, was he talking to himself in Gethsemane? Does the very fact that Jesus prayed prove he must be something less than...
- [What day of the week was Jesus crucified?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3064-what-day-of-the-week-was-jesus-crucified/): Question 3064. The day Jesus died is fixed in the Christian calendar as Good Friday, and most believers have never thought to question it. But some have, and their argument sounds strong at first hearing. Did Jesus not say he would be ‘three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12:40)?...
- [What Is God's Love?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02042-what-is-gods-love/): Question 2042. God’s love is not primarily a feeling, and it is not the vague affection our culture usually means when it uses the word. It is His settled, active commitment to the good of those He loves, a commitment proved beyond doubt at the cross. John states it as plainly as any verse in...
- [What Is God's Holiness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02041-what-is-gods-holiness/): Question 2041. God’s holiness is the attribute Scripture reaches for more often than any other to describe who He is, and it means two things held together, that God is entirely set apart from His creation in majesty, and that He is entirely set apart from sin in moral perfection. When Isaiah is given a...
- [What Does Divine Omnipresence Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02040-what-does-omnipresence-mean/): Question 2040. Divine omnipresence means that God is fully and equally present everywhere at once, in every place, at every moment, without being spread thin, divided into portions, or contained by any location. David captures this with unmatched honesty in Psalm 139, asking “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee...
- [What Is God's Mercy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02044-what-is-gods-mercy/): Question 2044. God’s mercy is His compassionate refusal to give sinners what their sin actually deserves, withholding deserved judgement out of tender, active compassion. Lamentations 3:22-23 puts it with unmatched beauty in the middle of a book otherwise soaked in grief, saying “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to...
- [What Is God's Justice?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02043-what-is-gods-justice/): Question 2043. God’s justice is His settled commitment always to do what is right, to treat every person exactly as they deserve, and never to let evil go unaddressed forever. Moses celebrates this at the end of his life, singing “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of...
- [What Is God's Supreme Rule Over All Things?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02047-what-is-gods-sovereignty/): Question 2047. God’s supreme rule means that He reigns as King over every person, every nation and every event in history, with nothing genuinely outside His authority or beyond His final purposes. I want to say plainly why I reach for this phrase rather than the more common theological term for this attribute. That older...
- [Is God's Wrath Compatible with His Love?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02046-is-gods-wrath-compatible-with-his-love/): Question 2046. Wrath and love feel, to many people, like they must belong to two different gods, one frightening and one kind, rather than to a single, coherent character. I want to challenge that instinct directly, because Scripture never treats these as competing attributes locked in tension. It presents them as two expressions of the...
- [What Is God's Wrath?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02045-what-is-gods-wrath/): Question 2045. God’s wrath is His settled, righteous opposition to sin, not a sudden fit of temper or an emotional outburst He later regrets. Romans 1:18 states plainly that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” I want to take that verse seriously rather than explain it...
- [Does God Change His Mind?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02049-does-god-change-his-mind/): Question 2049. Change his mind is a question Scripture answers in two apparently different ways, and I think both answers need to be taken seriously rather than one quietly explained away. Malachi 3:6 states plainly, “For I the Lord do not change,” yet Genesis 6:6 says God “regretted that he had made man on the...
- [What Is God's Providence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02048-what-is-gods-providence/): Question 2048. God’s providence is His continuous, active care in directing the events of creation and history toward His good purposes, quietly working through ordinary causes rather than only through dramatic miracle. The book of Ruth never mentions a single miracle, yet it opens with a famine, follows a chance-seeming arrival in a particular field,...
- [Does the Trinity Share One Consciousness or Three?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02059-does-the-trinity-share-one-consciousness-or-three/): Question 2059. The Trinity and consciousness is a question that takes me right to the frontier of what can actually be known about God, and it turns out to sit at the frontier of what the word consciousness is even equipped to mean once it is applied to a divine being rather than a human...
- [What Is Middle Knowledge?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02058-what-is-middle-knowledge/): Question 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this site. Middle knowledge refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually...
- [What Is Molinism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02057-what-is-molinism/): Question 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature in either direction. It is a framework developed to explain how God can know and providentially work through history with certainty while human beings retain...
- [Does God Need Us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02056-does-god-need-us/): Question 2056. God’s self-sufficiency is the reason the answer to this question is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us, not for His existence, not for His happiness, and not for His glory. Understanding why that is true, and why it is not the discouraging answer it might first sound like, takes...
- [How Do God's Attributes Relate to One Another?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02053-what-is-the-relationship-between-gods-attributes/): Question 2053. God’s attributes are not a set of competing interests inside a divine committee, however often popular preaching makes it sound that way. If God is perfectly holy and perfectly loving, do those two things ever pull in opposite directions? I hear this question in different forms all the time, and it matters more...
- [What Is Divine Aseity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02052-what-is-divine-aseity/): Question 2052. Divine aseity is one of those doctrines that sounds abstract until you actually sit with it, and then it quietly rearranges how you think about everything else you believe about God. The word comes from the Latin a se, meaning from himself, and the doctrine states plainly that God exists entirely from Himself....
- [What Is Divine Simplicity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02051-what-is-divine-simplicity/): Question 2051. Divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of separate parts or ingredients the way a created thing is, a portion of love here, a measure of power there, a quantity of holiness added on top. He is entirely, undividedly and simultaneously all that He is, in every attribute, at every moment,...
- [Is Beauty a Divine Attribute?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2072-is-beauty-a-divine-attribute-gods-beauty-and-other-attributes/): Question 2072. Divine beauty is not a category Christians spend much time thinking about, next to holiness, love, or justice, yet Scripture reaches for it often enough that I think it deserves a proper place among the attributes we teach. David’s one great request was ‘to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD’ (Psalm 27:4),...
- [What Is Divine Immutability?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02050-what-is-divine-immutability/): Question 2050. Divine immutability means that God’s character, His purposes and His promises never change, improve, decay or shift in any respect. James describes Him as the Father “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), a striking image drawn from astronomy, since even the most reliable heavenly bodies cast...
- [What Does It Mean That God 'Repented' or 'Relented'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2070-what-does-it-mean-that-god-repented-or-relented/): Question 2070. Divine repentance is the term theologians use for those startling verses where God is said to have ‘repented’ or ‘relented’ of something, most famously Genesis 6:6, where the LORD ‘regretted that he had made man on the earth’ (Genesis 6:6). At first glance it looks like a straightforward contradiction of God’s unchanging character,...
- [Is Anything Genuinely New in God's Experience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2069-is-there-anything-genuinely-new-in-gods-experience-can-god-be-surprised-or-grieved/): Question 2069. God’s experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, grieving, being moved with compassion and, at least on the face of it, responding to what creatures do, and I do not think we should...
- [How Should Christians Think About God's Silence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2068-how-should-christians-think-about-gods-silence/): Question 2068. God’s silence is one of the hardest experiences a believer can walk through, that stretch of praying into what feels like an empty room when heaven simply does not answer. I have sat with people in that place, and I have been there myself, and I want to say plainly that this experience...
- [How Does Divine Eternity Shape Prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2067-how-does-gods-relationship-with-time-affect-prophecy/): Question 2067. Divine eternity is the doctrine underneath one of the most fascinating questions in all of theology, and one with genuinely practical consequences for how I read Scripture’s prophetic material. When we speak of God knowing the future, we naturally reach for spatial metaphors. God looks ahead. He foresees events. He knows in advance...
- [Will we become angels when we die?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8025-will-we-become-angels-when-we-die/): Question 8025. The idea that we become angels when we die is everywhere, and I have heard it spoken at gravesides by people who meant every word of it kindly. Films use it, greeting cards use it, and well-meaning relatives tell grieving children that Grandma has her wings now. Scripture teaches something different and, I...
- [Do angels help in evangelism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8029-do-angels-help-in-evangelism/): Question 8029. The place of angels in evangelism is one of the most encouraging themes in the book of Acts, and one of the most consistently overlooked. Luke keeps showing us angelic activity around the spread of the gospel, and yet he never once has an angel preach it. That combination is deliberate, and once...
- [Who is the Angel of the LORD in the Old Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8010-who-is-the-angel-of-the-lord/): Question 8010. The Angel of the LORD is the most intriguing figure in the Old Testament, and working out who He is has been one of the most rewarding studies I have ever undertaken. He steps into the story unannounced, speaks as God in the first person, accepts worship that no created angel would dare...
- [Can angels and demons read our minds?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8009-can-angels-read-our-minds/): Question 8009. Can angels and demons read our minds? The question matters more than it might first appear, because a great deal of anxious teaching about spiritual warfare quietly assumes that they can, and builds practices on the assumption. My answer is no. Scripture reserves the knowledge of the human heart to God alone, and...
- [Who is Gabriel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8012-who-is-gabriel/): Question 8012. The angel Gabriel is the second of only two angels named in Scripture, and where Michael fights, Gabriel explains. Every appearance follows the same shape. He arrives at a moment of great significance, he brings understanding, and he announces what God is about to do. His name in Hebrew, gabri el, means something...
- [Who is Michael the archangel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8011-who-is-michael-the-archangel/): Question 8011. Michael the archangel is one of only two angels named in the canonical Scriptures, and of the two he is the one consistently found in conflict. His name is a question in Hebrew, mi ka el, meaning who is like God, and the expected answer is nobody. That name turns out to be...
- [What is the difference between angels and the host of heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8014-angels-and-the-host-of-heaven/): Question 8014. The phrase host of heaven runs right through the Old Testament, and it does two quite different jobs depending on where you find it. In some passages it names the angelic armies surrounding God’s throne. In others it names the sun, moon and stars, usually in the context of a warning against worshipping...
- [Are there other named angels in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8013-are-there-other-named-angels-in-scripture/): Question 8013. Named angels are far rarer in Scripture than most Christians assume. Ask around a congregation and you will hear Raphael, Uriel, sometimes Raguel or Sariel, and a general impression that the Bible contains a substantial roll of angelic names. It does not. There are two. Michael and Gabriel. That is the complete list...
- [Who is Abaddon or Apollyon?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8017-who-is-abaddon-or-apollyon/): Question 8017. Abaddon and Apollyon are two names for a single figure, and Revelation 9:11 gives us both because John is writing for readers in two languages. He is called the angel of the bottomless pit, and both of his names mean the same thing: Destroyer. That is a rare piece of transparency in a...
- [Who are the "sons of God" in Genesis 6?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8016-who-are-the-sons-of-god-in-genesis-6/): Question 8016. The sons of God in Genesis 6:1 to 4 have been argued over for well over two thousand years, and the argument shows no sign of settling. Four verses, a strange union, an unusual offspring, and then the flood. It is one of the most compressed and most disputed passages in the Old...
- [What are the "living creatures" in Ezekiel and Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08019-what-are-the-living-creatures-in-ezekiel-and-revelation/): Question 8019 Among the most striking descriptions in all of prophetic Scripture are the living creatures of Ezekiel’s inaugural vision and John’s throne-room vision in Revelation 4. They defy easy description, they surround the immediate presence of God, and they have provoked more theological reflection than almost any other category of angelic being. Mercifully, the...
- [Who are the four angels bound at the Euphrates?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8018-four-angels-bound-at-the-euphrates/): Question 8018. The four angels bound at the great river Euphrates appear in Revelation 9:14 and 15, and the detail that stops most readers is not the binding but the timing. They are released for the hour, the day, the month, and the year. That is a strange way to describe a moment. It is...
- [How does Revelation draw on and complete Old Testament prophetic imagery?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10201-how-revelation-draws-on-old-testament-prophets/): 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 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...
- [How do we read the Canaanite conquest in Joshua honestly?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60091-canaanite-conquest-joshua-gods-justice/): 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 is to explain it away until nothing troubling remains. The other is to shrug and say God can do what He likes. Neither is honest,...
- [What is the evidence for the resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60043-what-is-evidence-for-resurrection/): Question 60043 The resurrection of Jesus is not a blind leap of faith but a claim about history that can be examined. When we look at the evidence, we find that the resurrection is the best explanation for the facts that virtually all scholars, Christian and non-Christian alike, accept. Let’s consider what those facts are...
- [Was Jesus a real historical person?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60029-was-jesus-real-historical-person/): Question 60029. Every so often someone tells me that the historical Jesus never existed, that He was invented by the early church out of older myths, and that the whole thing is a construction. It circulates online, appears in popular books, and lands in the inbox of Christian students at university with an air of...
- [What is the atonement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7097-what-is-the-atonement/): Question 7097 The atonement of Christ is the centre of the Christian faith, and the word itself is one of the few great theological terms that began life in English. William Tyndale coined it in the sixteenth century to render the idea of at-one-ment, the making of one out of two who were estranged. It...
- [How do we know the Gospels accurately record the words of Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60078-how-do-we-know-gospels-accurately-record-jesus-words/): Question 60078. Whether the Gospel accounts accurately record what Jesus said is the question underneath a great many others, and it deserves a proper answer rather than an assertion about inspiration. I believe these books are the inspired word of God. But that is a conclusion I hold alongside the historical evidence rather than instead...
- [What is substitutionary atonement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7098-what-is-substitutionary-atonement/): Question 7098 Substitutionary atonement is the teaching that Jesus died in the place of sinners, bearing what they deserved so that they need not bear it themselves. Add the word penal and you have the full claim: what He bore was not suffering only but penalty, the judicial consequence of sin under a righteous God....
- [Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn't God just forgive?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7099-why-did-jesus-have-to-die-couldnt-god-just-forgive/): Question 7099 The question of why Jesus died rather than God simply issuing a pardon is one of the most honest questions anyone can ask, and it is usually asked with real feeling. If God is almighty and loving, why the blood? Why not one merciful word from the throne and the whole matter closed?...
- [What is propitiation? What is expiation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7101-what-is-propitiation-what-is-expiation/): Question 7101 Propitiation and expiation are two words that most Christians have met in a hymn and few could define. They are not interchangeable, and the difference between them was the subject of one of the sharpest translation debates of the twentieth century. It matters, because what is at stake is whether the cross deals...
- [What happened on the cross? (Theories of atonement)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7100-what-happened-on-the-cross-theories-of-atonement/): Question 7100 The theories of atonement are the church’s various attempts to answer one question: what exactly happened when Jesus died? Everybody agrees that the cross saves. The disagreement is about the mechanism, and two thousand years of reflection have produced several distinct accounts, some complementary and some genuinely at odds. My conviction is that...
- [What does 'ransom' mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7102-what-does-ransom-mean/): Question 7102 When Jesus said that the Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many, He was using a word His hearers understood immediately and we mostly do not. A ransom for many is not sentimental language about a life given up in a good cause. It named a specific commercial...
- [Is Jesus the only way to God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7103-is-jesus-the-only-way-to-god/): Question 7103 Whether Jesus is the only way to God is the question that makes Christians most uncomfortable in polite company, and it is the one the New Testament answers most bluntly. Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6)....
- [Is believing in Jesus' resurrection really necessary for salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7105-is-believing-in-jesus-resurrection-really-necessary-for-salvation/): Question 7105 Belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not an advanced doctrine for keen Christians. Paul makes it part of the confession by which a person is saved: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be...
- [How can I have a personal relationship with Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7104-personal-relationship-with-jesus/): Question 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up...
- [What does 'seated at the right hand of God' actually mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7107-what-does-seated-at-the-right-hand-of-god-mean/): Question 7107 To be seated at the right hand of God is the New Testament’s favourite way of describing where Jesus is now, and it is quoted or alluded to more than twenty times. Peter uses it at Pentecost, Stephen sees it as he dies, Paul builds on it, and the writer to the Hebrews...
- [Why can't I just believe in God without Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7106-why-cant-i-just-believe-in-god-without-jesus/): Question 7106 A great many people believe in God and want nothing much to do with Jesus. They are not hostile. They pray occasionally, they think there is Someone there, and they cannot see why an extra requirement should be attached. Why not simply believe in God and leave the doctrinal detail to the professionals?...
- [What will happen when Jesus returns?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10012-what-will-happen-when-jesus-returns/): Question 10012. What happens when Jesus returns is mapped in Scripture with far more detail than most Christians suspect, and the map matters, because vagueness about the programme produces confusion about the hope. When Jesus returns to earth, He comes not as the visitor of Bethlehem but as the King of kings, and a rapid,...
- [When will Jesus return?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10011-when-will-jesus-return/): Question 10011. The return of Jesus is the most asked-about event in Christian teaching, and the question people actually put to me is nearly always the same one the disciples put to Him: when? Let me answer honestly from the start: I do not know, you do not know, and anyone who claims to know...
- [What is easy believism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7067-what-is-easy-believism/): Question 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the...
- [Is the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis compatible with evangelical Christianity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60080-eastern-orthodox-theosis-vs-new-age-human-divinity/): Question 60080. Orthodox theosis is one of those doctrines that sounds alarming to evangelical ears and turns out, on examination, to be a good deal more careful than the word suggests. Deification, becoming god, partaking of the divine nature. Put like that it sounds like the serpent’s offer in the garden. But the Eastern churches...
- [Must Jesus be Lord for salvation, or can He be Saviour only?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7066-must-jesus-be-lord-for-salvation/): Question 07066 Receiving Jesus as Lord is not a second step that follows conversion, and it is not an extra condition attached to it either. When a sinner trusts Jesus, they receive the whole Person, and He does not come in sections. The question is whether submission belongs in the terms of the gospel or...
- [What is Lordship salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7065-what-is-lordship-salvation/): Question 07065 Lordship salvation is the teaching that saving faith necessarily includes a submission to Jesus as Lord, and that a profession of faith without submission is not saving faith at all. It became one of the sharpest evangelical arguments of the last forty years, and the dust has still not entirely settled. I want...
- [Was Judas Iscariot ever saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7062-was-judas-iscariot-ever-saved/): Question 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would require us to believe that a man could be chosen, indwelt and forgiven and still be described as one who was lost from the beginning....
- [Is there a specific moment of salvation or can it be gradual?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07055-is-there-a-specific-moment-of-salvation/): Question 07055 There is always a moment of salvation, even when nobody can identify it. That is the short answer, and it holds two things together that people often set against each other: the instantaneous nature of what God does, and the very gradual experience many believers have of coming to realise it. This question...
- [What is conversion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07054-what-is-conversion/): Question 07054 Christian conversion is the moment a person changes hands. It is not a church membership process, it is not a decision card, and it is not the gradual improvement of a decent life. It is the point at which someone stops trusting themselves and starts trusting Jesus, and everything after that flows from...
- [What about the thief on the cross?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07057-what-about-the-thief-on-the-cross/): Question 07057 The dying thief is the single clearest illustration in Scripture that salvation is by grace through faith and nothing else. He had no time to be baptised, no opportunity to join a church, no chance to make restitution to anyone he had robbed, and no prospect of a single good work. He had...
- [What is the relationship between faith and repentance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07056-what-is-the-relationship-between-faith-and-repentance/): Question 07056 Faith and repentance are two words for one turn. That is the heart of the answer, and getting it right saves a great deal of unnecessary anxiety, because a good deal of pastoral damage has been done by treating them as two separate transactions that must be completed in the correct order. The...
- [Can a true Christian commit apostasy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07059-can-a-true-christian-commit-apostasy/): Question 07059 Can a true Christian commit apostasy? My answer is no, and the reason is not that believers are strong but that God is faithful. A person who genuinely, finally and contentedly repudiates Jesus is revealing what was always the case rather than losing something they once possessed. That answer needs working out carefully,...
- [What about deathbed conversions? Are they valid?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07058-what-about-deathbed-conversions/): Question 07058 Deathbed conversions are genuine when the faith behind them is genuine, and the New Testament gives us no reason whatever to treat a late turning as second class. God is not running a loyalty scheme in which long service earns a better standing. That said, the question usually carries more than one concern...
- [What role does the gathered church play in interpreting Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9113-role-of-gathered-church-in-interpreting-scripture/): Question 9113. What role does the gathered church play in helping believers interpret Scripture? For many evangelicals the honest answer is none at all. We read our Bibles alone, we form our conclusions alone, and we treat the church as the place where those conclusions are occasionally aired. That instinct comes from something good, but...
- [What is Paul's mystery in Ephesians 3 and Colossians 1?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q009112-what-is-the-mystery-in-ephesians-3-colossians-1/): 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 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...
- [What is preaching to the spirits in 1 Peter 3:19?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60085-preaching-to-spirits-in-1-peter-3-19/): Question 60085 Few passages in the New Testament have generated more interpretive discussion than 1 Peter 3:18–20: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he also went and...
- [Was Jonah and the whale a true story?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60096-was-jonah-and-the-whale-a-true-story/): Question 60096. The book of Jonah divides readers more sharply than almost any other short piece of the Old Testament. A prophet runs from God, is thrown overboard, is swallowed by a great fish, survives three days inside it, and is vomited onto dry land to preach to a city that repents. Many scholars treat...
- [Does the Bible support slavery?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60092-does-the-bible-support-slavery/): Question 60092. Slavery in Scripture is raised more often as an accusation than as a question, and I understand why. The charge is that the Bible not only tolerates slavery but endorses it, and that the transatlantic trade was therefore consistent with Christian teaching. If that were true it would be a very serious matter...
- [Did the Red Sea part?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60097-did-the-red-sea-part/): Question 60097. Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the Red Sea. Wind setdown models, tsunami theories, and the argument that the Hebrew means Sea of Reeds and therefore a shallow marsh: all of them try to preserve something of the event while removing what...
- [What about those who have never heard the gospel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7021-what-about-those-who-never-heard-the-gospel/): Question 07021. What happens to those who have never heard the gospel is one of the hardest questions anyone asks me, and it is usually asked with real feeling rather than as a debating point. A student wants to know whether her Hindu grandmother is lost. A man wants to know what God does with...
- [What is the cosmological argument?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60099-what-is-the-cosmological-argument/): Question 60099. The cosmological argument begins with a question that turns out to be remarkably resistant to any answer that does not involve God: why is there something rather than nothing? The universe exists. Matter, energy, space and time exist. Where did they come from, and why is there anything at all to ask the...
- [What is the difference between the last trumpet in Paul and the seventh trumpet in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10202-difference-between-last-trumpets-corinthians-revelation/): 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 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...
- [What is the moral argument?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60101-what-is-the-moral-argument/): Question 60101. The moral argument starts with something so ordinary that it is easy to walk past. Human beings make moral judgements and expect them to carry real weight. When we say that torturing a child for entertainment is wrong, we do not mean that we personally dislike it, or that our society happens to...
- [What is the teleological argument?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60100-what-is-the-teleological-argument/): Question 60100. The teleological argument looks at the natural world, notices that it bears the marks of purpose, and asks what that implies. The name comes from the Greek telos, meaning end or goal, and the claim is that when we examine the universe at any scale, from the calibration of the physical constants to...
- [Why doesn't God just show Himself?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60103-why-doesnt-god-just-show-himself/): Question 60103. Divine hiddenness is the polite name philosophers give to a complaint most of us have made at some point, usually at two in the morning. If God is real and wants to be known, why does He not simply appear? One unmistakable public demonstration and the argument would be over. I do not...
- [What is the ontological argument?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60102-what-is-the-ontological-argument/): Question 60102. The ontological argument is the most demanding of the classical arguments for God’s existence and easily the most disputed. Unlike the cosmological or teleological arguments, which move from features of the world to a conclusion about God, this one attempts to establish God’s existence from the concept of God alone, without any appeal...
- [Could Hitler have gotten saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7084-could-hitler-have-gotten-saved/): Question 7084. Whether the worst sinners imaginable could be forgiven is a question people ask in two very different tones of voice, and the tone matters. Some ask it as a challenge, expecting Christianity to flinch. Others ask it because of somebody in their own family, and they need to know whether there is a...
- [How were people in the Old Testament saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7083-how-were-people-in-the-old-testament-saved/): 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 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...
- [What is definitive sanctification versus progressive sanctification?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07072-definitive-sanctification-versus-progressive-sanctification/): Question 7072. Progressive sanctification is the part of this doctrine most Christians have heard about, and it is the part that feels true to experience. We are being changed, slowly, unevenly, over a lifetime. What fewer believers have been taught is that Scripture also speaks of sanctification as something already accomplished, finished, and never to...
- [What does “born again” mean, and what change does it describe?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7089-what-does-born-again-mean/): Question 7089. Born again has become one of the most misused phrases in religious English. In the press it functions as a label for a certain kind of enthusiastic Christian, usually American and usually presented with a raised eyebrow. In some churches it has become shorthand for having made a decision at a particular meeting....
- [Is there a difference between the forgiveness received at conversion and the ongoing forgiveness available to the believer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7088-conversion-forgiveness-vs-ongoing-forgiveness/): Question 7088. Ongoing forgiveness and the forgiveness received at conversion are related but not identical, and failing to distinguish them causes two opposite problems. Some Christians live in fear that unconfessed sin has undone their salvation. Others conclude that since everything was forgiven at the cross, confession is unnecessary. Both have collapsed a distinction Scripture...
- [Can demons believe and yet not be saved (James 2:19)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07076-can-demons-believe-and-not-be-saved-james-2-19/): Question 7076. That demons believe correct theology and remain lost is one of the more unsettling statements in the New Testament, and James makes it deliberately. He is arguing with somebody who thinks that holding the right ideas about God is sufficient, and he produces the most damaging counter example available: the demonic realm is...
- [What is the gospel in its simplest form?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07075-what-is-the-gospel-in-its-simplest-form/): Question 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty minutes. At the same time a summary that leaves out something essential is not a shorter gospel but a different one. So the task is...
- [What does “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ” actually mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07078-what-does-believe-on-the-lord-jesus-christ-mean/): Question 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin. In ordinary speech we believe things we are fairly confident about and nothing follows from it. I believe the train leaves at ten past. That...
- [What is the role of confession in salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07077-what-is-the-role-of-confession-in-salvation/): Question 7077. The place of confession in salvation is one of those subjects where a single verse has been made to carry more weight than it can bear. Romans 10:9 mentions the mouth, and a whole practice of guided prayers and public declarations has been built on it, sometimes with the implication that a person...
- [Why does God allow natural disasters?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60105-why-does-god-allow-natural-disasters/): Question 60105. Natural disasters are the version of the problem of evil that is hardest to answer, and I want to say at the outset that I know it. Human wickedness can be laid at the door of human freedom. An earthquake cannot. Nobody chose the fault line under Port-au-Prince or the wave that came...
- [What is baptismal regeneration and is it biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09014-what-is-baptismal-regeneration-and-is-it-biblical/): Question 09014. Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the new birth is conveyed through the water of baptism, so that a person is regenerated in and by the act itself rather than by faith in Jesus prior to it. It is held in various forms by Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, many Lutherans and Anglicans, and...
- [What is theodicy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60107-what-is-theodicy/): Question 60107. Theodicy is the technical name for the attempt to defend the goodness and power of God in a world that contains suffering. The word was coined by Gottfried Leibniz in 1710, from the Greek theos and dike, God and justice, and it means something like the justification of God. That phrase should make...
- [Why does God allow evil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60106-why-does-god-allow-evil/): Question 60106. Moral evil is the wickedness that people do to one another, and it is the sharpest form of the oldest objection to the Christian faith. If God is good, He would want to prevent it. If He is almighty, He could. Evil exists. Something in the argument has to give. I want to...
- [Are modern Jews still God's chosen people?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10029-are-modern-jews-still-gods-chosen-people/): 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 people, because the calling that made them so was never conditional on their performance and has never been revoked. This is one of the places...
- [Can God create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60201-can-god-create-a-rock-too-heavy-to-lift/): Question 60201. Omnipotence is the doctrine this old puzzle is designed to break. Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He can, there is something He cannot do, namely lift it. If He cannot, there is something He cannot do, namely make it. Either way, the argument runs, almighty...
- [Where is heaven located?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10169-where-is-heaven-located/): Question 10169. The location of heaven has been a live question ever since Yuri Gagarin came back from orbit and reported that he had not seen God up there. It was meant as a joke against believers, and it landed only because a great many people, Christians included, had a vague idea that heaven was...
- [What Is the Baptism of the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04014-what-is-the-baptism-of-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4014. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the modern church, and few subjects have caused more confusion, division and quiet discouragement among sincere believers. Some are taught it is a second blessing they must seek after conversion, others that it is proved by speaking in tongues,...
- [Where is hell located?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10168-where-is-hell-located/): Question 10168. The location of hell is one of those questions that sounds like idle curiosity and usually is not. People ask it because they want to know whether hell is a real place with a real address, or a state of mind, or a metaphor that preachers use to frighten congregations into behaving. Scripture...
- [Can we see what is happening on earth from Heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10167-can-we-see-what-is-happening-on-earth-from-heaven/): Question 10167. Can those in heaven see what is happening down here? It is one of the most frequently asked questions in any pastoral ministry, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked by a widow, or by parents at a graveside, and behind it lies a longing to know whether...
- [Will there be a one-world government?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10166-will-there-be-a-one-world-government/): Question 10166. A single world government has been the dream of tyrants and idealists for as long as there have been maps, and Scripture tells us that in the end they will get one. Not the benign federation of the optimists, and not quite the conspiracy of the pamphlets either, but a genuine world government...
- [Is modern technology related to end times prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10146-is-modern-technology-related-to-end-times-prophecy/): Question 10146. Whenever a new invention arrives, some part of the Christian world immediately maps it onto prophecy, and modern technology has been identified as the fulfilment of end-times passages more times than I can count. Barcodes were the mark of the beast. Then credit cards were. Then microchips, then smartphones, then digital currency, then...
- [Is Heaven boring?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10109-is-heaven-boring/): Question 10109. The fear of eternal boredom is one of the most common reasons people quietly decide they do not want heaven, and I have some sympathy with them, because the version of heaven they are rejecting would indeed be tedious. An endless church service on a cloud, with harps, is not what Scripture promises...
- [Where do those who take their own lives go?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7022-where-do-those-who-commit-suicide-go/): Question 07022. Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face tells me the answer matters more than any other thing in the world just now. So I want to answer it plainly and gently, and...
- [What does the Bible teach about a one-world religion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10106-what-does-bible-teach-about-one-world-religion/): Question 10106. The Bible teaches that a one world religion will exist during the Tribulation, that it will centre on the worship of the beast and be enforced by the false prophet, and that it will be destroyed before the return of Jesus. It is not a conspiracy theory bolted on to Scripture. It is...
- [How should Christians respond to wars and rumours of wars?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10092-how-should-christians-respond-to-wars-and-rumours-of-wars/): Question 10092. Wars and rumours of wars have marked every generation since Jesus spoke the phrase, and every generation has been tempted to read its own headlines as the final act. I have lost count of the conversations that begin with a news alert and end with the question, is this it? The question is...
- [Will the Holy Spirit be removed during the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10082-will-holy-spirit-be-removed-during-tribulation/): 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 as much confusion. The idea has been repeated so often in popular prophecy teaching that many believers assume it is settled doctrine. It is not,...
- [What role does the Holy Spirit play in the end times?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10053-role-of-holy-spirit-in-end-times/): Question 10053. The Holy Spirit is deeply and actively at work all through the end times, restraining evil, drawing sinners to Christ, and empowering bold witness right up to the return of the King. People often imagine that Bible prophecy is really all about the Antichrist and the beast and the various judgements, and so...
- [What is the difference between the times of the Gentiles and the fullness of the Gentiles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10036-times-of-gentiles-vs-fullness-of-gentiles/): 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. When I speak of the times of the Gentiles I mean a period of Gentile political domination over Jerusalem and Israel, while the fullness of...
- [How do the biblical covenants relate to eschatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10014-how-do-biblical-covenants-relate-to-eschatology/): 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, 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...
- [Is 666 literal?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10010-is-666-literal/): Question 10010. The number 666 has escaped the book of Revelation and taken up residence in horror films, heavy metal albums, and internet conspiracy theories, which makes it one of the few Bible details unbelievers can quote. Behind the noise stands a serious text and a serious question: is the number 666 literal, and what...
- [Can a Believer Lose the Filling of the Spirit Through a Single Act of Sin, or Is It a More Gradual Process?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4079-lose-filling-spirit-single-act-sin/): Question 4079. Whether losing the filling of the Spirit happens through a single, dramatic act of sin or through a slower, more gradual drift is a genuinely practical pastoral question, and Scripture’s answer turns out to be more nuanced than either a strict once-off model or a purely gradual one alone. I want to work...
- [What Does It Mean to Be Drunk in the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04038-drunk-in-the-spirit/): Question 04038. Being drunk in the Spirit describes a state, claimed in some charismatic meetings, in which believers stagger, slur their words, laugh uncontrollably, or behave as though intoxicated, all of it attributed to an overwhelming dose of the Spirit’s presence. It became widely known through the Toronto Blessing and similar movements of the 1990s,...
- [How Does the Filling of the Spirit Relate to Intercessory Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4078-filling-spirit-intercessory-prayer/): Question 4078. How the Spirit’s filling relates to intercessory prayer is a connection Scripture draws explicitly, and understanding it will change how you approach prayer for others, particularly when you genuinely do not know what to pray or how to pray it. Intercessory prayer, prayer offered on behalf of someone else, is not primarily a...
- [How Do We Understand the Laying on of Hands in Relation to the Spirit's Reception in the Acts Narratives?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4077-laying-on-of-hands-spirit-reception-acts/): Question 4077. The laying on hands appears repeatedly in the Acts narratives connected to the Spirit’s reception, and I want to work through those specific passages carefully, because the pattern is genuinely more varied than a single, simplified formula for how believers receive the Spirit today. Getting this right matters, because some traditions have built...
- [Is There Biblical Evidence for a 'Second Blessing' Experience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4076-second-blessing-biblical-evidence/): Question 4076. Second blessing language has circulated in evangelical churches for well over a century, usually describing a dramatic, identifiable post-conversion experience in which a believer receives a fuller measure of the Spirit than they had at conversion. The phrase carries real emotional weight for many Christians who have had a genuinely significant spiritual experience...
- [How Does Spirit Baptism Relate to Water Baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4075-spirit-baptism-water-baptism-relationship/): Question 4075. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related but distinct realities, and confusing the two has caused more pastoral trouble in Baptist churches than almost any other misunderstanding in this area of doctrine. One is an invisible act performed by the Spirit at the moment a person believes. The other is a visible, physical...
- [What Is the Spirit's Role Within the Eternal Counsel of God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4074-holy-spirit-eternal-counsels-godhead/): Question 4074. The counsel of God is not a phrase Scripture uses lightly. It describes the settled purpose and plan that God formed within Himself before He ever spoke creation into being, and the question of what part the Holy Spirit plays within that counsel takes us into some of the most careful thinking the...
- [How Do We Distinguish the Spirit's Personhood from the Father and Son Without Tritheism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4073-spirit-distinct-personhood-trinity-tritheism/): Question 4073. The Spirit’s distinct personhood is one of those doctrines that sounds like abstract technical furniture until you try to pray, worship, or teach without a clear grasp of it, at which point you discover how much rests on getting it right. Scripture presents Father, Son, and Spirit as three who relate to one...
- [What Does It Mean That the Spirit Searches the Deep Things of God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4072-spirit-searches-deep-things-of-god/): Question 4072. The deep things of God are the subject of one of Paul’s boldest claims about the Holy Spirit, made in passing in a letter to a fractious, spiritually immature congregation in Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 2:10 he writes that God has revealed these things to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches...
- [How Does Pneumatology Relate to Trinitarian Theology as a Discipline?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4070-pneumatology-trinitarian-theology/): Question 4070. Trinitarian pneumatology is not an optional specialism sitting alongside the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is the frame within which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit must be studied at all, because the Spirit is not a topic that can be understood correctly in isolation from who He is as the third...
- [What Does the Old Testament Teach About the Spirit Before Pentecost?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4069-holy-spirit-activity-old-testament-before-pentecost/): Question 4069. The Spirit before Pentecost operated on a genuinely different basis from His ministry today, and understanding that difference clears up a great deal of confusion about how Old Testament believers related to God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active throughout the Old Testament, not absent until Acts chapter 2. What changed at Pentecost...
- [How does a person's heart become progressively hardened toward God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07031-progressive-hardness-of-heart/): Question 07031 The hardening of the human heart is rarely a sudden event. Most people do not arrive at a settled state of spiritual insensibility in a single moment of dramatic rebellion. What Scripture describes, and what pastoral observation confirms, is a process — gradual, largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it, and with each...
- [Can the Spirit Speak Through Dreams Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4089-can-the-spirit-speak-through-dreams-today/): Question 4089. I get asked about this more than almost anything else in pastoral conversation, so let me say plainly that guidance through dreams is something Scripture treats with real seriousness, without ever making it the normal channel for hearing from God. Dreams sit in an odd place in the Christian imagination. Some believers dismiss...
- [What role does the gathered church play in discerning the Spirit's guidance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09022-gathered-church-discerning-spirits-voice/): Question 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit’s leading strikes many believers as an odd idea. The modern pattern is that I pray, I sense a leading, I act, and the church finds out afterwards. The New Testament pattern...
- [Distinguishing Spirit Prompting From Your Own Reasoning](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4087-distinguishing-spirit-prompting-from-own-reasoning/): Question 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run in both directions. Claim the Spirit’s leading for what is really just personal preference dressed up in spiritual language, and you end up living by...
- [Does the Spirit's Conviction Give Real Ability to Respond?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4086-spirit-conviction-and-capacity-to-respond/): Question 4086. Spirit’s conviction of sin is one of the most significant realities in the whole business of evangelism, and the question of what it actually does inside a person when they hear the gospel deserves a careful answer. Does it genuinely open the possibility of a real response, or does it produce some kind...
- [What Is the Lord's Supper?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9006-what-is-the-lords-supper/): Question 9006 Alongside baptism, the Lord’s Supper is the other ordinance that Jesus gave to His Church. It has been called by various names: the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, the Breaking of Bread, the Lord’s Table. But what exactly is it? What does it mean? And why do we observe it? These are important...
- [What Is the Correct Mode of Baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9005-what-is-the-correct-mode-of-baptism/): Question 9005 Christians baptise in different ways. Some pour water over the head, some sprinkle water, and some immerse the whole body under water. Does it matter which method we use? Is one mode more biblical than the others? This is a question worth examining carefully, because baptism is not a human invention but a...
- [Should Infants Be Baptised?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9004-should-infants-be-baptised/): Question 9004 Few questions have divided Christians more than the question of infant baptism. Some denominations practise it; others reject it entirely. Some see it as essential for salvation; others view it as a harmful distortion of the gospel. Where should we stand? As always, our authority must be Scripture, not tradition or sentiment. What...
- [Who Should Be Baptised?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9003-who-should-be-baptised/): Question 9003 Baptism is one of the two ordinances that Jesus gave to the Church, and yet it has been a source of disagreement among Christians for centuries. One of the most fundamental questions is simply this: who is a proper candidate for baptism? Should everyone be baptised? Only adults? What about children? Let us...
- [What is the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9002-what-is-the-church/): 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 what does the Bible actually mean when it speaks of the Church? This is a question that deserves careful attention because understanding what the Church...
- [Does the Bible Support Gender Identity Separate from Biological Sex?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5003-does-the-bible-support-gender-identity-separate-from-biological-sex/): Question 5003. The question of gender identity has moved from academic journals to school classrooms in a single generation, and Christians cannot avoid it. The claim now made is that a person’s inner sense of gender can be separated from, and can override, the sex of their body. Does the Bible support that separation? I...
- [What Does the Bible Teach About Human Sexuality and Gender?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5002-what-does-the-bible-teach-about-human-sexuality-and-gender/): Question 5002. The Bible treats human sexuality as one of God’s good gifts, given before sin ever entered the world, and that starting point changes everything. Our culture talks about sex constantly, yet rarely asks the one question that matters most: what did the Maker intend? If human sexuality is a divine design rather than...
- [When does human life begin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5007-when-does-human-life-begin/): Question 5007. Ask me when human life begins and I will not reach first for a laboratory or a law court. I will reach for the Bible, because the question of when human life begins is finally a question about what God says He is doing in the hidden place where none of us can...
- [What Is the Relationship Between Scripture and Church Tradition?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1035-scripture-and-church-tradition/): Question 1035. Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has read, defended, and lived out Scripture across two thousand years. The question is not whether tradition matters. It plainly does. The question is which one...
- [What does the Bible say about abortion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q5008-what-does-the-bible-say-about-abortion/): Question 5008 Few issues provoke more heated debate than abortion. For many, it represents essential healthcare and women’s freedom; for others, it constitutes the taking of innocent human life. The question for us as believers is not what our culture says or what our political party says but what God says. While the Bible does...
- [What Is the Place of Public Scripture Reading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1057-what-is-the-place-of-public-scripture-reading/): Question 1057. public Scripture reading is commanded in the New Testament, not simply permitted as an optional liturgical flourish, and I think many churches, my own included at various points, have quietly let the practice shrink until Scripture is heard mainly in short snippets attached to a sermon rather than read at length in its...
- [What Is Dispensational Interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1042-what-is-dispensational-interpretation/): Question 1042. Dispensational interpretation is the framework I use to make sense of some genuinely puzzling features of the Bible that I meet almost every week in pastoral ministry. Why did God command animal sacrifices under the Old Testament and then stop requiring them? Why are some commands given specifically to Israel that plainly do...
- [What do angels look like?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8001-what-do-angels-look-like/): Question 8001. Angelic appearance is one of those subjects where our imagination has done far more work than our Bible reading. Ask most people to picture an angel and you will get soft robes, a halo, feathered wings, and a face somewhere between a toddler and a Renaissance model. Ask Scripture and you get something...
- [How does Jesus' death save people in the Old Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3039-how-does-jesus-death-save-old-testament-believers/): 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. Abraham died roughly two thousand years before Calvary. David never heard the name Jesus. If salvation is only through Christ’s death, as the New Testament...
- [Family Bible Reading: How Do We Make It Effective?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1058-family-bible-reading-how-to-make-it-effective/): Question 1058. family Bible reading fails in most homes not because parents lack good intentions but because it is attempted with the wrong expectations, either too ambitious a plan collapsing within a fortnight, or too passive an approach that never moves past reading words aloud without any real engagement. I have tried and failed at...
- [Are there female angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8003-are-there-female-angels/): Question 8003. Female angels are everywhere in our culture and almost nowhere in our Bibles, and that gap is worth examining rather than glossing over. Every angel who takes human form in Scripture and is described in any detail is described as a man. Every angel given a personal name, Michael and Gabriel, carries a...
- [Do angels have wings?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8002-do-angels-have-wings/): Question 8002. Do angels have wings? The question sounds trivial until you go looking for the answer, and then you discover that the Bible is remarkably selective about which heavenly beings it gives wings to. Some do. Most, when they appear to people, do not. And the pattern is not random. I enjoy this question...
- [Can angels eat and drink?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8005-can-angels-eat-and-drink/): Question 8005. Whether angels eat looks like a curiosity question until you notice how much rests on it. Scripture calls angels spirits, and Scripture also describes a meal in Genesis 18 in which Abraham serves curds, milk, a prepared calf and fresh bread, and his visitors sit under a tree and eat it. If angels...
- [Do angels have bodies?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8004-do-angels-have-bodies/): Question 8004. Angelic bodies have puzzled thoughtful readers of the Bible for a very long time, and the reason is simple. Scripture calls angels spirits, and Scripture also shows them eating a meal, taking a man by the hand, and wrestling until daybreak. Both descriptions are in the text, and neither one can be quietly...
- [Do angels have emotions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8008-do-angels-have-emotions/): Question 8008. Angelic emotions are more visible in Scripture than most readers expect, and once you start looking for them they are difficult to miss. Angels shout, sing, rejoice, long, marvel, and worship, and none of those verbs describe a passionless mechanism carrying out instructions. I think the assumption that angels are cold comes from...
- [Can angels die?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8007-can-angels-die/): Question 8007. Can angels die? Jesus answered part of this question directly, and His answer is the natural place to begin. Speaking of the resurrection in Luke 20:36, He says the redeemed cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God. So the deathlessness of angels is used as a...
- [Could angels rebel again?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8126-could-angels-rebel-again/): Question 08126. Whether angels rebel again is one of those questions that sounds like idle speculation until you notice what is sitting underneath it, because the person asking is rarely curious about angelic politics. They are asking whether heaven is safe. If a vast company of angelic beings could fall once, what stops the same...
- [Do angels have free will?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8006-do-angels-have-free-will/): Question 8006. Angelic free will is one of those doctrines that seems abstract until you realise it is the only way to explain how evil entered a universe made entirely good. Something went wrong before Genesis 3, and it went wrong among creatures who were not deceived by a serpent, because they were the serpent....
- [Can Women Teach or Preach Scripture? What Does Scripture Say?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1135-can-women-teach-preach-scripture/): Question 1135. Women teaching and preaching generates more heat in contemporary Christianity than almost any other practical question I am asked, and I understand why. Positions range from full egalitarianism, where no ministry distinctions exist between men and women at all, to a strict complementarianism that some apply so broadly it silences women’s voices well...
- [What About God's Commands to Destroy Nations?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1116-what-about-gods-commands-to-destroy-nations/): Question 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it...
- [How Do I Teach My Children to Love Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1128-how-do-i-teach-my-children-to-love-scripture/): Question 1128. Helping children love Scripture is, I think, one of the most important tasks any Christian parent takes on, and also one of the most quietly daunting. We want our children not simply to know facts about the Bible but to treasure it, to reach for it naturally, and to find in it the...
- [How Does Scripture Address the Deconstruction Movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1133-scripture-deconstruction-movement/): Question 1133. The deconstruction movement has become impossible to ignore in Christian conversation, whether you first met the word on social media, in a bestselling memoir, or in the empty seat of someone who used to sit near you on a Sunday. Social media is full of stories of people, often raised in evangelical homes,...
- [What If I've Tried Reading Plans and Failed?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1127-what-if-ive-tried-reading-plans-and-failed/): Question 1127. A Bible reading plan started with such good intentions back in January. This would finally be the year you read through the whole thing. February arrived and you missed a few days. March, you tried to catch up and fell further behind. By April you had quietly given up. Sound familiar? You are...
- [Should I Read Straight Through or Jump Around?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1126-should-i-read-straight-through-or-jump-around/): Question 1126. A Bible reading approach is one of those decisions that sounds small until you actually sit down with your Bible and wonder where to begin. Should you start at Genesis and read straight through to Revelation? Should you jump around to different books as a need or interest arises? Should you follow a...
- [How Do I Read My Bible When It Feels Dry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1123-how-do-i-read-my-bible-when-it-feels-dry/): Question 1123. Bible reading dryness is something every Christian I have ever pastored has experienced at some point, myself very much included. The pages seem flat. The words don’t come alive the way they used to, or the way you keep hearing they should. You know you are meant to want this, and yet most...
- [What Hermeneutic Leads to Amillennialism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1122-what-hermeneutic-leads-to-amillennialism/): Question 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....
- [What is the "mystery" of the Church that Paul describes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09200-mystery-of-the-church/): 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 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...
- [How Does Pretribulationism Depend on Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1121-how-does-pretribulationism-depend-on-scripture/): 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 foundation behind it. It rests on a specific reading of specific texts, held together by a consistent, literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic applied to prophecy the same way...
- [What is paradise?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10117-what-is-paradise/): Question 10117. The biblical paradise is the place of God’s presence, pictured as a garden, where the righteous dead are at rest and where the tree of life stands. The word appears only three times in the New Testament, and each occurrence adds something: Jesus promises it to the dying thief, Paul is caught up...
- [What does the Bible say about near-death experiences?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10116-what-does-the-bible-say-about-near-death-experiences/): Question 10116. Scripture says nothing directly about near-death experiences as a category, and that silence is itself instructive. What the Bible gives us instead is a settled account of what happens at death, a firm warning about deception, and a clear statement that we already have everything we need in the written word. Those three...
- [What is the beatific vision?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10114-what-is-the-beatific-vision/): Question 10114. The beatific vision is the theological term for the promise that the redeemed will see God face to face, and that this seeing will be the source of their endless happiness. The word beatific simply means happy-making, and the idea rests on a handful of texts that promise us sight of God rather...
- [Will we have free will in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10113-will-we-have-free-will-in-heaven/): Question 10113. We will have free will in heaven, and we will have far more of it than we do now, but we will never sin. Those two statements only look contradictory if we have accepted a definition of freedom that the Bible never uses, namely that being free means being permanently poised between good...
- [What crowns will believers receive?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10111-what-crowns-will-believers-receive/): Question 10111. Scripture names five heavenly crowns promised to believers: the imperishable crown, the crown of rejoicing, the crown of righteousness, the crown of life and the crown of glory. They are given at the judgement seat of Christ, they are rewards for service rather than payment for salvation, and they end up back at...
- [What is the Bema seat (judgment seat of Christ)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10110-what-is-the-bema-seat-judgment-seat-of-christ/): Question 10110. The Bema seat is the judgement seat of Christ, where believers will stand to have their service assessed and rewarded. It is not a trial to determine whether we are saved. That question was settled at the cross and received by faith, and no Christian will ever face it again. What happens at...
- [What is the marriage supper of the Lamb?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10112-what-is-the-marriage-supper-of-the-lamb/): Question 10112. The marriage supper of the Lamb is the wedding feast celebrating the union of Jesus and his church, announced in Revelation 19 immediately before he returns in glory. The bride is the church, the Lamb is the Bridegroom, and the feast marks the point at which the long betrothal is finally consummated in...
- [Will there be marriage in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10107-will-there-be-marriage-in-heaven/): Question 10107. There will be no marriage in heaven in the sense of new marriages being contracted or existing ones continuing as legal and exclusive unions. Jesus said so plainly, and I am not going to soften it. What I do want to argue is that this is not the loss it first appears, because...
- [What is the New Jerusalem?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10105-what-is-the-new-jerusalem/): Question 10105. The New Jerusalem is the city that God has prepared for his people, described at length in Revelation 21 and 22, coming down out of heaven from God to the new earth. I take it as a literal city with real dimensions and real materials, not as a picture of the church dressed...
- [Will ethnic Israel be saved in the future?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10016-will-ethnic-israel-be-saved-in-the-future/): 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 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...
- [Will there be animals in the new heaven and new earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10104-will-there-be-animals-in-new-heaven-new-earth/): Question 10104. Will there be animals in heaven and on the new earth? I think the biblical answer is yes, and I say that not to be sentimental but because the prophets describe the coming kingdom as a world full of living creatures at peace, and because the new earth is presented as a restored...
- [What is the "fullness of the Gentiles"?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10018-what-is-the-fullness-of-the-gentiles/): 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” (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,...
- [What does "all Israel will be saved" mean in Romans 11:26?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10017-what-does-all-israel-will-be-saved-mean-romans-11-26/): 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 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...
- [What were the purposes of the Mosaic law?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10019-what-were-the-purposes-of-the-mosaic-law/): 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: 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...
- [What about evolution?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60002-what-about-evolution/): Question 60002. Darwinian evolution is the account of origins that most of us absorbed before we could evaluate it, in classrooms and documentaries and museum captions, and it arrives with the authority of settled fact rather than as a theory with a history and a set of assumptions. I want to do two things here....
- [Should Christians be pacifists?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12047-should-christians-be-pacifists/): Question 12047. Christian pacifism is one of those positions I find myself respecting far more than I agree with. The people I have known who held it were not soft-headed idealists. They were serious believers who had read the Sermon on the Mount and decided to take Jesus at His word, whatever it cost them,...
- [Is Christian Nationalism Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12046-is-christian-nationalism-biblical/): 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 the people drawn to it are responding to something real, and telling them they are simply wicked will not help anybody. So let me try...
- [What is the relationship between law and grace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7081-relationship-between-law-and-grace/): 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 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,...
- [How do we balance 'love your neighbour' with controlling borders?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12048-love-your-neighbour-and-controlling-borders/): Question 12048. Every time border control comes up in conversation at church, somebody quotes the good Samaritan and somebody else quotes Nehemiah building a wall, and both of them think the argument is now over. It never is. This is one of those questions where the Bible has a great deal to say and almost...
- [What does the primal heresy look like today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60049-primal-heresy-modern-manifestations/): Question 60049. Primal heresy is the name I give to the oldest lie ever told, the one that arrived in a garden and has been repackaged in every generation since. It has four parts, and if you learn them you will recognise them everywhere, which is both useful and rather depressing. The serpent questioned God’s...
- [What About Climate Change?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12050-what-about-climate-change/): Question 12050. Ask a room of British evangelicals about climate change and you will get two confident answers and a lot of silence in between. One group treats it as the defining moral emergency of our time. Another treats the whole subject as a political trap dressed up in science. I think both are answering...
- [Did Satan need permission to attack Job's children?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8127-did-satan-need-permission-to-attack-jobs-children/): Question 08127. Whether Satan required permission to attack Job’s children is not a puzzle for the study, because anybody who has buried someone they love and then read Job 1 knows exactly how sharp it is. The text plainly shows Satan seeking and receiving permission to attack, and ten young people die within a few...
- [Is Islam compatible with Christianity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60051-is-islam-compatible-with-christianity/): Question 60051. Are Islam and Christianity compatible? The question is asked in several different senses, and a great deal of confusion comes from answering one sense while the questioner meant another. Sometimes it means whether Muslims and Christians can live peaceably as neighbours, which is a social question. Sometimes it means whether the two faiths...
- [Is Smoking a Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12049-is-smoking-a-sin/): Question 12049. Is smoking a sin? I get asked this more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just come to faith and is quietly terrified that the answer is yes and that they will fail. That pastoral setting shapes everything I am about to say. The honest answer is that Scripture...
- [Who are the three enemies of the Christian life, and how do we fight them?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11065-battling-the-world-flesh-and-devil/): Question 11065. The three enemies of the Christian life have been named in that order for centuries, the world, the flesh and the devil, and the grouping is not a piece of ecclesiastical tidiness. It comes straight out of the New Testament and it is enormously useful for diagnosis. The reason it matters is that...
- [Body/soul/spirit: are we two parts or three?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/body-soul-spirit-are-we-two-parts-or-three-make-the-biblical-case-for-both/): Question 5045 Whether human beings consist of two parts — body and soul/spirit — or three distinct parts — body, soul, and spirit as separate entities — is a question that has divided careful biblical scholars for centuries. Both positions claim substantial textual support, and both are held by thoughtful, orthodox interpreters. Rather than pretending...
- [How do you cultivate greater awareness of the Spirit's presence without becoming mystical or subjective?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11067-cultivating-awareness-of-the-spirits-presence/): Question 11067. Awareness of the Spirit’s presence is something many believers want and few know how to pursue without feeling they are either faking an experience or drifting into something Scripture would not sanction. The fear is reasonable. There is a great deal of nonsense about, and some of it is loud. But the answer...
- [How do you know if unconfessed sin or a resisted prompting is hindering the Spirit's work in your life?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11066-is-unconfessed-sin-grieving-the-spirit/): Question 11066. Unconfessed sin is one of the quietest problems in the Christian life, precisely because it makes no noise. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no thunderclap and no obvious discipline. There is simply a slow flattening, a sense that prayer has become mechanical and Scripture has gone grey. I get asked how a believer...
- [What does the Bible say about euthanasia?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12063-what-does-the-bible-say-about-euthanasia/): Question 12063. Assisted dying is no longer a theoretical question in Britain. Parliament has debated it repeatedly, opinion has shifted, and a good many Christians find themselves uneasy without being able to say exactly why. This article is my attempt to give the why. I want to write it carefully, because behind the policy debate...
- [What does the Bible say about abortion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12062-what-does-the-bible-say-about-abortion/): Question 12062 Abortion is among the most contested moral questions in contemporary Western society, and it is one on which Scripture speaks with more clarity than is often acknowledged. The Bible does not use the word abortion, but it addresses the foundations on which any Christian answer must be built, and those foundations lead in...
- [Is Yinka Oyekan evangelical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60076-is-yinka-oyekan-evangelical/): Question 60076 Yinka Oyekan is one of the more visible and genuinely complex figures in contemporary British Baptist life. He is a man of obvious energy, real commitment to evangelism, and personal warmth. He holds positions that many evangelical Baptists would recognise and share, and he holds others that sit in considerable tension with evangelical...
- [Is depression a sin or a spiritual problem?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11070-is-depression-a-sin-or-a-spiritual-problem/): Question 11070. Depression and sin have been tangled together in Christian thinking for a very long time, and a great deal of harm has followed. I have sat with believers who were told that their illness was evidence of unrepented sin, and I have watched what that does to a person who is already at...
- [What happens to a person in the time between death and the resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10200-intermediate-state-death-and-resurrection/): Question 10200. The intermediate state is the condition of a human being between the moment of death and the morning of resurrection, and it is one of the questions people ask me most often at a graveside. Is my mother with Jesus now, or asleep, or waiting somewhere? Does she know anything? Does she have...
- [What does the Bible say about fear and anxiety?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11069-what-does-the-bible-say-about-fear-and-anxiety/): Question 11069. Fear and anxiety are addressed in Scripture far more often than most people realise, and usually with a good deal more tenderness than the way we quote those verses to one another. The instruction not to be afraid appears again and again, and it is almost always accompanied by a reason rather than...
- [How should I prepare to give an answer for the hope I have?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60077-how-should-i-prepare-to-give-an-answer-for-the-hope-i-have/): Question 60077. Peter tells us to be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in us, and I suspect that verse has produced more guilt in ordinary Christians than almost any other. We read it and picture a debate we would lose. But look at...
- [How should parents teach doctrine to their children?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11072-how-should-parents-teach-doctrine-to-their-children/): Question 11072 Christian parents are the first theologians their children will ever meet, and most of us only realise it long after the lessons have started. Every answer given at bedtime, every reaction to bad news, every explanation of why we are going to church again this Sunday is doctrine being taught, whether we intended...
- [What is the relationship between truth and love in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11071-relationship-between-truth-and-love-in-scripture/): Question 11071. Truth and love are set against each other so routinely in Christian conversation that many believers assume they must be balanced, as though every increase in one required a reduction in the other. That framing is wrong, and it has done real damage in both directions. Scripture never presents them as competing forces...
- [What is the danger of religious consumerism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09111-what-is-the-danger-of-religious-consumerism/): Question 9111. Religious consumerism is the habit of approaching church the way we approach every other service we buy, and it has crept into congregations so quietly that most of us do not notice we are doing it. We assess the music, the preaching, the children’s work, the coffee and the car park, and we...
- [Why does understanding justification bring freedom from shame?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07095-why-does-understanding-justification-bring-freedom-from-shame/): Question 7095 Freedom from shame is one of the least advertised benefits of the doctrine of justification, and for many believers it is the one they need most. Guilt and shame are not the same thing, and a gospel presentation that deals only with guilt will leave a great many Christians still bowed under something...
- [What is Satan's role as the accuser of the brethren?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8049-what-is-satans-role-as-the-accuser-of-the-brethren/): Question 8049. Of all the titles Scripture gives him, Satan the accuser is the one that touches ordinary Christians most often. We may never face a dramatic temptation or anything resembling a spiritual encounter, and yet most believers I know have spent a bad night under a voice reciting their failures back to them with...
- [What does it mean that Satan "asked" to sift Peter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8048-what-does-it-mean-that-satan-asked-to-sift-peter/): Question 8048. The words are among the most striking Jesus ever spoke to a friend. “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” The request to sift Peter was made, it was granted, and the Lord...
- [Can Satan appear in dreams?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8047-can-satan-appear-in-dreams/): Question 8047. People ask me whether Satan can appear in dreams more often than almost any other question in this area, and they usually ask quietly, after a bad night, when they are not sure whether they are being silly. They are not being silly. A dream can leave a residue that lasts for days....
- [Can Satan appear as an angel of light?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8046-can-satan-appear-as-an-angel-of-light/): Question 8046. Paul says it directly: Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. It comes in the middle of a painful passage where he is defending his ministry against men who had arrived in Corinth with better manners, better rhetoric and a different gospel, and it explains how they had got a hearing at...
- [Can Satan perform miracles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8045-can-satan-perform-miracles/): Question 8045. Can Satan perform miracles? The short answer is that he can produce genuine signs and wonders, that Scripture says so plainly, and that this is one of the reasons we are told to test everything rather than to be impressed by displays of power. A miracle is not by itself proof that God...
- [What are Satan's schemes or devices?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8044-what-are-satans-schemes-or-devices/): Question 8044. Paul assumes that Satan’s schemes can be recognised. He tells the Corinthians that we are not ignorant of his designs and he tells the Ephesians to put on the whole armour of God so that they can stand against them. Neither statement makes any sense unless the enemy works to a pattern that...
- [Who or what is Beelzebub?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8043-who-or-what-is-beelzebub/): Question 8043. The name Beelzebub turns up in the Gospels on the lips of people trying to destroy Jesus, and it has a long history behind it before it ever gets there. It began as the title of a local god in a Philistine city, picked up a sneer along the way, and ended up...
- [What does Lucifer mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8042-what-does-lucifer-mean/): Question 8042. Ask most people where the name Lucifer comes from and they will tell you it is the devil’s proper name, the one he had before he fell. It is a reasonable assumption, since that is how hymns, poems and films have used it for centuries. It is also not quite what the Bible...
- [Is Satan a literal being or just a symbol of evil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8041-is-satan-a-literal-being-or-just-a-symbol-of-evil/): Question 8041. Whether Satan is a literal being or a poetic way of describing the darker side of human nature is not an idle question, and I get asked it far more often than you might expect. Sceptics raise it as an objection. Believers raise it because they have grown uncomfortable with the way some...
- [What happened to the demons Jesus cast out?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8040-what-happened-to-the-demons-jesus-cast-out/): Question 8040. When Jesus cast out demons the Gospels almost never tell us where they went, and the silence is consistent enough to look deliberate. Luke records crowds of deliverances in a single sentence and moves straight on to the preaching. There are a few hints, and they are worth gathering. But I want to...
- [Are demons the same as fallen angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8031-are-demons-the-same-as-fallen-angels/): Question 8031. Whether demons are fallen angels is a question the Bible answers by implication rather than by definition, which is why it still gets discussed. Scripture never pauses to say here is where demons came from, and readers have to assemble the picture from a number of passages that were written for other purposes....
- [Are angel encounters in near-death experiences real?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08030-are-angel-encounters-in-near-death-experiences-real/): Question 8030. Reports of angel encounters during near-death experiences have become a publishing industry of their own, and I am asked about them more often than almost any other question in this area. Someone has read a book, or a relative has described a light and a figure and a sense of overwhelming peace, and...
- [Can demons take physical form?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8034-can-demons-take-physical-form/): Question 8034. Whether demons can take physical form is a question people usually ask because they have seen something, or because someone they trust has. I want to answer it from Scripture rather than from anecdote, while treating the anecdotes with more respect than they sometimes receive. The biblical evidence is more limited than most...
- [Where do demons live?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8032-where-do-demons-live/): Question 8032. Asking where demons live sounds like an odd question until you notice how much Scripture actually says about it. The Bible is not squeamish on the subject, and the answer turns out to matter for how we think about temptation, about places, and about the limits of the enemy. The short version is...
- [Can demons cause physical illness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8035-can-demons-cause-physical-illness/): Question 8035. Whether demons can cause physical illness is a question the New Testament answers with more directness than many Christians expect, and with more care than many teachers show. The Gospels do connect certain conditions with demonic activity. They also, in the same breath, refuse to make that connection universal. Getting this right matters...
- [What is the abyss or bottomless pit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8033-what-is-the-abyss-or-bottomless-pit/): Question 8033. The bottomless pit turns up at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, and it is easy to read past it as atmosphere. It is not atmosphere. The abyss is presented as a real location in the unseen world, a place of restraint for spirit beings, and the demons who met Jesus...
- [What are unclean spirits?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8037-what-are-unclean-spirits/): Question 8037. The phrase unclean spirits runs right through the Synoptic Gospels and the book of Acts, and most readers slide past it as a synonym for demons. It is a synonym, but it is not an accidental one. The word chosen tells us how Scripture wants us to think about these beings, and the...
- [Can demons cause mental illness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8036-can-demons-cause-mental-illness/): Question 8036. Few questions at the meeting point of theology and pastoral care carry higher stakes than whether demons cause mental illness. Get it wrong in one direction and you tell a person with a treatable condition that they need an exorcism. Get it wrong in the other and you leave someone facing a genuinely...
- [Can animals be demon-possessed?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8039-can-animals-be-demon-possessed/): Question 8039. The question of demons and animals arises from one specific incident in the Gospels, and it is worth examining that incident carefully rather than speculating around it. A herd of pigs on a hillside near the Sea of Galilee is the whole biblical evidence, and a great deal has been built on rather...
- [What are lying spirits or deceiving spirits?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8038-what-are-lying-spirits-or-deceiving-spirits/): Question 8038. Lying spirits are not an occasional tactic of the enemy but the whole shape of his operation. Jesus said of the devil that when he lies he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Everything else he does runs downstream of that. Scripture uses...
- [Can we see angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8021-can-we-see-angels/): Question 8021. Whether we can see angels is one of those questions that people ask me quietly, usually after a service, usually because something has happened that they cannot explain. Scripture does not laugh at the question. It takes the unseen world seriously, and it tells us enough to answer honestly without pretending to know...
- [Do angels appear to people today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8020-do-angels-appear-to-people-today/): Question 8020. Whether angels appear today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other in this category, usually by someone who has heard a story and does not know what to do with it. The honest answer has two parts, and both need saying. Scripture nowhere states that angelic appearances have...
- [Can we speak to angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8022-can-we-speak-to-angels/): Question 8022. Whether we may speak to angels is a fair question, because the Bible is full of people who did exactly that. Zechariah answered Gabriel. Mary questioned him. Manoah asked for a name. Nobody in Scripture is ever rebuked for replying to an angel who has come to them. The distinction that matters, and...
- [Can we command angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8024-can-we-command-angels/): Question 8024. The idea that we can command angels has become surprisingly common in certain circles, usually presented as a believer’s neglected authority. Conferences teach it, books promote it, and sincere Christians come away convinced they have been leaving a resource untapped. I want to handle this carefully rather than dismissively, because the people drawn...
- [Can we pray to angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8023-can-we-pray-to-angels/): Question 8023. Whether we may pray to angels is a question I want to answer with real clarity, because the stakes are higher than they first appear. Prayer is not a neutral activity. It is worship, and worship belongs to God alone. Scripture nowhere invites us to pray to angels, records no example of anyone...
- [What is the role of angels in answered prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8027-what-is-the-role-of-angels-in-answered-prayer/): Question 8027. The connection between angels and answered prayer is one of the quieter themes of Scripture, and it is easy to miss because the Bible almost never draws attention to it. God answers, and sometimes the answer walks in through a locked door wearing the appearance of a man. I want to trace what...
- [Will we judge angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8026-will-we-judge-angels/): Question 8026. Paul says that we will judge angels, and he says it in the middle of telling off a church for suing one another. “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!” It is one of the great throwaway lines of the New...
- [Do angels attend church services?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q8028-do-angels-attend-church-services/): Question 8028. The question of angels in worship sounds either startling or sentimental, depending on what you already assume about Sunday mornings. I want to argue that it is neither, and that Scripture treats the presence of the unseen host at our gatherings as a settled fact rather than a special occasion. It is not...
- [What is redemption?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07029-what-is-redemption/): Question 07029. Redemption in Christ is a word borrowed from the slave market and the auction block, and I think we lose most of its force because we have never stood in either. When Paul writes about being bought with a price, his first readers did not need the metaphor explained. Many of them had...
- [What is justification?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07014-what-is-justification/): Question 07014. Justification is the moment a guilty sinner is declared righteous by God, and I want to be precise about that word declared, because everything hangs on it. God does not pretend that we are better than we are, and he does not wait until we have improved enough to deserve the verdict. He...
- [What is reconciliation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07028-what-is-reconciliation/): Question 07028. Reconciliation with God presupposes something most people would rather not admit, which is that a real estrangement exists in the first place. You cannot reconcile parties who were never at odds. So before we can say anything useful about how peace is made, we have to be honest about how the quarrel started...
- [What is adoption?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07027-what-is-adoption/): Question 07027. Adoption as sons is, to my mind, the warmest word in the whole vocabulary of salvation, and it is the one most often skated over. Justification tells me my legal position has changed. Redemption tells me my bondage has ended. Regeneration tells me my nature has been renewed. Adoption tells me something further...
- [What is imputation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07026-what-is-imputation/): Question 07026. Imputed righteousness is the answer to a question that ought to keep every honest person awake: how can a guilty man stand in front of a holy God and not be destroyed? Imputation is the accounting word Scripture uses for what God does about that, and once you grasp it you will never...
- [Is faith alone enough, or do works matter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07025-is-faith-alone-enough-or-do-works-matter/): Question 07025. The relationship between faith and works is where a great many Christians tie themselves in knots, and I understand why. Paul says a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. James says faith without works is dead. Put those two sentences side by side without care and you have...
- [What is the sinner's prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07024-what-is-the-sinners-prayer/): Question 07024. The sinner’s prayer has introduced more people to the vocabulary of conversion than almost any other set of words in modern evangelicalism, and yet you will not find it anywhere in Scripture. There is no apostolic script, no prescribed formula, no moment in Acts where Peter or Paul asks a crowd to repeat...
- [Is baptism necessary for salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07023-is-baptism-necessary-for-salvation/): Question 07023. Is water baptism necessary for salvation? My answer is no, and I hold it firmly, but I want to reach it the long way round because there are passages that appear to say otherwise and they deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved past. Anyone who tells you this question is simple...
- [What should a pastor do when someone has made multiple decisions for Christ but shows no genuine change?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07090-counselling-multiple-decisions-no-evidence-of-change/): Question 7090 Few situations in pastoral work are as uncomfortable as sitting with someone who has come forward at three separate meetings, prayed the same prayer each time, and can point to no genuine change of any kind. They are not play-acting. The tears were real. The desire was real. And yet a year on,...
- [What is eternal security?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07020-what-is-eternal-security/): What is eternal security? Can we lose our salvation? No! is the emphatic answer.
- [What does adoption give the believer that justification does not?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07092-adoption-distinct-from-justification-pastoral-implications/): Question 7092 The doctrine of adoption is one of those truths that gets quietly folded into justification and lost. Preachers mention it in passing, systematic theologies give it a short paragraph, and the believer walks away with the impression that being adopted is simply another way of saying being forgiven. It is not, and the...
- [How can a believer know they are genuinely saved, and what does the Spirit's witness in Romans 8:16 mean practically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07091-assurance-of-salvation-witness-of-holy-spirit/): Question 7091 The question of assurance of salvation is one I am asked more often than almost any other, and it is usually asked by people who are already believers. That in itself is telling. The person living happily in unrepentant sin rarely loses sleep over whether they belong to God. It is the tender...
- [Is water baptism necessary for salvation, or is it a public declaration of what faith has already accomplished?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07094-water-baptism-and-salvation/): Question 7094 Whether water baptism is necessary for salvation is a question that has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by quoting one verse loudly. There are passages which appear at first glance to make baptism part of the transaction, and any honest treatment has to deal with them rather than...
- [Is union with Christ the foundation of all soteriological blessings, or one blessing among several?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07093-union-with-christ-justification-sanctification/): Question 7093 Union with Christ is the most frequent way the New Testament describes a Christian, and one of the least discussed in ordinary church life. Paul uses the phrase in Christ, or its equivalents, well over a hundred times. It is his shorthand for what a believer is. Yet ask most Christians to explain...
- [What does it mean to be "in Christ"?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7047-what-does-it-mean-to-be-in-christ/): Question 7047. Being in Christ is Paul’s favourite way of describing a Christian, and I suspect most of us read straight past it. He uses the phrase, or one of its near relatives, more than a hundred and sixty times. He does not usually call people Christians. He calls them those who are in Christ...
- [What is union with Christ?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7046-what-is-union-with-christ/): Question 7046. Union with Christ is the doctrine that a believer is not simply forgiven by Jesus and helped by Jesus but is genuinely joined to Him, so that what is true of Him becomes true of those who belong to Him. It is the least discussed and, I would argue, the most far-reaching of...
- [What does it mean that Jesus died "for all" yet not all are saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7045-jesus-died-for-all-yet-not-all-saved/): Question 7045. Scripture says plainly that Jesus died for all, and just as plainly that not everyone will be saved. Put those two statements next to each other and many people feel a contradiction opening up. Either the death of Jesus did not accomplish what it set out to do, or the all is not...
- [What is the extent of the atonement (for whom did Christ die)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7043-what-is-the-extent-of-the-atonement/): Question 7043. Unlimited atonement is my answer to the oldest question in this discussion: for whom did Jesus die? Did He die for every human being who has ever lived, or only for those who would finally believe? The question sounds abstract until you are sitting with a dying man who wants to know whether...
- [What is the perseverance of the saints?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7041-what-is-the-perseverance-of-the-saints/): Question 7041. The perseverance of the saints, or final perseverance, is the fifth point of the Calvinist system, and it teaches that everyone God has chosen will certainly continue in faith and holiness to the end. The elect cannot fall away finally, and anyone who does fall away permanently demonstrates by that fact that their...
- [What is prevenient grace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7040-what-is-prevenient-grace/): Question 7040. Prevenient grace is a term drawn mainly from Wesleyan and Arminian theology, and the word prevenient simply means going before. It describes a work of God in a person that comes before conversion, enabling a response that would otherwise be impossible. The doctrine exists to answer a genuine problem: if sin has damaged...
- [What is limited atonement (particular redemption)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07039-what-is-limited-atonement/): Question 07039. Limited atonement, also called particular redemption or definite atonement, is the third point of the Calvinist system and the one that causes most trouble even inside Calvinism itself. It teaches that Jesus did not die for every human being, but died specifically and efficaciously for the elect, so that the cross actually secured...
- [What is irresistible grace (effectual grace)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07038-what-is-irresistible-grace/): Question 07038. Irresistible grace, sometimes called efficacious or effectual grace, is the fourth point of the Calvinist system. It teaches that when God sets out to save one of His elect, that saving work cannot fail and cannot finally be refused. The person will come, and will come willingly, because God has changed the will...
- [What is the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07036-what-is-the-difference-between-calvinism-and-arminianism/): Question 07036. The argument between Calvinism and Arminianism has been running for four centuries and shows no sign of tiring, which tells you either that the questions are unanswerable or that they matter enormously. I think it is the second. What is at stake is how God saves, what human beings contribute, for whom Jesus...
- [What is effectual calling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07035-what-is-effectual-calling/): Question 07035. Effectual calling is the Reformed teaching that alongside the outward call of the gospel, which goes to everybody who hears a sermon, there is an inward call which God issues only to the elect and which always achieves what it was sent to do. On this understanding the outward call can be refused...
- [What is predestination?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07034-what-is-predestination/): Question 07034. Predestination and foreknowledge are two words that make many Christians flinch, and the flinching usually has more to do with what they have heard about the words than with what the Bible does with them. Predestination sounds like fatalism. Foreknowledge sounds like a divine spreadsheet. Neither impression survives an honest look at the...
- [What is election?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07033-what-is-election/): Question 07033. The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame them. Few doctrines have caused more heat, more caricature and more pastoral damage when handled carelessly. Yet the word is in the Bible, it is...
- [What is the ordo salutis?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07032-what-is-the-ordo-salutis/): Question 07032. The ordo salutis is Latin for order of salvation, and it refers to the logical sequence in which the various parts of salvation relate to one another. It is a theologian’s framework rather than a phrase you will find in Scripture, and I want to be honest about that from the outset. No...
- [What is Arminianism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07108-what-is-arminianism/): Question 7108 Arminian theology is the other great system in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it is almost as frequently misrepresented as Calvinism. Many who reject Calvinism assume they must therefore be Arminian, and many Calvinists use the word as a synonym for shallow thinking. Neither assumption survives contact with the actual documents. I am...
- [What Should I Do If I Have Been Involved in the Occult?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08103-what-to-do-if-involved-in-the-occult/): Question 08103 If you are carrying past occult involvement and wondering what to do about it, I want to say the most important thing at the very start. Jesus is enough. Whatever you did, however deeply you went in, the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and there is no category of sin marked...
- [What are the five points of Calvinism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13005-what-are-the-five-points-of-calvinism/): Question 13005. The five points of Calvinism are usually met for the first time as an acrostic, TULIP, and I have watched more than one young believer fall in love with the tidiness of it before ever testing it against a Bible. That is the danger of a good system. It answers questions so neatly...
- [What is Calvinism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07096-what-is-calvinism/): Question 7096 The Calvinist system is the most influential account of salvation in English-speaking evangelicalism, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately by both its friends and its critics. If we are going to disagree with it, and I do, then we owe it an accurate description first. Caricature is cheap and...
- [What are the Five Solas?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07087-what-are-the-five-solas/): Question 7087. The Five Solas are the five Latin slogans that summarise what the Reformers recovered from Scripture in the sixteenth century: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and to the glory of God alone. Every one of them is a statement of exclusion, which is the point of the word sola, and...
- [What should we make of the Evangelical Baptist Network in the UK?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09110-evangelical-baptist-network-uk/): Question 9110. The Evangelical Baptist Network is a relatively recent body, and it exists because of a specific crisis inside Baptists Together, the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It grew out of what was initially called Baptist Ministers for Orthodox Marriage, formed as the Union worked through the question of whether accredited ministers could be...
- [What about church history?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13008-what-about-church-history/): Question 13008. Church history has a reputation problem. It sounds like the sort of thing you take up once the children have left home and you have run out of hobbies, a matter of dates, councils and men in unlikely hats. I want to argue the opposite. Church history is the record of how Jesus...
- [Who was John Calvin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13003-who-was-john-calvin/): Question 13003. John Calvin was a French lawyer turned theologian who became the most systematic mind of the Reformation and gave his name to a movement he would probably have found embarrassing. I am not a Calvinist, which means I have to work harder than most to write about him fairly, and I want to...
- [Who was Martin Luther?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13002-who-was-martin-luther/): Question 13002 Martin Luther is one of the most consequential figures in the history of Christianity. His challenge to the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century ignited the Protestant Reformation, and his theological convictions about justification, Scripture, and the nature of the gospel continue to shape Protestant identity. Understanding who he was, what...
- [What was the Reformation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13001-what-was-the-reformation/): Question 13001. The Protestant Reformation was the sixteenth-century movement that recovered the gospel of justification by faith and, in the process, broke Western Christendom apart. That sentence contains both the glory and the tragedy of it, and any honest account has to hold the two together. I am a Baptist, which means my own spiritual...
- [Who were the Church Fathers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13000-who-were-the-church-fathers/): Question 13000. The Church Fathers are the Christian writers of roughly the first five centuries whose works have survived, and for a lot of Baptists they occupy a strange middle ground. We suspect them of being Catholic, we cannot name more than two, and we have a nagging sense that we ought to know something...
- [What about the Latter Rain and Manifest Sons of God movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60072-latter-rain-manifest-sons-of-god/): Question 60072. The Latter Rain movement began in a small Canadian town in 1948 and has shaped far more of modern charismatic Christianity than most of its heirs realise. Its ideas are still with us, usually without the label attached. I write as a continuationist. I believe the gifts of the Spirit remain, and I...
- [Did Jesus Preach to Demons Between His Death and Resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08087-did-jesus-preach-to-demons-between-death-and-resurrection/): Question 08087 The question of Jesus preaching to demons between his death and resurrection comes up more often than you might expect, usually after somebody has read 1 Peter 3 or recited the line in the Apostles’ Creed about descending to the dead. It sounds strange to modern ears, and it has been used to...
- [What Is Theology Proper?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02001-what-is-theology-proper/): Question 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within the Godhead. It is called "proper" not because other branches of theology are somehow improper, but because it studies God as the direct subject rather...
- [What is the Free Grace movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7068-what-is-the-free-grace-movement/): Question 07068 The Free Grace movement is a loose body of teachers who insist that salvation is received by faith alone, entirely apart from works, commitment or any promise of future obedience. It came into focus in the 1980s as a reaction against Lordship salvation, and it contains a great deal I agree with alongside...
- [Can a nation sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60025-can-a-nation-sin/): Question 60025. Modern political thinking has almost no category for national sin. Nations are treated as power structures, economies, or administrative units, and the idea that a country as a country might be morally accountable to God sounds to most ears like something left over from an older world. Scripture takes an entirely different view,...
- [Does God Forget Our Sins When He Forgives?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02009-does-god-forget-our-sins-when-he-forgives/): Question 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in the whole Bible. Others find it puzzling: if God knows everything, how can He forget anything at all? Getting this right matters, because misunderstanding it...
- [Carnal and Spiritual Christians: The Difference](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04019-difference-between-carnal-and-spiritual-christians/): Question 4019. What is the difference between carnal and spiritual Christians? The contrast between carnal and spiritual believers comes straight out of Paul’s letter to a church that was behaving badly, and it describes a difference we can all recognise if we are honest. Both are real Christians. Both have the Spirit. The difference lies...
- [What Is the Role of the Holy Spirit in Salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04100-what-is-the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-in-salvation/): Question 4100. The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it at the cross, and the Holy Spirit who...
- [What Is Conviction of Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04200-what-is-conviction-of-sin/): Question 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like good news to someone who already knows they need it. Nobody arrives at that awareness by clever argument alone, and nobody talks themselves into it...
- [Can We Trust Our Hearts?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q05011-can-we-trust-our-hearts/): Question 5011. Can we trust our hearts? Our culture answers before the question is finished: follow your heart, be true to yourself, you do you. It is the closest thing the modern West has to a creed. The Bible’s answer is bracingly different, and it comes from the prophet Jeremiah: the heart is deceitful above...
- [What does it mean to harden your heart?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6021-what-does-it-mean-to-harden-your-heart/): Question 6021. To harden your heart, in biblical language, is to make yourself progressively less responsive to God. It is not usually a decision anyone announces. It is the cumulative effect of small refusals, each one making the next refusal a little easier and a little quieter. The Bible treats it as one of the...
- [Do the sins of parents affect their children?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6024-do-the-sins-of-parents-affect-their-children/): Question 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion people usually draw from that, which is that the child somehow carries the parent’s guilt. Two things are true at once here, and holding them...
- [What does it mean to have a seared conscience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0622-what-does-it-mean-to-have-a-seared-conscience/): Question 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned until the nerve endings no longer report anything at all. It is one of the bleakest phrases in the New Testament, and it is worth...
- [What does the Bible say about gluttony?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11083-what-does-the-bible-say-about-gluttony/): Question 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and lust with reasonable confidence, and then we hold a fellowship lunch. I include myself in that observation and I am not writing from a position...
- [What is corporate sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6025-what-is-corporate-sin/): Question 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, and pretending otherwise requires ignoring a great deal of the Old Testament. The difficulty is that this doctrine has been enlisted recently to support ideas...
- [What does the Bible say about pride?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6029-what-does-the-bible-say-about-pride/): Question 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence appears twice in the New Testament because it needed saying twice. It is also the sin nobody thinks they have. Everybody can name their temper...
- [Is addiction a sin or a disease?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11082-is-addiction-a-sin-or-a-disease/): Question 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and to speak of sin in the same sentence is unhelpful at best and cruel at worst. The question...
- [Is it a sin to have intrusive thoughts?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11084-is-it-a-sin-to-have-intrusive-thoughts/): Question 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent image appears while holding a baby. A believer who loves God finds his mind producing material that horrifies him. The people who ask me about...
- [What does the Bible say about lust?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06032-what-does-the-bible-say-about-lust/): Question 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many Christians are confessing as lust something that Scripture does not call lust at all. So let me try to define it accurately first, because a...
- [What does the Bible say about anger?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06031-what-does-the-bible-say-about-anger/): Question 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it. What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place...
- [What does the Bible say about envy and jealousy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06030-what-does-the-bible-say-about-envy-and-jealousy/): Question 6030. Envy and jealousy get used interchangeably in ordinary speech, and Scripture is more careful than we are. One of them is always sinful. The other can be a virtue, and is even used of God Himself. Sorting them out is worth the effort, because the confusion has made a good many believers anxious...
- [What is apostasy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07070-what-is-apostasy/): Question 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that has drifted, to a preacher whose theology went sideways, and once or twice to somebody who had simply irritated the person speaking. Scripture handles the...
- [Are sinful dreams a sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11085-are-sinful-dreams-a-sin/): Question 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, and spends the morning wondering whether he has offended God in his sleep and what it says about him that his mind produced it. I...
- [Does God Hate Sinners, or Only Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02014-does-god-hate-sinners-or-just-sin/): Question 2014. Does God hate sinners, or does He only hate sin? It is one of those questions that sounds like a technicality until someone asks it through tears, usually because they have just been told by a well meaning Christian that God cannot stand the sight of them. I have sat with people in...
- [What is the difference between weakness and wickedness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6042-difference-between-weakness-and-wickedness/): Question 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks like the same sin, and they need entirely different responses. Scripture handles them differently throughout, and so should we. Two different conditions Weakness is the...
- [Is there such a thing as a 'respectable' sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6041-is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-respectable-sin/): Question 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to...
- [Why do good people suffer while wicked people prosper?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6040-why-do-good-people-suffer-while-wicked-prosper/): Question 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by the writers of Scripture themselves. That fact alone should reassure anyone who has felt guilty for asking it. The Bible does not treat this as...
- [Why do Christians still sin after being saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6049-why-do-christians-still-sin-after-being-saved/): Question 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is helped by a version of the gospel that promises what the New Testament does not. The question is why, and the answer has to do...
- [What is the 'old man' and 'new man' in Paul's writings?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6044-what-is-the-old-man-and-new-man-in-paul/): Question 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer’s spare room. He is describing the person you used to be, considered as a whole, in Adam and under condemnation. Getting that right changes a great deal about how the Christian life is fought,...
- [Is all suffering a result of personal sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06058-is-all-suffering-a-result-of-personal-sin/): Question 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us an entire book to make sure we do not get it wrong. The instinct to trace every affliction back to personal sin runs deep in...
- [What is the relationship between suffering and sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06057-relationship-between-suffering-and-sin/): Question 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does...
- [What is secret sin, and does God see it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06062-what-is-secret-sin/): Question 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up on the surface of your life. That is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Every believer I have known well has had some version of...
- [What is habitual sin, and can a believer fall into it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06061-what-is-habitual-sin/): Question 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is the groove your life runs in, and you could set your calendar by it. Two questions come with this subject, and they need different answers....
- [What does it mean to mortify sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06060-what-is-mortification-of-sin/): Question 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul’s blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary. We prefer to speak of growth, journey and process. Paul reaches for a word that belongs in an execution yard. If by the Spirit you...
- [What is wilful sin, and what does Hebrews 10:26 mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06063-what-is-wilful-sin/): Question 6063. Wilful sin is sin committed with open eyes. Not the sin that overtakes you, not the sin you regret before you have finished it, but the sin you knew was wrong and chose anyway. The phrase makes believers nervous because of one verse. If we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge...
- [Does God Use Evil for Good? Genesis 50:20 Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2016-does-god-use-evil-for-good-purposes/): Question 2016. Does God use evil for good, and if so, does that make Him responsible for the evil in the first place? This question sits at the bottom of nearly every conversation I have had with people walking through genuine suffering, whether that is illness, betrayal, bereavement or the aftermath of someone else’s cruelty....
- [Where does temptation end and sin begin, and was the temptation of Jesus genuine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06065-relationship-between-temptation-and-sin/): Question 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, which is rather like apologising for having been shot at. So where does the line fall? And if Jesus was tempted in every respect as...
- [Is habitual or addictive sin spiritual, psychological or physical, and what does that mean for pastoral care?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11090-habitual-and-addictive-sin-spiritual-psychological-physical/): Question 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who has confessed the same thing for the fifth time and asked, with real desperation, why nothing changes. The question of whether habitual sin is primarily...
- [What is the difference between attraction and lust?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06072-lust-vs-attraction/): Question 6072. Lust and attraction are not the same thing, and a great many sincere Christians have been tormented by the assumption that they are. Noticing that someone is beautiful is not adultery. Jesus never said it was. The difference between lust and attraction is one of those distinctions that sounds academic until you meet...
- [Is masturbation sinful?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06071-is-masturbation-sin/): Question 6071. Scripture defines sexual sin with considerable care, and masturbation is never named among the things it defines. That silence is the first fact any honest answer has to reckon with. This is a question people are ashamed to ask and desperate to have answered, so I want to be careful and direct. What...
- [What is the difference between sin, transgression, and iniquity in the Old Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06070-sin-transgression-iniquity-distinctions/): Question 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what sin actually is than any single word could capture. Three of those terms recur throughout the Hebrew Scriptures — and significantly, they appear together in...
- [Are there degrees of sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06069-are-there-degrees-of-sin/): Question 6069. Are there degrees of sin? Yes and no, and both halves of that answer need holding at once or you will end up in one of two ditches. All sin makes a person guilty before a holy God, so in the matter of guilt there are no degrees of sin worth counting on....
- [What is the biblical process for handling public sin and restoring a fallen church member?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09024-church-discipline-and-restoration/): Question 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, and the abuses have been real enough to justify the flinch. So most churches quietly do nothing, and serious sin goes unaddressed until it does...
- [Is private confession to God enough, or does Scripture require confession to others?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06067-confession-of-sin-private-or-corporate/): Question 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and plainly, because a great deal of religious machinery has been built on denying it. And yet Scripture also tells believers to confess to one another....
- [What does Jeremiah mean that the heart is deceitful?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6019-jeremiah-heart-is-deceitful/): Question 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never said. It has been quoted to shut down every intuition, every emotion and every conviction a believer has ever had. That is not what the...
- [What is the difference between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6018-godly-sorrow-vs-worldly-sorrow/): Question 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two people can weep over the same sin and end up in entirely different places. Knowing which one you are experiencing is not a matter of...
- [What Role Does Satan Play in Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08084-what-role-does-satan-play-in-sin/): Question 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad...
- [Can we blame the devil for our sins?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6017-can-we-blame-the-devil-for-our-sins/): Question 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the God who gave her, the woman blamed the serpent, and the pattern has been running ever since. Scripture takes our enemy entirely seriously. It also...
- [What does the Bible mean by 'the world'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6015-what-does-the-bible-mean-by-the-world/): Question 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the world system. God so loved the world, John writes, and then he tells us not to love the world. The knot unties the moment you...
- [Why does God allow us to be tempted?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6014-why-does-god-allow-us-to-be-tempted/): Question 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been asked it in hospital corridors and in the church car park, and it always carries a certain weariness with it. It deserves a straight answer...
- [What is a besetting sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6013-what-is-a-besetting-sin/): Question 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have confessed more times than you can count. The phrase itself comes from the Authorised Version of a single verse in Hebrews, and understanding what the...
- [What are the seven deadly sins? Are they biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q6012-are-the-seven-deadly-sins-biblical/): Question 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval art, in films and quiz shows, and most people assume the list must be somewhere in the Bible. It is not. So where did the...
- [What is the sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7009-what-is-the-sin-unto-death/): Question 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, and it stops them dead. John has spent five chapters telling his readers how they may know that they have eternal life, and then, almost...
- [Is there a difference between Peter's gospel and Paul's?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60098-peters-gospel-versus-pauls-gospel/): 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 his prison epistles, apply to the church today. The position is usually called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism, and it needs answering carefully because it grows out...
- [What about dinosaurs?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60004-what-about-dinosaurs/): Question 60004. Looking for dinosaurs in Scripture is one of the first things a curious child does once they discover that the Bible starts with animals and that their favourite creature seems to be missing. It is a fair question, and it deserves better than a nervous change of subject. The short answer is that...
- [What about the age of the earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60003-what-about-the-age-of-the-earth/): Question 60003. I hold a young earth position, and I want to tell you why before I tell you how careful I intend to be about it. This is a question where Christians who love the Bible equally have reached different conclusions, and the temperature of the debate has often been higher than the quality...
- [What makes Christianity unique?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60008-what-makes-christianity-unique/): Question 60008. Asking what makes Christianity unique invites a certain kind of answer, the sort that lists our advantages and sounds rather pleased with itself. I want to avoid that, because the things that actually set the gospel apart are not achievements we can be smug about. Every one of them is something done to...
- [What about other religions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60007-what-about-other-religions/): Question 60007. What about other religions is rarely a neutral enquiry. Behind it usually stands a colleague, a neighbour, a daughter in law, somebody sincere and kind who believes something else, and the real question is whether I am prepared to say that person is wrong. So let me answer it honestly and without the...
- [What about the problem of evil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60006-what-about-the-problem-of-evil/): Question 60006. The problem of evil is the objection I take most seriously, and the one I am slowest to answer quickly. It is the argument that if God is entirely good and entirely powerful, then the suffering in this world should not exist, and since it plainly does, one of those attributes has to...
- [What Is Open vs Closed Communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9009-what-is-open-vs-closed-communion/): Question 9009 When a church gathers for the Lord’s Supper, who is welcome at the table? This question has led to different practices among churches, often described as “open communion,” “closed communion,” and “close communion.” Understanding these different approaches will help you navigate the variety of practices you may encounter and think through what your...
- [How Often Should We Take Communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9008-how-often-should-we-take-communion/)
- [Who Can Take Communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q9007-who-can-take-communion/): Question 9007 When the bread and cup are passed at the Lord’s Supper, a question naturally arises: who may participate? Is it for everyone present? Only church members? What about visitors? What about children? These are practical questions that churches must answer, and Scripture provides guidance for us. For Believers Only The most fundamental principle...
- [Can Watching Horror Films Invite Demonic Activity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08101-can-horror-films-invite-demonic-activity/): Question 08101 Whether horror films can invite demonic activity is a question I get asked more often around the end of October than at any other time of year, and it deserves a better answer than either of the usual ones. Some Christians treat the genre as a spiritual open door. Others treat the whole...
- [How Does Satan Attack Churches?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08100-how-does-satan-attack-churches/): Question 08100 The way the enemy attacks churches tells you a great deal about what he fears, and it is rarely what we expect. In my experience he is far less interested in dramatic assault than in the slow, respectable erosion that nobody notices until a congregation looks round and wonders where the life went....
- [How Does Satan Attack Families?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08099-how-does-satan-attack-families/): Question 08099 When the enemy attacks families he is going after the oldest institution God ever made. Before there was a nation, a temple or a church, there was a household, and God has been working through households ever since. That alone tells you why the family draws so much fire. Over the years I...
- [How Does Satan Attack Marriages?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08098-how-does-satan-attack-marriages/): Question 08098 Understanding how the enemy attacks marriages begins with understanding why he bothers. Marriage was God’s idea before sin entered the world, and Paul tells us it pictures something enormous: the relationship between Jesus and his church. Anything that displays the gospel that clearly is going to draw fire. My wife and I have...
- [Is It Demonic or Just Psychological?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08097-demonic-or-psychological-how-to-discern/): Question 08097 Asking whether something is demonic or psychological is one of the most delicate questions a pastor gets, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real damage. I have seen unwell people treated as though they were possessed, and I have seen genuine spiritual trouble waved away as a chemical problem. So let...
- [How Do I Know If I Am Under Spiritual Attack?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08096-how-do-i-know-if-under-spiritual-attack/): Question 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does...
- [Did One Third of the Angels Fall With Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08095-did-one-third-of-angels-fall-with-satan/): Question 08095 The idea that a third of the angelic host became fallen angels is so widely repeated that most Christians assume it is stated somewhere in plain terms. It is not. It rests on a single symbolic image in Revelation 12, and the inference drawn from it is reasonable without being certain. I hold...
- [What happens to Satan in the end?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10156-what-happens-to-satan-in-the-end/): Question 10156. Satan’s final defeat is described in Scripture with a clarity that leaves nothing to the imagination and no room for appeal. He is not an eternal rival to God, he is a creature, and Satan’s final defeat was written into the story long before it began. What surprises people is that the ending...
- [Is yoga spiritually dangerous?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08109-is-yoga-spiritually-dangerous/): Question 08109. Whether yoga practice is spiritually dangerous is a question that divides thoughtful Christians, and I want to handle it in a way that respects both sides rather than declaring one of them unspiritual. I have friends who would not set foot in a class and friends who go every Tuesday, and both can...
- [What is the role of angels in end times events?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10155-role-of-angels-in-end-times/): Question 10155. The role of angels in the end times is far larger than most Christians realise, and Revelation is where it becomes impossible to miss. The role of angels is visible on almost every page of that book, sounding trumpets, pouring bowls, restraining winds, announcing judgements and gathering the harvest. They are not decorative....
- [What Does Resist the Devil Mean Practically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08088-what-does-resist-the-devil-mean-practically/): Question 08088 When James tells us to resist the devil, he is not handing us a slogan to shout at the ceiling. He is describing a settled posture that has a great deal more to do with what we submit to than with what we say out loud. Yet in a good many churches the...
- [Does God want us to be wealthy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11080-does-god-want-us-to-be-wealthy/): Question 11080 Material wealth is one of those subjects on which the Bible says a great deal more than most congregations want to hear, and it says it in both directions. Anyone hoping for a simple verdict, either that riches are a blessing to be pursued or that poverty is inherently holy, will be disappointed...
- [Should there be dancing in the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11091-should-there-be-dancing-in-the-church/): Question 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what...
- [What is the role of music in worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11094-role-of-music-in-worship/): Question 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an...
- [What is private worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11015-what-is-private-worship/): Question 11015. Private worship is what happens between a believer and God when nobody else is in the room and nobody is going to ask about it afterwards. It is the least visible part of Christian life and, I would argue, the part that shapes everything else. It also carries a good deal of guilt....
- [Can we worship outside of church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11014-can-we-worship-outside-of-church/): Question 11014. People usually ask about worship outside church for one of two reasons. Either they have felt God on a hillside more powerfully than they ever have in a service and want to know whether that counts, or they have stopped attending and would like to know whether the walk on Sunday morning will...
- [What is Buddhism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60014-what-is-buddhism/): Question 60014. Buddhism and Christianity both begin by taking suffering seriously, which is more than most modern philosophies manage, and then they move in opposite directions. That shared starting point is why Buddhism appeals to thoughtful Westerners who have given up on church. It is also why the differences need stating clearly. A faith that...
- [Should Christians sing music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60026-music-from-bethel-elevation-hillsong/): Question 60026. Few questions divide thoughtful believers as quickly as this one, because modern worship music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong is everywhere. Their songs fill hymn projectors, playlists and youth events across the English speaking church, and a good many of them are genuinely singable, warm and biblically shaped in their language. I have...
- [What about worship styles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11029-what-about-worship-styles/): Question 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly. Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they...
- [Should we use instruments in worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11095-should-we-use-instruments-in-worship/): Question 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, Bible-loving congregations across these islands who sing unaccompanied on principle, and there are others where the drum kit arrived decades ago and nobody has thought...
- [How should we worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11028-how-should-we-worship/): Question 11028. Asking how we should worship God is a more dangerous question than it looks, because Scripture contains several accounts of people who worshipped God enthusiastically and wrongly, and it did not go well for them. Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorised fire. Uzzah steadied the ark with the best of intentions. Cain brought an...
- [What is worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11027-what-is-worship/): Question 11027. Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church’s worship than any argument over music ever has. When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight....
- [What about liturgy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11031-what-about-liturgy/): Question 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,...
- [Should we raise hands?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11030-should-we-raise-hands/): Question 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who want permission, and that itself tells you something about how tangled the issue has become. In some churches raising hands is so normal that not...
- [Does fasting make prayer more effective?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11054-does-fasting-make-prayer-more-effective/): Question 11054. Fasting and prayer appear together so often in Scripture that many believers assume the combination works like a spiritual amplifier, as though skipping meals turns up the volume on our requests until God can no longer ignore them. That instinct is understandable, and I think it is wrong in a way that matters....
- [Should we pray aloud or silently?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11053-should-we-pray-aloud-or-silently/): Question 11053. Praying aloud feels natural to some believers and excruciating to others, and I have met plenty of Christians who quietly assume they are doing it wrong whichever way they lean. Somebody who was raised in a tradition of audible prayer can feel that silent prayer is half hearted, while somebody who prays best...
- [What is intercessory prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11052-what-is-intercessory-prayer/): Question 11052. Intercessory prayer is simply praying for somebody who is not you. That definition sounds almost disappointingly plain, and yet the practice behind it runs through Scripture from Abraham on the road to Sodom right up to Jesus at the right hand of the Father. It is one of the most ordinary things a...
- [How long should we pray?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11051-how-long-should-we-pray/): Question 11051. The length of prayer is one of those questions that makes people squirm before they even ask it. Somewhere in the back of most Christian minds sits a suspicion that real believers pray for an hour before breakfast and we are all quietly failing an exam nobody set. I want to take the...
- [Should we pray written prayers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11048-should-we-pray-written-prayers/): Question 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand...
- [Why are prayers ended with 'in Jesus' name'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11047-why-are-prayers-ended-with-in-jesus-name/): Question 11047. Ending prayers in Jesus’ name is a habit most Christians acquire before anyone explains it, and quite a few carry a low-level worry that they have been reciting a formula rather than doing something meaningful. The phrase comes straight from Jesus himself, repeated several times in the upper room discourse, so we are...
- [Why do prayers end in 'Amen'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11046-why-do-prayers-end-in-amen/): Question 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is one of the few words that has travelled unchanged from Hebrew through Greek into English. Children ask about it and adults rarely have an answer...
- [Should We Pray to the Father, Jesus, or the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q02020-should-we-pray-to-father-jesus-or-holy-spirit/): Question 2020. What does Trinitarian prayer look like, and should we pray to the Father, to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit? This question comes up more than you might expect, usually from newer believers who have noticed that different prayers offered in church seem to be addressed to different persons of the Trinity and...
- [What about Job's suffering?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06016-what-about-jobs-suffering/): Question 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it. Let me try to read it...
- [What started the transgender movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12029-genesis-of-transgender-movement/): Question 12029 The transgender movement seemed to arrive suddenly, and that impression is part of why it has been so disorienting. One decade the subject was almost unknown outside specialist clinics, and the next it was reshaping schools, hospitals, sport and law. Nothing moves that fast without a long run-up somewhere out of sight. I...
- [Does God Cause Suffering or Just Allow It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06011-does-god-cause-suffering-or-allow-it/): Question 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How you answer it shapes whether you can trust God on the worst day of your life. If He directly causes every agony, He begins to...
- [What about wills and estate planning?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11039-what-about-wills-and-estate-planning/): Question 11039. Estate planning feels like a subject for solicitors rather than sermons, and that assumption is precisely why so many Christians die intestate and leave their families a mess. Scripture does not contain a chapter on probate. It does contain a great deal about provision, about planning, about honesty and about the numbering of...
- [What are Biblical Perspectives on Economic Systems?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12061-biblical-perspectives-on-economic-systems/): Question 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will bless capitalism or socialism outright, and it stubbornly refuses to do either. What it does give us is a set of convictions about property, work,...
- [Is debt always wrong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12060-is-debt-always-wrong/): Question 12060. Borrowing money is not always wrong, and the short answer to this question is no, though borrowing money carries warnings in Scripture that most Christians in Britain have never heard preached. We live in a country built on credit, and a teaching that never examines it has quietly surrendered a large part of...
- [Should we leave inheritance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11038-should-we-leave-inheritance/): Question 11038. Leaving an inheritance is commended in Proverbs and complicated by almost everything else Scripture says about money, which is why sincere Christians land in very different places on it. Some are determined to pass on everything they have. Others intend to give it all away and let their children make their own way....
- [What about charging interest?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12011-what-about-charging-interest/): Question 12011 Charging interest has a long and awkward history in Christian ethics. For centuries the church treated it as sin outright, and Christians who lent at interest could find themselves excluded from communion. Today most believers hold a mortgage, a pension and a savings account without a flicker of conscience. Something has clearly shifted,...
- [Can Christians be landlords?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12012-can-christians-be-landlords/): Question 12012 Christian landlords are asked to justify themselves far more often than they used to be. In a country where housing costs cause real hardship, the suggestion that profiting from someone’s need for shelter is inherently exploitative has moved from the fringe to the dinner table. It deserves a proper answer rather than a...
- [What about cryptocurrency?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11035-what-about-cryptocurrency/): Question 11035. Cryptocurrency investing is one of those subjects where Christians want a verse and there is not one, which means the answer has to be built from principles rather than proof texts. Bitcoin did not exist when the New Testament was written, and neither did index funds, mortgages or pensions. What Scripture does address...
- [What about student loans? (For American Audiences)](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11034-what-about-student-loans/): Question 11034. Student loans raise a genuine question of conscience for believers, because Scripture has strong things to say about debt and yet many young Christians cannot train for the work God has given them without borrowing. This question comes to me most often from American readers, where the sums involved are frankly alarming, but...
- [Should we save for retirement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11033-should-we-save-for-retirement/): Question 11033. Saving for retirement troubles some Christians because it looks suspiciously like the rich fool in Luke 12, who built bigger barns and heard God call him a fool that same night. Others never think about it at all, and then arrive at seventy dependent on adult children who cannot afford it. Both responses...
- [How much money is enough?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11032-how-much-money-is-enough/): Question 11032. Asking how much is enough money is one of the few financial questions the Bible answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable enough that most of us prefer to keep the question vague. We are far more willing to ask how to earn well, give wisely or invest sensibly. Those are good questions....
- [What is Biblical Stewardship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11064-what-is-biblical-stewardship/): Question 11064. Biblical stewardship is one of those phrases that has been reduced almost entirely to money, and usually to money at the point where a church needs some. That is a shame, because the idea is far larger and considerably more searching than an annual appeal. A steward in the ancient world was a...
- [Should Christians be poor? Or in poverty?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11063-should-christians-be-poor/): Question 11063. Christians and poverty is a subject on which the church has swung wildly between two errors, and both of them are still with us. One says that God wants every believer wealthy and that poverty indicates a failure of faith. The other treats poverty itself as a spiritual achievement and regards money as...
- [Is gender a biological reality?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12027-gender-as-biological-reality/): Question 12027 Whether sex is a biological reality or a social construct has moved from academic seminars to primary schools in about two decades, which is remarkably fast for an idea that reverses something humanity has assumed for all of recorded history. It is now treated in many settings as established fact, with dissent marked...
- [What about psychology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11059-what-about-psychology/): Question 11059. Psychology and Scripture is a subject that produces more heat than light in most Christian conversations, and I have watched believers land in two equally unhelpful ditches. On one side sits the Christian who treats every therapist as an enemy of the faith and every diagnosis as a failure of discipleship. On the...
- [What is the prosperity gospel and why is it dangerous?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60048-prosperity-gospel-dangers/): 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 are released. It goes by several names. Word of Faith. Health and wealth. Name it and claim it. Positive confession. The labels differ and the...
- [What about giving?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11004-what-about-giving/): Question 11004. Christian giving is one of the few subjects where almost everyone agrees in principle and disagrees in practice. We all know we should be generous. Most of us give rather less than we imagine we do, and almost nobody wants the sermon. So let me try to make the case honestly, without guilt-driven...
- [Should Christians tithe?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11003-should-christians-tithe/): Question 11003. Ask about Christian tithing in most evangelical churches and you will get a confident answer: ten per cent, off the top, and the Bible says so. Ask for the New Testament chapter and verse that requires it of the Church, and the room usually goes quiet. I want to handle this carefully, because...
- [How should Christians give to the church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11093-how-should-christians-give-to-the-church/): Question 11093 Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of us have sat under at least one sermon that felt like a sales pitch. So let me say at the outset that I am not...
- [How should we respond to the scandal at Bethel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60027-how-should-we-respond-to-the-scandal-at-bethel/): Question 60027. Bethel Church in Redding, California has been under sustained public scrutiny for several years now, and the questions have grown sharper rather than quieter. In January 2026 the apologist Mike Winger published a lengthy investigation setting out evidence that Shawn Bolz, a prominent figure closely associated with the movement, had fabricated prophetic words,...
- [What about Filipino Israelism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60067-what-about-filipino-israelism/): Question 60067. Filipino Israelism is the claim that the Filipino people are the descendants of ancient Israel, that the Philippines is the land promised in Scripture, and that the prophecies of restoration point to the islands rather than to the Middle East. It is less familiar in Britain than its Victorian cousin, but it is...
- [What about British Israelism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60066-what-about-british-israelism/): 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 Assyrian deportation and rediscovered, as it happens, in ourselves. It sounds harmless enough at first, a piece of Victorian eccentricity. It is not harmless, and...
- [What is a cult?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60018-what-is-a-cult/): Question 60018. Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is intense. It is odd. It made my cousin move to Wales. Used that loosely the word becomes a way of saying that I find a...
- [How do we recognise false teachers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60024-how-do-we-recognize-false-teachers/): Question 60024. The New Testament assumes that false teachers will come. Jesus warned about them, Paul warned the Ephesian elders that they would arise from among their own number, and Peter, John and Jude each devote substantial space to the problem. The question is never whether they exist. It is how ordinary believers, without a...
- [What is the New Age movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60015-what-is-the-new-age-movement/): Question 60015. The New Age movement is not a church, a denomination, or an organisation you can join, and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to pin down. There is no headquarters, no founder, no membership roll and no creed. What there is instead is a mood, a set of instincts about the...
- [What about Scientology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60021-what-about-scientology/): Question 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, the litigation and the shopfronts on the high street offering a free personality test, and very little else. What the organisation teaches at its higher...
- [What about Mormonism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60020-what-about-mormonism/): Question 60020. Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, speak warmly about Jesus, ask about your family, and offer to pray. Nothing in that encounter tells you that you are meeting a different religion,...
- [What about Jehovah's Witnesses?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60019-what-about-jehovahs-witnesses/): Question 60019. Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably the group my church members ask me about most, for the simple reason that they are the ones who knock. Few movements are so widely recognised and so little understood. Most people know the door to door work, the magazines, the refusal of blood transfusions and the absence of...
- [What of the cover-up culture in the charismatic movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60075-cover-up-culture-charismatic-movement/): Question 60075. The cover-up culture that has come to light across parts of the charismatic and independent church world over the last decade is one of the saddest things I have had to think about as a minister. Case after case has followed the same shape, and the shape is what interests me here. I...
- [What about the New Apostolic Reformation and its leading ministries?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60074-nar-him-che-ahn-bill-johnson/): Question 60074. The New Apostolic Reformation is the most influential movement in global charismatic Christianity that most churchgoers have never heard named. Its songs are sung in congregations that would be alarmed by its doctrine, and its assumptions have travelled far further than its label. I write as a continuationist who believes the gifts of...
- [What is the eternal covenant?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07037-what-is-the-eternal-covenant/): 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 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...
- [What About Speaking in Tongues Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q04123-speaking-in-tongues-today/): Question 04123. Speaking in tongues today divides opinion in the church perhaps more sharply than any other single spiritual gift, and I want to give this question the space a Deep Dive allows, because both the Pentecostal insistence that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of Spirit baptism and the cessationist claim that tongues ended...
- [Should infants be baptised?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09004-should-infants-be-baptised/): Question 09004 Infant baptism, or paedobaptism, is practised by the majority of the world’s Christians, including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and many Methodists. Given its prevalence, it is reasonable to ask whether Scripture supports the practice. The answer, examined on purely biblical grounds, is that it does not. This is not said...
- [What is apostolic succession?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09018-what-is-apostolic-succession/): Question 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,...
- [What is the difference between Catholic and Protestant churches?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09017-difference-catholic-and-protestant/): Question 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that...
- [Why are there so many denominations?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09016-why-so-many-denominations/): Question 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two...
- [What happened at the Reformation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q13004-what-happened-at-the-reformation/): Question 13004. The Protestant Reformation is one of those events everybody has heard of and very few of us could actually describe. Mention it at a church coffee morning and you will get Luther, a hammer, a door, and then a rather polite silence while somebody refills the teapot. So let me tell you what...
- [What Is the Difference Between Prophecy and Prediction?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01006-difference-between-prophecy-and-prediction/): Question 01006. People use the words prophecy and prediction as though they mean the same thing, but prophecy and prediction are not identical, and the difference matters more than you might expect. Get them muddled and you will misread large stretches of the Bible, because biblical prophecy involves far more than forecasting the future. Reduce...
- [How Should We Interpret the Book of Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01021-how-should-we-interpret-the-book-of-revelation/): 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 from the very outset that faithful, Bible-believing Christians have read this book in several quite different ways across church history. I hold a futurist, literal-grammatical-historical...
- [What Percentage of the Bible Is Prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01003-what-percentage-of-bible-is-prophecy/): Question 01003. The amount of biblical prophecy in Scripture is one of its most distinctive features, and people are often surprised when they discover just how much of the Bible is given over to it. Estimates vary depending on how you define and count it, but a frequently cited figure is that somewhere around a...
- [What Is Apocalyptic Literature](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01013-what-is-apocalyptic-literature/): Question 1013. The phrase apocalyptic literature turns up constantly in biblical studies, and if you do not understand what it means you will struggle to read whole stretches of the Bible well. It is not a scary word, though the imagery it covers can certainly be vivid. It simply names a particular way of writing...
- [What about The Turning revival in Reading, UK?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60073-the-turning-revival-reading-uk/): Question 60073. The Turning revival began in Reading in 2016 and for a while it was the most talked about thing in British evangelicalism. Reports of hundreds and then thousands of people praying to receive Jesus on the streets travelled quickly, and churches across the country wanted to know how to get it. I want...
- [What is repentance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7051-what-is-repentance/): Question 07051 True repentance is one of those words the church uses constantly and explains rarely, which is a pity, because a great deal of unnecessary misery grows in that gap. Some people think it means grovelling. Some think it means getting your life sorted before God will have you. Some have been told it...
- [Is faith the gift, or salvation, in Ephesians 2:8 and 9?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7000-is-faith-the-gift-or-salvation-ephesians-2-8-9/): 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 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,...
- [Can General Revelation Save Anyone](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1011-can-people-be-saved-through-general-revelation-alone/): Question 1011. Few pastoral questions trouble thoughtful Christians more than this one, and at its heart sits the matter of general revelation. Can a person be saved simply by looking at the created world and following their conscience, without ever hearing the name of Jesus? What about those born in remote places, or those who...
- [What is faith?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7052-what-is-faith/): Question 07052 Saving faith is the hinge on which everything in the Christian life turns, and it is also the thing people most commonly misunderstand. Some treat it as a leap in the dark. Some treat it as a feeling they have to work up. Some treat it as agreeing with a list of propositions...
- [Can someone be saved and not know it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7003-can-someone-be-saved-and-not-know-it/): Question 7003. Can a person be saved and have a lack of assurance about it? Yes, and that is not the same thing as a lack of salvation. Many genuine believers have lived for long stretches without the settled confidence that they belonged to God. This question usually arrives from someone in real distress, so...
- [What is assurance of salvation and how can I have it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7001-what-is-assurance-of-salvation/): Question 7001. Assurance of salvation is the settled confidence that you belong to God and will not be lost. It is not the same thing as being saved, and keeping those two apart is the first step to understanding the whole subject. Security is objective and rests on God. Assurance is subjective and rests in...
- [What if I don't feel saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7004-what-if-i-dont-feel-saved/): Question 07004. If you have ever gone to bed at night troubled because you do not feel saved, you are in far larger company than you imagine. I have sat with believers who could explain the gospel more clearly than I could, who loved their Bibles, who served their church week after week, and who...
- [What are the biblical evidences of genuine salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7002-biblical-evidences-genuine-salvation/): Question 7002. Genuine salvation leaves marks. Scripture says so plainly, and the first letter of John was written largely to describe them so that believers could know where they stood. I want to handle this carefully, because the same evidences that steady a careless person can crush a sensitive one. So before the marks of...
- [How does James 2 relate to salvation by faith alone?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7010-how-does-james-2-faith-without-works-relate-to-salvation/): Question 07010. If salvation is by faith alone, why does James say that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone? That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a shuffle. James 2:24 is the only place in the Bible where the words faith alone appear together,...
- [What is the difference between saving faith and intellectual belief?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7005-difference-saving-faith-intellectual-belief/): Question 07005. The difference between saving faith and intellectual belief is one of the most practically urgent distinctions in the whole of Scripture, and it is one that a great many church attenders have never had explained to them. A person can hold every article of the Christian faith to be true, defend it in...
- [What does Hebrews 6:4-6 teach about falling away?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7008-what-does-hebrews-6-teach-about-falling-away/): Question 07008. Hebrews 6:4-6 is the passage people reach for when they want to argue that a genuine believer can be lost, and the language about falling away is undeniably severe. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I have no patience with treatments that wave the difficulty away. If you have been troubled...
- [What does work out your salvation with fear and trembling mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7007-what-does-work-out-your-salvation-mean/): Question 07007. Paul’s command to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling has frightened more Christians than almost any other sentence he wrote, and the fright is entirely unnecessary once you see where the sentence sits. Read on its own it sounds as though salvation is a project we complete under threat. Read...
- [Do I need to forgive myself?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11087-do-i-need-to-forgive-myself/): Question 11087 Do I need to forgive myself? The question arrives constantly in pastoral conversation, usually from someone who believes God has forgiven them and still cannot get free of something they did. They have confessed it, sometimes for years, and the weight has not lifted. I want to say two things that sound contradictory...
- [Can a true Christian fall away?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07050-can-a-true-christian-fall-away/): Question 07050 Few things trouble a tender conscience quite like the fear of falling away. I have sat with believers who could recite the promises of God perfectly well and still could not sleep, because somewhere at the back of the mind sat a suspicion that one cold enough season, one serious enough failure, and...
- [What is backsliding?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06035-what-is-backsliding/): Question 06035 The word “backsliding” has an old-fashioned ring to it in some quarters, but the reality it describes is anything but historical. It names something that believers in every generation have experienced and that the biblical writers addressed with both pastoral honesty and theological seriousness. The Biblical Origins of the Term The word comes...
- [What is antinomianism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07082-what-is-antinomianism/): Question 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road....
- [How is a person saved?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07013-how-is-a-person-saved/): Question 07013. How can a person be saved? It is the oldest question in the book, quite literally, since the Philippian jailer asked it in almost those words at midnight with an earthquake still settling around him. Paul’s answer to him was one sentence long, and I have never been able to improve on it:...
- [What is salvation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07012-what-is-salvation/): Question 07012. God’s salvation is a rescue, and that single word does more work than any other in explaining what Christians mean when they use the term. We are not describing self-improvement, or moral effort, or the gradual refinement of a decent person into a slightly better one. We are describing somebody being pulled out...
- [What is legalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07071-what-is-legalism/): Question 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say...
- [Can salvation be lost?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07019-can-salvation-be-lost/): Question 07019. Can you lose your salvation? I do not believe you can, and I want to give you the reasons rather than simply the conclusion, because this question deserves better than a slogan. It is asked by frightened people far more often than by curious ones, and a frightened person needs argument, not reassurance...
- [What is grace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07018-what-is-grace/): Question 07018. God’s grace is favour shown to people who have earned the opposite, and that definition is worth memorising because almost every popular version of it is softer than the real thing. Grace is not God being lenient. Leniency overlooks the offence. Grace deals with the offence at enormous cost and then treats the...
- [What is regeneration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07017-what-is-regeneration/): Question 07017. Regeneration is the theological word for the new birth, the act by which God gives spiritual life to someone who was spiritually dead. Jesus introduced the idea to a highly religious man in the dark, and Nicodemus found it completely baffling, which should encourage the rest of us. What makes the new birth...
- [What is glorification?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07016-what-is-glorification/): Question 07016. Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained but permanently absent. It is the third tense of salvation. I have been saved from sin’s penalty, I am being saved from sin’s power, and...
- [What is sanctification?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07015-what-is-sanctification/): Question 07015. Sanctification means being set apart, and if you grasp that one idea you have the doctrine in your hand. The word group behind it in Hebrew and Greek does not primarily mean to become morally impressive. It means to be marked off for a particular use, taken out of general circulation and reserved...
- [Is there a difference between the social gospel and the biblical gospel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60035-social-gospel-versus-biblical-gospel/): Question 60035. The social gospel is a phrase thrown about in church arguments without anyone stopping to define it, and that is a pity, because the difference it names is real. I have sat in meetings where a good man was accused of preaching the social gospel because he wanted the church to open a...
- [What is the Bible's view on systemic racism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60034-systemic-racism-biblical-perspective/): Question 60034. Few phrases generate more heat in a Christian conversation than systemic racism, and a good deal of that heat comes from people arguing past one another because they are using the words differently. Before anyone can agree or disagree, it is worth being clear about what is actually being claimed. At its simplest...
- [What does the Bible say about racism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60030-what-about-racism/): Question 60030. Racism is one of the oldest and most persistent evils in human history, and Scripture gives us the tools to name it for what it is. Before we get to any modern argument about terminology or policy, there is a straightforward biblical account of why treating people as lesser on the basis of...
- [What about Christian Zionism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60071-what-about-christian-zionism/): 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 anything I want to say clearly what I do and do not mean by it. What I hold is that God made unconditional promises to...
- [What about unreached peoples?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11022-what-about-unreached-peoples/): Question 11022. Ask about unreached peoples and you are really asking two questions at once. There is the practical one about the millions who live where no church exists, and there is the harder one underneath it: what happens to those who die without ever hearing of Jesus? I want to answer both, and to...
- [What about praying to Mary or the saints?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60065-what-about-praying-to-mary-or-the-saints/): Question 60065. The practice of praying to Mary and to the saints is one of the sharpest points of difference between Rome and the churches of the Reformation, and it is one where I find the Catholic explanation and the Catholic practice do not always match each other. I want to state the case for...
- [What about Catholic miracles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60064-what-about-catholic-miracles/): Question 60064. Reports of Catholic miracles put an evangelical in an awkward spot, and I think we should admit that rather than reaching for a stock answer. Healings at Lourdes, weeping statues, incorrupt bodies, the medical dossiers assembled for canonisations. Are they real, and if some of them are, what follows? I want to avoid...
- [Are education and faith compatible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60063-education-and-faith-compatibility/): Question 60063. The assumption that faith and education pull in opposite directions is so widespread that it barely gets stated, it just hangs in the air. Get educated and you will grow out of religion. Stay religious and you will have to keep your head down in a seminar. I do not accept the framing,...
- [Why trust the Church with so many abuse scandals?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60061-why-trust-the-church-abuse-scandals/): Question 60061. Church abuse scandals are the objection I find hardest to answer, not because the answer is complicated but because the objection is so often justified. Somebody has been hurt, badly, by people who claimed to speak for God, and now they are asking me why they should trust an institution that did that...
- [What about numerology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60054-what-about-numerology/): Question 60054. Biblical numerology covers two quite different things, and a good deal of confusion comes from muddling them. One is the observation that certain numbers recur in Scripture with evident significance, which is plainly true and worth studying. The other is the practice of treating numbers as carriers of hidden meaning, calculating with names...
- [What about the Da Vinci Code?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60053-what-about-the-da-vinci-code/): Question 60053. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us two decades later. I still meet people who believe that the church suppressed rival gospels, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that the doctrine of...
- [What about string theory?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60052-what-about-string-theory/): Question 60052. String theory comes up in church conversations more often than you might expect, usually because somebody has watched a documentary and wants to know whether it undermines Genesis. It is a proposal in theoretical physics which suggests that the fundamental constituents of matter are not point particles but tiny vibrating filaments, and that...
- [Can you be pro-choice and Christian?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60047-can-you-be-pro-choice-and-christian/): Question 60047. Can you be a pro-choice Christian? I want to answer the pro-choice Christian question carefully, because it is almost never asked in the abstract. Behind it there is usually a person, and often a hard story, and a pastor who answers as though he were scoring a debating point has failed before he...
- [Why do some American Christians focus on guns and borders?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60046-why-do-some-american-christians-focus-on-guns-and-borders/): Question 60046. Guns and borders occupy a place in the public witness of some American Christians that puzzles believers almost everywhere else in the world. I am writing as a British Baptist minister, and I want to be careful, because it is easy for an outsider to be superior about another country’s debates while being...
- [What should Christians think about being 'woke'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60045-what-should-christians-think-about-being-woke/): Question 60045. Woke ideology is a term that generates more heat than light, partly because almost nobody who is called woke uses the word about themselves, and partly because it has become a general purpose insult for anything the speaker dislikes. So let me define what I mean before I go a step further, because...
- [Is Roman Catholicism Christian?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60062-is-roman-catholicism-christian/): Question 60062. Asking whether Roman Catholicism is Christian is a question that needs unpicking before it can be answered, because it is really two questions wearing one coat. Are individual Roman Catholics Christians? And does the Roman Catholic system, as officially defined, teach the gospel of the New Testament? Those questions have different answers, and...
- [Is there freedom of religion in Islamic lands?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60070-is-there-freedom-of-religion-in-islamic-lands/): Question 60070. Whether there is religious freedom in Islamic lands is a question that invites two bad answers. One says no, never, anywhere, which is inaccurate. The other says the situation is much like anywhere else, which is worse than inaccurate because it makes light of real suffering. I want to give you the picture...
- [What about aliens and UFOs?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60055-what-about-aliens-and-ufos/): Question 60055. Aliens and UFOs are no longer a fringe subject. Governments have released footage, congressional hearings have been held, and polling suggests a substantial minority of people now believe intelligent life elsewhere has already made contact. So the question deserves a proper answer rather than a joke, and I get asked it often enough...
- [What does the Bible say about intersectionality?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60044-what-does-the-bible-say-about-intersectionality/): Question 60044. Intersectionality theory began life as a technical term in American legal scholarship and has since become a whole way of seeing the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 to describe a real problem: a black woman suing for discrimination could find that the courts recognised race claims and sex claims but had...
- [How does progressivism affect theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60041-how-does-progressivism-affect-theology/): Question 60041. Theological progressivism is not a denomination and does not have a headquarters, which is part of what makes it difficult to discuss. It is better understood as a method, a way of handling Scripture and doctrine which assumes that the church is on a journey away from its past and towards a fuller...
- [What is the difference between deconstruction and reformation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60040-difference-between-deconstruction-and-reformation/): Question 60040. Faith deconstruction has become the standard word for what happens when a believer starts pulling their inherited Christianity apart to see what, if anything, holds. It is worth noticing that the church has a much older word for a similar process, and that word is reformation. The two are not the same, and...
- [Why is antisemitism wrong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60109-why-is-antisemitism-wrong/): Question 60109. Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would have been recognised in 1930s Germany, and a great deal of it circulating among people who would be appalled to be called racist. So it...
- [Is reincarnation biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60108-is-reincarnation-biblical/): Question 60108. Reincarnation is now believed by a surprising number of people in this country, including a fair few who would describe themselves as Christians. Surveys have repeatedly put the figure at around a quarter of the British population, which means it is not a fringe idea any more but a background assumption. So the...
- [How do fulfilled prophecies prove the reliability of Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60079-fulfilled-prophecies-prove-reliability-of-scripture/): Question 60079. Fulfilled prophecy is the one line of evidence that Scripture itself puts forward as a test, which makes it different from every other argument in the apologist’s bag. God does not say prove me by philosophy or by archaeology. He says look at what I said would happen and see whether it happened....
- [Have there ever been dragons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60005-have-there-ever-been-dragons/): Question 60005. Dragons in Scripture turn up more often than most readers realise, and the question of whether anything real stands behind them is not as silly as it sounds. Every continent has dragon stories, and cultures with no contact produced descriptions with striking family resemblances. I am going to take the question seriously without...
- [What is Soul Sleep and Is It Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10103-what-is-soul-sleep-and-is-it-biblical/): Question 10103. Soul sleep is the teaching that the dead, believers included, pass into a state of complete unconsciousness at death and know nothing at all until they are raised at the last day. On this view there is no experience between dying and rising, so that the moment of death and the moment of...
- [Was Peter in Rome?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60009-was-peter-in-rome/): Question 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I...
- [How Does Scripture Address Gender Ideology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1099-how-does-scripture-address-gender-ideology/): Question 1099. Gender ideology is one of the most pastorally sensitive subjects I address, because behind every abstract question sits a real person, often someone genuinely struggling, sometimes a parent frightened for a child, sometimes a young person in real distress. I want to answer carefully and with compassion, because Scripture never lets truth and...
- [How Creation Reveals God](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1012-how-does-creation-reveal-god/): Question 1012. Scripture teaches that creation reveals God to every person on earth, whether they live under bright city lights or open desert skies, and that truth runs far deeper than mere sentiment. Stand under a clear night sky and look up, watch the sun lift over the hills, or consider the staggering detail packed...
- [What is the danger of Ouija boards?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08059-what-is-the-danger-of-ouija-boards/): Question 8059. Ouija boards are sold in toy shops and used at sleepovers, and that is precisely what makes them worth talking about. A thing packaged as a game is a thing nobody examines, and what this particular game attempts is the one activity Scripture singles out with the sharpest possible language. The danger is...
- [What is the difference between demonic oppression and possession?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08089-can-a-christian-be-demon-possessed/): Question 08089 Not all demonic activity is the same, and the failure to distinguish between different forms of it leads to both unnecessary panic and unhelpful pastoral counsel. The two categories most commonly discussed are possession and oppression, and they describe genuinely different conditions. What Possession Involves Possession, in its full biblical sense, describes a...
- [Can demons enter through occult practices?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08058-can-demons-enter-through-occult-practices/): Question 8058. Scripture forbids occult practices in the strongest language it uses about anything, and the reason is not that they are silly. The reason is that they are real. God does not warn His people away from empty superstitions with the word abomination, and He does not prescribe the death penalty for parlour games....
- [Is sleep paralysis demonic?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08057-is-sleep-paralysis-demonic/): Question 8057. Sleep paralysis is one of the most frightening experiences a person can have, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. You wake, you cannot move, you cannot speak, there is often a weight on the chest and a sense of a presence in the room, and it can last long enough...
- [Are ghosts real or are they demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08056-are-ghosts-real-or-are-they-demons/): Question 8056. When people ask about ghosts and demons they are usually asking two questions at once. Do the spirits of the dead come back, and if not, what did I actually experience? Both deserve an answer, and the answers are different. My position is that Scripture rules out the return of the departed, that...
- [Can a house or place be haunted?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08055-can-a-house-or-place-be-haunted/): Question 8055. The question of whether a haunted house is a real thing comes up more often than you might expect, and rarely from people looking for entertainment. It usually comes from someone who has experienced something in a building they cannot account for, and who is not at all sure they want to talk...
- [Can demons attach to objects or places?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08054-can-demons-attach-to-objects-or-places/): Question 8054. Whether demons can attach to objects or places is a question I get asked after house moves, after clearing out a relative’s belongings, and by new Christians wondering what to do with things from a former life. It deserves a straight answer rather than either a shrug or a scare story. My short...
- [Can Christians be demonically oppressed?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08053-can-christians-be-demonically-oppressed/): Question 8053. Can Christians be demonically oppressed? I believe they can, and I want to say so carefully, because this is an area where careless answers do real damage in both directions. A believer cannot be owned or inhabited by an unclean spirit. A believer can certainly be harassed, pressed and worn down from outside....
- [What is the difference between demonic possession, oppression, and influence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08052-demonic-possession-oppression-and-influence/): Question 8052. The words demonic possession, oppression and influence get used almost interchangeably in Christian conversation, and the confusion causes real harm. I have sat with people convinced they were possessed who were exhausted and unwell, and I have met others who dismissed every spiritual dimension of their trouble because they had only ever heard...
- [How does Satan blind unbelievers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08051-how-does-satan-blind-unbelievers/): Question 8051. Paul says something in 2 Corinthians 4 that explains a great deal of what we see in evangelism. The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. The enemy works to blind unbelievers, and he is...
- [What is exorcism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08071-what-is-exorcism/): Question 08071 The practice of exorcism carries a great deal of cultural baggage, most of it supplied by films rather than by Scripture, and that makes it difficult to discuss calmly. People arrive at the subject already braced for something lurid. So let me set the films aside and describe what the Bible actually shows,...
- [What is the snare of the devil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08050-what-is-the-snare-of-the-devil/): Question 8050. The phrase snare of the devil comes from Paul’s letters to Timothy, and it is worth noticing how ordinary the context is. He is not describing an exorcism or a supernatural encounter. He is talking about the appointment of church leaders and the handling of people who oppose the truth. A snare is...
- [What is deliverance ministry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08070-what-is-deliverance-ministry/): Question 08070 Deliverance ministry covers a wide range of practice, from careful pastoral work with genuinely troubled people to something closer to a stage act. Because the label is so elastic, I want to describe what it usually involves before saying what I think of it. I write as someone who believes demonic activity is...
- [What are spiritual strongholds?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08068-what-are-spiritual-strongholds/): Question 08068 Talk of spiritual strongholds has become so common that most believers assume they know what the term means without ever having looked at where it comes from. Conferences are held on breaking them. Prayer initiatives target them over cities. Individuals are told they have personal ones needing specialist attention. The phrase belongs to...
- [What does "give no place to the devil" mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08067-what-does-give-no-place-to-the-devil-mean/): Question 08067 The instruction to give no place to the devil is one of those phrases that has floated free of its context and now gets used to mean almost anything. I have heard it applied to house layouts, to music, to hobbies and to whole categories of medicine. Paul had something considerably more specific...
- [Can we rebuke Satan or demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08066-can-we-rebuke-satan-or-demons/): Question 08066 Whether a believer may rebuke Satan directly is one of those questions where practice has run a long way ahead of the text. In some circles you cannot get through a prayer meeting without someone addressing the enemy out loud, binding him, cancelling his assignments and ordering him off the premises. I want...
- [What is the difference between temptation from Satan and temptation from our flesh?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08064-difference-between-temptation-from-satan-and-flesh/): Question 08064 Telling temptation from Satan apart from the ordinary pull of your own flesh is harder in practice than most teaching admits, and I think we should say so at the start. When you are actually in the moment, the experience does not usually arrive with a label attached. Even so, Scripture does distinguish...
- [Can curses affect Christians?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08063-can-curses-affect-christians/): Question 08063 Whether spoken curses can affect a Christian is a question I have been asked in quiet voices more than once, usually after something unpleasant has happened. Someone has cursed a believer to their face, or a relative involved in witchcraft has made a threat, or a stranger online has pronounced something ugly over...
- [Are generational curses real?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08062-are-generational-curses-real/): Question 08062 The question of whether generational curses are real comes to me most often from people carrying something heavy. There is alcoholism in three generations of the family, or a pattern of broken marriages, or a history of depression that seems to travel down the line, and someone at a conference has told them...
- [Can horoscopes open doors to demonic activity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08061-can-horoscopes-open-doors-to-demonic-activity/): Question 08061 I get asked about reading horoscopes more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has done it for years without thinking twice and has suddenly started to wonder whether it matters. The question behind the question is nearly always the same. Is this a harmless bit of fun tucked between the...
- [What is the danger of tarot cards and fortune-telling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08060-danger-of-tarot-cards-and-fortune-telling/): Question 8060. Tarot cards have moved a long way from the fairground. They are sold in high street shops, recommended as tools for self-reflection, and used by people who would be offended at the suggestion that anything occult is involved. That shift in packaging is the first thing worth noticing. Scripture forbids fortune-telling in every...
- [What is the relationship between Satan and the False Prophet?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08081-what-is-the-relationship-between-satan-and-the-false-prophet/): Question 08081 The False Prophet is the least discussed of the three figures who dominate Revelation 13, and that is a pity, because his role explains a great deal about how the tribulation actually functions. He is the religious arm of a political system, and he is the one who makes the whole thing work....
- [What is the relationship between Satan and the Antichrist?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08080-what-is-the-relationship-between-satan-and-the-antichrist/): Question 08080 Satan and Antichrist are not the same being, and confusing them is one of the commonest mistakes in popular prophecy teaching. One is a fallen angelic creature with a history stretching back before the human story. The other is a man, yet to appear, who will hold political power for a limited period....
- [What is Satan's role in the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08079-what-is-satans-role-in-the-tribulation/): Question 08079 Satan’s role in the tribulation is described more fully than at any other point in Scripture, and Revelation gives us a sequence rather than a snapshot. He is thrown down, he pursues, he empowers, he deceives, and finally he is seized and bound. I write as a pretribulational premillennialist, so I take that...
- [What is the prayer of Jabez and spiritual warfare?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08078-what-is-the-prayer-of-jabez-and-spiritual-warfare/): Question 08078 The prayer of Jabez occupies two verses buried in a genealogy, and for a few years around the turn of the century it was among the best known passages in the English-speaking church. A short book sold many millions of copies and turned these lines into a daily formula for a great many...
- [What does "binding and loosing" actually mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08077-what-does-binding-and-loosing-actually-mean/): Question 08077 Binding and loosing has become one of the most quoted and least examined phrases in contemporary Christian speech. It is used to bind demons, bind sickness, bind circumstances and loose blessing, favour and finances, often within a single sentence. The phrase occurs twice in the New Testament, both times in Matthew, and in...
- [Should Christians pray against principalities over cities?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08076-should-christians-pray-against-principalities-over-cities/): Question 08076 The question of whether praying against principalities over cities is a legitimate Christian practice sounds technical, but a great deal hangs on it. Entire prayer movements have been built on the assumption that it is, and many believers have been made to feel unspiritual for hesitating. I do hesitate, and I want to...
- [What is spiritual mapping?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08075-what-is-spiritual-mapping/): Question 08075 Spiritual mapping is the practice of researching the history, religion and moral record of a place in order to identify the demonic powers believed to control it, so that intercessors can then target those powers in prayer. It grew up alongside territorial warfare and is usually presented as its research arm. I have...
- [What are territorial spirits?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08074-what-are-territorial-spirits/): Question 08074 The phrase territorial spirits refers to fallen angelic beings thought to exercise influence over particular nations, regions or cities. The idea has become so embedded in some circles that it is assumed rather than argued, and so foreign to others that it is dismissed without a hearing. I sit between the two. I...
- [What is territorial warfare?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08073-what-is-territorial-warfare/): Question 08073 Territorial warfare is the practice of identifying and confronting demonic powers believed to rule over geographical areas, and then attempting to break their hold through organised prayer. It has been enormously influential in the last forty years, particularly through the church growth movement and its offshoots. I want to describe it fairly before...
- [Can any Christian cast out demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08072-can-any-christian-cast-out-demons/): Question 08072 Whether any Christian can cast out demons is a question that usually arrives with a good deal riding on it. Someone is frightened, or someone has been told they should be able to do this and nothing has happened, or someone has watched a ministry team at work and wondered whether they are...
- [What Is the Covering Cherub in Ezekiel 28?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08094-what-is-the-covering-cherub-ezekiel-28/): Question 08094 The covering cherub of Ezekiel 28 is one of the most discussed and most disputed figures in the Old Testament. For centuries readers have found in these verses a description of Satan before his fall, and for almost as long other readers have insisted the passage is about a Phoenician king and nothing...
- [What Does Prince of the Power of the Air Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08093-what-does-prince-of-the-power-of-the-air-mean/): Question 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and...
- [What Does God of This World Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08092-what-does-god-of-this-world-mean/): Question 08092 Spiritual blindness is the whole point of the verse where Paul calls Satan the god of this world, and if we miss that we will misunderstand the title badly. The phrase sounds at first like a rival deity with a throne of his own. It is not that at all. Paul writes, “In...
- [What Does Powers and Principalities Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08091-what-does-powers-and-principalities-mean/): Question 08091 The phrase powers and principalities has become one of those bits of church vocabulary that everyone recognises and few can define. It sounds impressive from a pulpit, it turns up in hymns and prayers, and if you stopped ten believers on a Sunday morning and asked what it meant you would probably get...
- [Who Is the Prince of Persia in Daniel 10?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08090-who-is-the-prince-of-persia-daniel-10/): Question 08090 The prince of Persia in Daniel 10 is one of those figures who lifts the curtain for a moment and then lets it drop again. For three verses we are allowed to see something happening behind the visible world, and then the vision moves on and we are left with more questions than...
- [Who Are the Spirits in Prison in 1 Peter 3:19?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08086-who-are-the-spirits-in-prison-1-peter-3-19/): Question 08086 The spirits in prison of 1 Peter 3:19 have generated more commentary per word than almost any other verse in the New Testament, and Martin Luther famously admitted he did not know what Peter meant. That is a reassuring thing for the rest of us to hear. If a passage humbled Luther, we...
- [Will Demons Be Judged Separately From Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08085-will-demons-be-judged-separately-from-satan/): Question 08085 Demonic judgement is a subject Scripture treats with more restraint than most of us would like. We are told plainly that fallen angels face a reckoning, and we are told a good deal about Satan’s end, but the fine detail of how the two relate is sketched rather than spelled out. That should...
- [Why Is Satan Released After the Millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08083-why-is-satan-released-after-the-millennium/): Question 08083 Satan’s release at the end of the thousand years is one of the strangest turns in the whole prophetic landscape, and I understand why people stumble over it. God has bound the enemy. Jesus reigns in person from Jerusalem. The earth has known a thousand years of justice, peace and visible righteousness. And...
- [What is the meaning of the great chain in Revelation 20?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08082-meaning-of-the-great-chain-revelation-20/): Question 08082 The great chain of Revelation 20 is one of those details that decides far more than it appears to. How you read it determines whether you place the millennium in the future or in the present, and that in turn shapes your entire understanding of prophecy. So this is not a question about...
- [What are familial spirits?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08132-what-are-familial-spirits/): Question 08132. The phrase familial spirits gets used in two quite different ways, and separating them is the first job, because one usage points to something Scripture genuinely condemns and the other points to a teaching I do not think Scripture supports at all. In older Bibles you will meet familiar spirits, which is occult...
- [Why did God create Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08131-why-did-god-create-satan/): Question 08131. The question of why God create Satan in the first place is usually asked with more feeling than curiosity, and I understand why. If God knew what this creature would become, and made him anyway, then the trail of misery running through human history seems to lead back to a decision God took...
- [Can demons perform miracles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08128-can-demons-perform-miracles/): Question 08128. Asking whether demons perform miracles usually follows something a person has witnessed or heard about, and the question behind it is a practical one. If something extraordinary happens in a meeting, does that settle whose power is at work? My answer is that demons perform miracles in a limited and derivative sense, and...
- [How should a pastor respond to claims of angelic visitations?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08141-how-to-respond-to-claims-of-angelic-visitations/): Question 08141. Claims of angelic visitations arrive in pastoral ministry more often than people outside it would guess, and they rarely arrive at a convenient moment. Somebody stays behind after a service, or rings on a weekday evening, and tells you what they saw. How you answer in the next sixty seconds matters enormously, so...
- [Will Christians have authority over angels, and what does that mean now?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08140-will-christians-have-authority-over-angels/): Question 08140. Paul tells the Corinthians that we are to judge angels, and from that single clause a whole industry has grown up teaching that believers hold authority over angels here and now, with instructions on how to exercise it. I want to take the verse seriously and the industry rather less so, because Paul’s...
- [Do angels experience emotions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08139-do-angels-experience-emotions/): Question 08139. Whether angels experience emotions sounds like a question for a slow afternoon, until you notice how much of the Bible’s angelic material is emotional in tone. They shout, they rejoice, they worship, they cover their faces, and in one case they shudder. I think the answer is plainly yes, and working out what...
- [What role did angels play in giving the Law at Sinai?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08138-what-role-did-angels-play-in-giving-the-law/): Question 08138. The idea of angels at Sinai catches most readers by surprise, because Exodus 19 and 20 describe thunder, smoke, trumpet and the voice of God without mentioning an angelic host at all. Yet three New Testament writers refer to angelic involvement in the giving of the Law as though it were common knowledge....
- [Does Satan know Scripture, and how does he use it?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08137-does-satan-know-scripture/): Question 08137. Whether Satan know Scripture is not really in doubt once you have read Matthew 4, because he quotes it there, quotes it accurately, and quotes it to the Son of God. The more useful question is how he uses it, because that is where the danger lies for us. A misquoted Bible is...
- [Why do angels long to look into the gospel (1 Peter 1:12)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08136-why-do-angels-long-to-look-into-the-gospel/): Question 08136. Peter says that angels long to look into the things announced to us through the gospel, and it is one of those half-verses that people read past for years before it suddenly stops them. Why would beings who stand in the presence of God be craning to see something we hold in our...
- [What do angels know, and what don't they know?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08135-what-do-angels-know/): Question 08135. Working out what angels know turns out to be a surprisingly practical exercise, because a great deal of bad teaching depends on assuming they know rather more than they do, and a great deal of needless fear depends on the same mistake. Scripture gives us a clear enough picture. Angels are intelligent, experienced...
- [What will happen to Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08124-what-will-happen-to-satan/): Question 08124. The future of Satan is one of the few subjects on which Scripture is entirely unambiguous. There is no mystery about the outcome, no suspense, and no possibility of a different result, which is more than can be said for many things people are curious about. What the Bible gives is a sequence,...
- [What is Satan doing now?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08123-what-is-satan-doing-now/): Question 08123. The present work of Satan is one of those subjects where Christians tend to know either too little or far too much, and I have met both. Some treat him as a figure confined to Eden and Revelation with nothing much happening in between, while others see his fingerprints on every flat tyre....
- [Can we bind Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08122-can-we-bind-satan/): Question 08122. The practice of binding Satan has become so familiar in some circles that many believers assume it must be a plain biblical instruction, and are surprised to discover that no apostle ever does it and no letter ever tells us to. I want to look carefully at the passages that are used to...
- [What is spiritual warfare?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08121-what-is-spiritual-warfare/): Question 08121. Spiritual warfare is not an optional interest for unusually dramatic Christians. It is the reality every believer already lives inside, whether or not they have a vocabulary for it, and the only question is whether we will fight with the equipment God supplied or with something we invented. A great deal of what...
- [Can Christians be demon-possessed?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08120-can-christians-be-demon-possessed/): Question 08120. Few questions in pastoral ministry generate as much fear and confusion as whether demon possession is possible for a believer, and few have been answered so badly by so many well-meaning people. My answer is no, and I hold it firmly. But the question deserves more than a flat denial, because the people...
- [What are demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08119-what-are-demons/): Question 08119. Understanding what demons are is not an exercise in morbid curiosity. It is the difference between a believer who takes the enemy seriously without becoming obsessed and one who either dismisses the whole subject or sees a demon behind every difficulty. Scripture is measured on this, which is itself instructive. It tells us...
- [How did Satan fall?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08118-how-did-satan-fall/): Question 08118. The fall of Satan is one of those subjects where Scripture gives us real information without ever supplying a narrative, and the gap between those two things has been filled over the centuries with a great deal of confident material that the Bible never provided. There is no chapter headed The Fall of...
- [Who is Satan?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08117-who-is-satan/): Question 08117. Knowing who Satan is matters more than most Christians realise, because almost every error in this area comes from a false picture rather than from a false verse. Get his size wrong and you will either live in fear of him or ignore him altogether, and both mistakes suit him perfectly well. So...
- [What are cherubim and seraphim?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/08116-what-are-cherubim-and-seraphim/): Question 08116 Cherubim and seraphim are among the most striking and least understood figures in the biblical narrative. They appear at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, from the guarding of Eden to the throne room of God in Isaiah’s vision. Yet they are often confused with one another, blended into a generic...
- [Do we have guardian angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08115-do-we-have-guardian-angels/): Question 08115. The idea of guardian angels is one of the most widely held beliefs in popular Christianity and one of the least carefully examined. It appears on nursery walls, in sympathy cards and in the confident assurances people give at funerals, usually without anyone asking what the Bible actually says. My answer is a...
- [How many angels are there?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08114-how-many-angels-are-there/): Question 08114. Scripture never gives us the number of angels, and I think that silence is deliberate. What it gives instead is a vocabulary of vastness, used repeatedly and by different writers, which is designed to leave you with an impression rather than a figure. That impression is worth having. A believer who grasps the...
- [What are angels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08113-what-are-angels/): Question 08113. Getting clear on what angels are is surprisingly difficult, because most of us learned the subject from Christmas plays, greetings cards and films before we ever opened a concordance. The popular version has wings, harps, halos and a distinct shortage of anything the Bible actually says. So let me take the popular picture...
- [Do angels exist?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08112-do-angels-exist/): Question 08112. Whether angels exist is a question I am asked far more often by Christians than by unbelievers, which tells you something about the state of our teaching. Most believers have absorbed the idea that angels belong to the decorative edges of the faith, somewhere near Christmas cards and children’s talks, rather than to...
- [Can hypnosis open doors to demonic influence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08111-can-hypnosis-open-doors-to-demonic-influence/): Question 08111. What actually happens under hypnosis is less mysterious than most people assume, and getting that clear is the first step to answering whether it opens doors to demonic influence. The popular picture, borrowed almost entirely from stage shows and films, is of a person switched off and taken over. That is not what...
- [Are martial arts spiritually dangerous?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08110-are-martial-arts-spiritually-dangerous/): Question 08110. Whether martial arts are spiritually dangerous depends almost entirely on which martial arts you mean and who is teaching them, which is why a blanket answer will always be wrong for somebody. The category covers everything from an Olympic combat sport to a discipline that opens with meditation before a shrine. So rather...
- [Can meditation open doors to demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08108-can-meditation-open-doors-to-demons/): Question 08108. The question of whether Eastern meditation can open doors to demons needs a definition before it needs an answer, because the word meditation is now doing duty for at least three unrelated activities and people talking about it are frequently talking past each other. There is biblical meditation, which Scripture commands. There is...
- [How do I protect my children from spiritual attack?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08107-how-do-i-protect-children-from-spiritual-attack/): Question 08107. Protecting children from spiritual attack is one of those parental concerns that can either drive you to prayer or drive you slightly mad, and I have watched it do both. The instinct behind the question is right and God given. A parent who did not want to shield their child from spiritual attack...
- [Should I be afraid of Satan and demons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08106-should-i-be-afraid-of-satan-and-demons/): Question 08106. Being afraid of Satan is more common among Christians than most of us admit in public. It shows up at two in the morning, or after a film we should not have watched, or when a house feels wrong, and it can settle into something that quietly governs a person’s spiritual life. So...
- [What if deliverance ministry doesn't seem to work?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08105-what-if-deliverance-ministry-doesnt-work/): Question 08105. When deliverance ministry does not seem to work, the person left standing there afterwards carries a weight that is hard to describe. They came forward believing, they were prayed over at length, they were told something had left, and within a fortnight the same anger or the same craving or the same darkness...
- [Can Christians have demons cast out of them?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08104-can-christians-have-demons-cast-out/): Question 08104. Whether one believer should try to cast out demons from another believer is a question I have been asked in tears more than once, usually by a Christian who has been told that their depression, their temper or their besetting sin has a name and needs expelling. The pastoral damage done by that...
- [Should Christians Read Books About Demons and the Occult?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q08102-should-christians-read-books-about-demons-and-occult/): Question 08102 The question of whether Christians should read occult books needs one distinction made before anything useful can be said. There is an enormous difference between a Christian book about the occult and an actual manual of occult practice, and a great deal of confusion disappears once we separate the two. Nobody sensible thinks...
- [The Universal Church and the Local Church: Are They the Same Thing?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09086-universal-church-and-local-church-relationship/): Question 09086 The relationship between the universal church and the local congregation is one of those doctrines that quietly determines how people live. Get it wrong in one direction and you end up with a Christian who belongs to everything in general and nothing in particular. Get it wrong in the other and you end...
- [Should Christians Go on a March for Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09072-should-christians-march-for-jesus/): Question 09072 A March for Jesus, or something like it, comes round in most towns sooner or later, and the invitation usually arrives with an assumption that any serious Christian will want to be there. I have been asked about this many times, often with a second question attached in a lower voice: what about...
- [What Is Ecumenism, and Should Evangelicals Join In?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09071-what-is-ecumenism/): Question 09071 The word ecumenism, and the ecumenical movement that carries it, has become one of those terms that generates more heat than light. To some it means everything good about Christians laying down their weapons. To others it means everything bad about churches abandoning the truth in order to be liked. Both reactions contain...
- [Should We Seek Spiritual Gifts?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09070-should-we-seek-gifts/): Question 09070 Should we seek gifts from God, or is that presumption dressed up as devotion? I have heard the question put both ways, sometimes by the same person in the same conversation. On one side there is a fear of manufacturing something the Spirit has not given. On the other there is a fear...
- [Can Spiritual Gifts Be Misused?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09069-can-gifts-be-misused/): Question 09069 Anyone who has spent time in church life knows that misused gifts are not a theoretical problem. They are a pastoral one. A gift is a good thing given by a good God, and yet it passes through hands that are still being sanctified, which means it can be handled carelessly, proudly, or...
- [How Do We Discover Our Spiritual Gifts?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09068-how-do-we-discover-our-gifts/): Question 09068 Few questions reach me more often than this one: how do I work out what my spiritual gifts actually are? It usually arrives with a little anxiety attached, as though the Christian life were a treasure hunt and somebody had mislaid the map. I want to take that anxiety out of the question...
- [What is consubstantiation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09066-what-is-consubstantiation/): Question 09066. Consubstantiation is the term commonly used for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper, in which the body and blood of Jesus are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine, while the bread and wine remain fully bread and wine. Both are there together, which is what the prefix is...
- [What is transubstantiation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09065-what-is-transubstantiation/): Question 09065. Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic teaching that in the Mass the bread and wine are changed in their substance into the actual body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, while the appearances of bread and wine, what the medieval theologians called the accidents, remain unchanged. It is not a metaphor about spiritual benefit....
- [Is communion just symbolic?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09064-is-communion-just-symbolic/): Question 09064. The memorial view of the Lord’s Supper holds that the bread and cup represent the body and blood of Jesus rather than becoming or containing them, and that the table is chiefly an act of remembrance and proclamation. It is the position of most Baptists and independent evangelicals, and it is regularly dismissed...
- [What does communion mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09063-what-does-communion-mean/): Question 09063. The meaning of communion is not one thing but several, and I suspect that is why so many believers take the bread and cup each month without being able to say what they are doing. We know it matters. We know it has to do with the cross. Beyond that most of us...
- [What are the ordinances?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09057-what-are-the-ordinances/): Question 09057. The two ordinances given to the church are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Jesus instituted both, commanded both, and gave the church no others. Everything else that congregations do, however valuable, is either an application of Scripture’s general instructions or a matter of Christian liberty. That claim needs defending, since Rome counts seven...
- [What is excommunication?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09056-what-is-excommunication/): Question 09056. Biblical excommunication is the final step of church discipline, in which a congregation formally removes an unrepentant member from its fellowship and no longer treats that person as a believer in good standing. The word itself means to put out of communion, from the Latin behind our word koinonia, fellowship, and it carries...
- [What is church discipline?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09055-what-is-church-discipline/): Question 09055. Church discipline is the process by which a congregation lovingly confronts a member living in serious, unrepentant sin, with the aim of bringing that person to repentance and restoration. That last clause is the one everybody forgets, and forgetting it is why the practice has such a grim reputation. Most British congregations have...
- [What about the house church movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09054-what-about-the-house-church-movement/): Question 09054. The house church movement covers a wide range of groups who meet in homes rather than in dedicated buildings, usually with informal leadership, participatory meetings and a conviction that this recovers something the institutional church has lost. In China and other places where the state is hostile it is not a movement at...
- [Should Christians attend church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09053-should-christians-attend-church/): Question 09053. Should Christians attend church? I am aware that a minister answering this question is like a barber telling you that you need a haircut, so let me say at the outset that I am not arguing for the survival of an institution. I am arguing for something the New Testament assumes so completely...
- [What is church membership?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09052-what-is-church-membership/): Question 09052. Church membership is a formal, covenanted commitment between a believer and a local congregation, in which the believer commits to the life, worship, discipline and support of that body, and the body commits to teach, care for and be accountable to that believer. Written out like that it sounds rather grand for something...
- [What is the role of deacons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09050-what-is-the-role-of-deacons/): Question 09050. The role of deacons is one of the most misunderstood things in church life, and the misunderstanding runs in two opposite directions. In some congregations deacons have become a board that runs the church and hires the minister. In others the title has become honorary, given to long-standing members as a mark of...
- [What is the role of elders?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09049-what-is-the-role-of-elders/): Question 09049. The role of elders is set out in the New Testament with more care than almost any other practical matter, and yet many believers could not name what an elder is supposed to do. They know elders exist. They may know who theirs are. Beyond that it gets vague, and vagueness about leadership...
- [What is church government?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09048-what-is-church-government/): Question 09048. Church government is the least glamorous subject in theology and one of the most consequential. It decides who chooses your minister, who holds the money, who can discipline a member, and what happens when a congregation and its leadership disagree. Nobody joins a church because of its constitution, and a great many people...
- [What is the purpose of the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09046-purpose-of-the-church/): Question 09046. The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of them about what the church does for them. That is not a cynical observation. It is what happens when a congregation stops asking the question...
- [When did the Church begin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09043-when-did-the-church-begin/): 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 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...
- [What is the autonomy of the local church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09039-autonomy-of-the-local-church/): Question 09039. Ask a Baptist what makes his church Baptist and sooner or later he will say something about local church autonomy. It is one of those phrases that gets used far more often than it gets explained, and I have sat in enough meetings to know that people mean rather different things by it....
- [What is the difference between the church and the kingdom of God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09038-difference-between-church-and-kingdom-of-god/): 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 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...
- [What is a church covenant?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09036-what-is-a-church-covenant/): Question 09036. A church covenant is a written statement of the promises members of a congregation make to God and to one another about how they will live together. It is not a statement of faith, which sets out what a church believes. It is a statement of commitment, setting out what the members undertake...
- [Should churches be involved in politics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09035-should-churches-be-involved-in-politics/): Question 09035. Say the words church and politics in most congregations and you can feel the temperature change. Some believers are convinced that any political comment from a pulpit is a betrayal of the gospel. Others are equally convinced that silence in the face of national wickedness is cowardice dressed as piety. Both groups can...
- [What is the church's relationship to the state?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09034-church-relationship-to-the-state/): Question 09034. The relationship between church and state has produced more confusion, and more blood, than almost any other question in Christian history. Scripture gives us the principles rather than a constitution, and the principles have to be applied in circumstances that vary enormously from one country and century to another. What Scripture does establish...
- [Can online church replace physical attendance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09033-can-online-church-replace-physical-attendance/): Question 09033. Whether online church can replace physical attendance is a question almost nobody asked before 2020 and almost every minister has been asked since. Services went to a screen out of necessity, a good many people found the arrangement convenient, and a proportion of them never came back. The question is now a live...
- [What is parachurch ministry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09032-what-is-parachurch-ministry/): Question 09032. A parachurch ministry is a Christian organisation that works alongside the local church without being one. The prefix comes from the Greek para, meaning beside. Student unions, mission agencies, prison and hospital chaplaincy work, Christian publishers, camp organisations, counselling services, apologetics ministries and relief charities all fall into the category. Opinions divide sharply....
- [What is church planting?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09031-what-is-church-planting/): Question 09031. Church planting is the work of starting new local congregations, usually where none exists or where the existing churches cannot reach the population around them. It is not a modern technique borrowed from business, whatever the language of some conferences might suggest. It is the ordinary method by which the gospel spread across...
- [When should you leave a church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09029-when-should-you-leave-a-church/): Question 09029. Deciding whether to leave a church is one of the loneliest decisions a Christian makes, and it is usually made badly. People stay far too long in places that are damaging them, or they walk out over something that would have been settled by one honest conversation. Both mistakes hurt, and both are...
- [What is expository preaching?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09028-what-is-expository-preaching/): Question 09028. Expository preaching is preaching in which the point of the passage is the point of the sermon. The preacher works through a text, explains what it means in its own context, and then presses that meaning on the congregation. The shape of the sermon comes from the shape of the text rather than...
- [What distinguishes a parachurch organisation from a church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09099-parachurch-organisation-vs-church/): Question 9099. What distinguishes a parachurch organisation from a church? The question sounds academic until a congregation is asked to fund one, staff one, or send its young people away for a week with one, and then it becomes very practical indeed. My short answer is that a parachurch organisation is a voluntary society formed...
- [How often should a church observe communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09097-new-testament-frequency-of-communion/): Question 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to find the practice completely different from what they were used to, and by leaders wondering whether their own habit has any basis beyond inheritance. The...
- [What role do deacons actually fill in the New Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09096-what-does-the-new-testament-say-about-deacons/): Question 9096. Ask ten churches to describe the role of deacons and you will get ten different answers, most of them shaped by whatever that particular congregation has always done rather than by anything in the New Testament. Some treat deacons as a board of trustees. Some treat them as junior elders. Some treat them...
- [Does Scripture prescribe an ideal church size?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09095-what-does-scripture-say-about-church-size/): Question 9095. Whenever church size comes up in conversation, somebody always wants a number. Is a congregation of forty too small to be viable? Is a congregation of two thousand too large to be a church in any meaningful sense? I understand the instinct behind the question, but Scripture does not answer it the way...
- [What is presbyterian church government?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09021-presbyterian-church-government/): Question 09021. Presbyterian government is rule by elders. Authority in the local congregation belongs to a body of elders called a session or kirk session rather than to a bishop above or to the membership below, and those local bodies are linked together in a series of graded courts: presbytery, synod and general assembly. The...
- [What is episcopal church government?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09020-episcopal-church-government/): Question 09020. Episcopal government is the system in which authority in the church rests with bishops, who oversee groups of congregations and stand in a distinct order above the local minister. The word comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning overseer. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, Methodists in many places and several Pentecostal bodies all...
- [What is congregational church government?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09019-congregational-church-government/): Question 09019. Congregational government is the conviction that, under Jesus, final authority in a local church rests with the gathered membership rather than with a bishop, a synod or a self perpetuating board. Baptists, most independent evangelical churches, the older Congregational tradition and many newer fellowships work this way. Decisions of substance come to a...
- [Are there apostles today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09012-are-there-apostles-today/): Question 09012. Asking whether there are apostles today gets a sharper answer than most questions about gifts, and the reason is that the New Testament uses the word in two distinct senses which get collapsed into one in the modern debate. I am a continuationist. I do not believe God switched the gifts off at...
- [How should pastors be trained and called?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09011-how-should-pastors-be-trained-and-called/): Question 09011. Good pastoral training begins in a local church, continues in a local church, and is tested by a local church, and any model that treats the congregation as the place you go once the training is finished has the order wrong. I say that as someone who values study a great deal. The...
- [What is ordination?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09010-what-is-ordination/): Question 09010. Ordination to ministry is the recognition by a local church that God has called and gifted a man for the work of an elder or pastor, and its public setting apart of him for that work. Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say that ordination confers powers, creates a...
- [What does it mean to break bread together?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09094-what-does-break-bread-mean-lords-supper-full-meal/): Question 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple...
- [What is open vs closed communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09009-open-vs-closed-communion/): Question 09009 The distinction between open and closed communion is one that many churchgoers encounter without fully understanding. It determines who is welcome at the Lord’s Table when a church celebrates the Supper, and the answer a church gives reveals something about how it understands the nature of the church, the ordinances, and the boundaries...
- [Should a church ever partner with a government or state agency?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09093-should-a-church-partner-with-government-or-state-agency/): Question 9093. Questions about church and state partnership land on my desk more often than people might expect. A council officer offers a grant for the toddler group, a school asks whether the church hall can host a breakfast club, a housing charity funded by the local authority wants to run a debt advice service...
- [Should a Church Be Led by One Pastor or a Team of Elders?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09092-should-a-church-be-led-by-one-pastor-or-team-of-elders/): Question 09092 Whether a congregation should be led by one pastor or by a plural eldership is a question with more practical consequence than most people expect. It shapes how decisions are made, how a minister is protected from himself, and what happens to a church when its leading figure is ill, or wrong, or...
- [Is It Ever Right to Leave a Church, and How Should It Be Done?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09091-is-it-ever-right-to-leave-a-church/): Question 09091 The decision to leave a church is one that most believers face at some point, and it is usually made badly. Some go too soon, at the first friction, and repeat the pattern in every congregation they join. Others stay far too long under teaching that is starving them, out of loyalty to...
- [Is Church Discipline a Form of Love or a Contradiction of It?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09089-is-church-discipline-love-or-contradiction/): Question 09089 To modern ears church discipline sounds like the opposite of love, which is why so few congregations practise it and so many members would leave if theirs began. The word carries associations of Puritan severity, public humiliation and religious control, and I understand the reaction even while I think it is mistaken. The...
- [How Should a Church Handle a Pastor Who Falls Into Serious Sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09088-how-should-a-church-handle-a-pastor-who-falls-into-sin/): Question 09088 Few situations test a congregation like a fallen pastor, and few are handled worse. The instinct is either to cover it, in order to protect the church’s reputation, or to destroy the man, in order to demonstrate that we do not tolerate such things. Scripture points somewhere different from both. I write this...
- [How often should we take communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09008-how-often-should-we-take-communion/): Question 09008 The New Testament commands the church to observe the Lord’s Supper but does not specify how frequently. This has led to considerable variation across Christian traditions, from daily celebration in some Catholic and Orthodox settings to quarterly or even annual observance in some Protestant churches. The absence of a specific command about frequency...
- [Is the Alpha Course Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09073-is-the-alpha-course-biblical/): Question 09073 The Alpha course is probably the most widely used evangelistic tool in the English speaking church, and asking whether it is biblical tends to make people defensive on both sides. Some treat any criticism of it as an attack on evangelism itself. Others dismiss it wholesale because of its origins or its associations,...
- [What are the marks of a true church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09047-marks-of-a-true-church/): Question 09047. What makes a true church true? It is not a theoretical question. People move house and need to find somewhere to worship. Believers watch a congregation drift and wonder whether it has crossed a line. Somebody starts a fellowship in a front room and asks whether it counts. Behind all of those situations...
- [Is Israel the same as the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09044-is-israel-the-same-as-the-church/): 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 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...
- [What is the Lord's Supper?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09006-what-is-the-lords-supper/): Question 09006 The Lord’s Supper is the second of the two ordinances Jesus gave to His church. It is practised in virtually every Christian tradition, yet the meaning attached to it varies enormously. Roman Catholics believe the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. Lutherans hold that Christ is physically present...
- [What is revival?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09037-what-is-revival/): Question 09037. Talk of genuine revival stirs something in most believers, and it also makes many of us wary, because the word has been attached to so much that turned out to be froth. A conference gets called a revival. A well attended series of meetings gets called a revival. Something emotional happens and within...
- [What are signs of an unhealthy church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09030-signs-of-an-unhealthy-church/): Question 09030. Recognising an unhealthy church is harder than it sounds, because the warning signs rarely arrive labelled. They arrive as enthusiasm, as loyalty, as a strong sense of mission. By the time people realise something has gone wrong, they have usually invested years and friendships in the place, and leaving feels like a betrayal....
- [What is the correct mode of baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09005-correct-mode-of-baptism/): Question 09005 Christians who agree that believers should be baptised sometimes disagree about how it should be done. Should the person be fully immersed in water, or is pouring or sprinkling equally valid? The question is not trivial, because the mode of baptism is connected to the meaning of baptism, and the meaning is not...
- [What is the Regulative Principle of Worship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09027-what-is-the-regulative-principle-of-worship/): Question 09027. The regulative principle of worship is the rule that a church may include in its public worship only what Scripture positively commands or clearly implies. Anything not warranted by the Bible is excluded, not because it is wicked but because God has not asked for it. It came out of the Reformation, it...
- [Who should be baptised?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09003-who-should-be-baptised/): Question 09003 Baptism is one of the most visible acts of the Christian life, and it is also one of the most debated. Who is it for? Is it reserved for those who have already believed, or does it extend to the children of believers as well? The answer to this question shapes how churches...
- [Is the instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 35 cultural or timeless?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09104-1-corinthians-14-34-35-cultural-or-timeless/): Question 9104. The instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 that women should keep silent in the churches is among the hardest sentences in Paul for a modern congregation to hear, and the debate about whether it is a cultural instruction or a timeless one has been running for a very long time. I want to take...
- [Should the Church Pay Taxes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09083-should-the-church-pay-taxes/): Question 09083 Church tax exemption comes up more often now than it did twenty years ago, and the question is usually asked with an edge. Why should religious organisations receive relief that a small business does not? Is a church that accepts favourable treatment from the state compromised by it? Both are fair questions and...
- [Pastors and Teachers: One Calling or Two?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09081-pastors-and-teachers-one-calling-or-two/): Question 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a great deal. It affects who we appoint, what we expect of them, and how we read the qualification lists in the Pastoral Epistles. The verse...
- [Why Are Churches Declining in the West?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09079-why-are-churches-declining-in-the-west/): Question 09079 Church decline in Britain and across much of the West is not a matter of opinion. The buildings that once held four hundred now hold forty, chapels have become carpet showrooms and flats, and every denomination publishes figures it would rather not. The question is not whether it is happening but why, and...
- [What Is the Role of a Pastor?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09078-what-is-the-role-of-a-pastor/): Question 09078 Ask ten church members what pastoral ministry involves and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by the last minister they had rather than by the New Testament. Some picture a chief executive. Some picture a chaplain who visits and comforts. Some, increasingly, picture a communicator with a platform. The text...
- [Is Online Church Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09077-is-online-church-biblical/): Question 09077 Whether online church is biblical has moved in a few short years from a curiosity to a live pastoral question in almost every congregation I know. The technology arrived gradually, the pandemic made it universal, and a good many believers have never fully returned to the building. Their question is a fair one:...
- [How should a church handle disagreement over women in ministry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09103-navigating-disagreement-womens-ministry-roles/): Question 9103. Few subjects can empty a church faster than a badly handled disagreement about women in ministry. I have seen congregations where the question was never raised until a crisis forced it, and by then positions had hardened, personalities had become involved, and what should have been a careful study of Scripture had turned...
- [What is the difference between prophecy and the teaching office?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09102-prophecy-vs-teaching-office-1-corinthians-14/): Question 9102. The relationship between prophecy and teaching is one of those questions that looks like a technicality until it lands in the middle of a church meeting. Someone stands up in a service and says the Lord has laid something on their heart, and immediately the congregation is asking whether that was a word...
- [Are pastor, elder and bishop different offices?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09100-pastor-elder-bishop-difference/): Question 9100. Are pastor, elder and bishop three different offices or three words for the same one? The New Testament answer is clearer than most church structures would suggest, and getting it right has consequences for how a congregation is led. My position is that elder and bishop describe a single office viewed from two...
- [Are church covenants biblically required?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09098-what-is-a-church-covenant/): Question 9098. A church covenant is a written statement of mutual promises that members make to God and to one another when they join a congregation. It usually speaks of walking together in love, of watching over one another, of attending faithfully, of contributing to the work, and of submitting to discipline where necessary. Some...
- [What distinguishes complementarianism from egalitarianism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09107-complementarian-vs-egalitarian-position/): Question 9107. The complementarian and egalitarian positions are the two main answers evangelicals give to the question of how men and women relate in the home and in the church, and the labels get thrown about with far more confidence than accuracy. Before anyone can decide between them, they need to know what each actually...
- [What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09105-what-does-1-timothy-2-12-mean-in-context/): Question 9105. What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context? Few verses in the New Testament are quoted more often with less attention to what surrounds them, and few are dismissed more quickly by people who have decided in advance what Paul is allowed to say. I want to walk through the passage carefully, because...
- [Are there prophets today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09013-are-there-prophets-today/): Question 09013. Whether there are prophets today is a question I answer yes to, with a great many qualifications attached, and the qualifications are not small print. They are the difference between a healthy church and a wrecked one. I am a continuationist. I do not believe the gifts were withdrawn when the last apostle...
- [Who can take communion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09007-who-can-take-communion/): Question 09007 The question of who may take communion touches directly on how we understand the nature of the Lord’s Supper and the community for which it was given. Different Christian traditions draw the lines in different places, from the very restrictive to the entirely open. What does the New Testament itself say about who...
- [What Makes a Church Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09076-what-makes-a-church-biblical/): Question 09076 People ask me what makes a biblical church far more often than they used to, and I take that as a healthy sign. It usually means somebody has been let down, or has moved to a new town, or has begun reading the New Testament and noticed that the churches described there do...
- [What is the difference between positional and practical sanctification?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07073-positional-versus-practical-sanctification/): Question 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are discouraged precisely because they have been measuring the first by the second. If you have ever wondered how Paul could call the Corinthians saints with...
- [Can Christians achieve sinless perfection in this life?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07074-can-christians-achieve-sinless-perfection/): Question 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than waving it away. The people who hold it are usually not careless Christians. They are often the opposite, people with a high view of holiness...
- [What is Eastern Orthodoxy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09042-what-is-eastern-orthodoxy/): Question 09042. Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and you will usually get something about icons and beards. Ask an Orthodox believer what Baptists believe and you may get something equally thin. Since a...
- [What is the Christian Perspective on Immigration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12055-christian-perspective-on-immigration/): Question 12055. A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for the community receiving him. Most public argument picks one and treats the other as evidence of bad faith. I am not going to tell you...
- [Should There Be Flag Waving in Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09085-should-there-be-flag-waving-in-church/): Question 09085 Flag waving in church covers two quite different practices that often get muddled in the same conversation. One is the use of coloured banners and flags in worship, common in charismatic settings and increasingly seen elsewhere. The other is the display of a national flag inside the building, which raises questions about patriotism,...
- [What are the philosophical roots of transgender ideology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12030-philosophical-roots-rousseau-to-transgender/): Question 12030 Transgender ideology did not begin in a clinic or on a university campus in the 1990s. It is the late fruit of a philosophical revolution that has been running for four centuries, and unless you can see the whole tree you will keep being surprised by the fruit. I write this as a...
- [What is meant by being spiritual not religious?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60113-spiritual-not-religious/): Question 60113. Spiritual not religious has become the standard British answer to a question about faith, and you will hear it at work, at the school gate and at funerals. It signals openness to something beyond the material world combined with a firm distaste for institutions, doctrines and anyone telling you what to believe. I...
- [How do we comfort those who suffer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60112-how-do-we-comfort-those-who-suffer/): Question 60112. Those who suffer are usually surrounded, at least at first, by people who want to help and have no idea how. I have watched kind Christians make a bereavement worse with a sentence, and I have said things at gravesides in my twenties that I would give a good deal to take back....
- [What about chronic illness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60111-what-about-chronic-illness/): Question 60111. Chronic illness is a different kind of suffering from the sudden crisis, and the church is often better at the crisis. When somebody collapses there are meals, visits and prayer chains. When somebody has been unwell for eleven years, the casseroles stopped a decade ago and the phone rings less than it used...
- [Why do some prayers for healing fail?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60110-why-do-some-prayers-for-healing-fail/): Question 60110. Prayers for healing are among the most heartfelt any of us ever pray, and one of the hardest things in pastoral ministry is standing beside someone whose prayer has not been answered. I have done it many times, and I have never got used to it. So this article on prayers for healing...
- [Does the Quran prove the Bible is true?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60017-does-quran-prove-bible-true/): Question 60017. The question of whether the Qur’an proves the Bible reaches me from two directions at once, and the people asking it want opposite things. Some Muslims say that the Qur’an confirms the Torah and the Gospel, and that a Christian ought therefore to accept the Qur’an as the final word in the same...
- [Do Christians and Muslims believe in one God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60016-do-christians-and-muslims-believe-in-one-god/): Question 60016. Whenever this question comes up, people are usually asking two different things at once, and it helps to separate them before deciding whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. One question is whether both faiths teach that there is only one God. The other is whether the God each describes is in...
- [What is Hinduism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60013-what-is-hinduism/): Question 60013. Hinduism and Christianity are often placed side by side as two religions, and the comparison misleads before it begins. Hinduism is not a single religion with a founder, a creed and a date. It is a family of traditions that grew over three thousand years in the Indian subcontinent. That makes generalisation risky,...
- [What is Islam?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60012-what-is-islam/): Question 60012. Islam and Christianity share a great deal of vocabulary and disagree about almost everything that vocabulary refers to. Both speak of one God, of prophets, of revelation, of Jesus, of judgement, and the overlap makes the differences harder to see rather than easier. I want to describe what Muslims actually believe, accurately enough...
- [What is Judaism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60011-what-is-judaism/): Question 60011. Christians often assume that modern Judaism is simply the religion of the Old Testament carried forward, and that a Jewish neighbour today believes roughly what Moses believed with a longer beard. It is a natural assumption and it is not accurate. The faith practised in synagogues today took its present shape after the...
- [Should Christians be involved in politics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60028-should-christians-be-involved-in-politics/): Question 60028. Christian political involvement makes many believers uneasy, and the unease usually runs in one of two directions. Some feel that any engagement with public life is a distraction from the gospel and a step toward compromise. Others feel that a faith which never touches how a country is run is a private hobby...
- [Does relativism lead to intolerance?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60037-relativism-leading-to-intolerance/): Question 60037. Moral relativism arrived with a promise of peace. If there is no truth binding on everyone, the argument went, then nobody can impose anything on anybody, and we shall all live together in easy tolerance. That was the sales pitch. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement in recent years knows that the...
- [What is the biblical view of expressive individualism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60036-expressive-individualism-effects/): Question 60036. Expressive individualism is the water our culture swims in, and like all water it is hardest to notice when you are soaked in it. It is the conviction that each of us carries an authentic inner self, that the highest good is to discover and express that self, and that anything which restrains...
- [Should Christians use AI?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60033-should-christians-use-ai/): Question 60033. Whether a Christian should be using AI is now a live question in ordinary church life rather than a theoretical one. Students are using it for essays, employers are requiring it, and preachers are quietly wondering whether the sermon outline that appeared in thirty seconds counts as their own work. The unease is...
- [Is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60032-is-artificial-intelligence-a-threat-to-humanity/): Question 60032. Artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into daily life at a speed that has caught most institutions unprepared, the church very much included. Systems that write, summarise, translate, generate pictures and hold a conversation are now in the hands of anyone with a phone, and the question of whether...
- [What does the Bible say about environmentalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60031-what-about-environmentalism/): Question 60031. Creation care is one of those subjects where Christians tend to react rather than think, and the reactions come in two flavours. Some believers absorb the environmental movement wholesale and end up with a faith in which recycling has become a sacrament. Others dismiss the whole field as a left wing preoccupation for...
- [Is there life anywhere else in the Universe?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60060-is-there-life-anywhere-else-in-the-universe/): Question 60060. Whether extraterrestrial life exists is one of those questions people expect a minister to duck. I am not going to duck it, but I am going to disappoint anyone hoping for a verse that settles it, because there is no such verse. What I can do is show you what Scripture actually claims,...
- [How could light exist before the sun?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60059-how-could-light-exist-before-the-sun/): Question 60059. The first thing God makes in Genesis is created light, and He makes it on day one, which is three whole days before He hangs the sun in the sky. Sceptics point at that and say the author did not understand basic astronomy. Christians sometimes shuffle their feet and change the subject. I...
- [Does life need death (e.g. plants need mulch to survive)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60058-does-life-need-death/): Question 60058. The question of animal death sounds like a gardening problem and turns out to be a theology problem. Somebody points out that a woodland floor lives off what has died on it, that leaf mould feeds the next generation of trees, that the whole system seems to run on decay, and then asks...
- [Are the mountains of Ararat the same as in ancient times?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60057-are-the-mountains-of-ararat-the-same/): Question 60057. Are the mountains of Ararat the same today as they were in ancient times? The question comes up whenever somebody proposes an expedition to find the ark, and it deserves a more careful answer than either side usually gives. Genesis says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, in the...
- [Did the sun really stand still?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60056-did-the-sun-really-stand-still/): Question 60056. Whether the sun stood still over Gibeon is one of those questions that separates a reader from the text before he has begun. Joshua 10 records that Joshua spoke to the LORD in front of Israel and said, Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon, and that the...
- [Does Christianity cause trauma?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60038-christianity-causing-trauma/): Question 60038. Religious trauma is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather and is now common enough to have its own shelf in the bookshop. It describes the lasting harm some people carry from their experience of church, and the first thing I want to say is that the harm is often real. I...
- [What is the significance of the seven churches in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10148-what-is-the-significance-of-the-seven-churches-in-revelation/): 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 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...
- [What is the "already/not yet" tension in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10145-what-is-the-already-not-yet-tension-in-scripture/): 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 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....
- [What is inaugurated eschatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10144-what-is-inaugurated-eschatology/): 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 whether the phrase was used or not. It holds that the kingdom of God has genuinely begun with the coming of Jesus, yet awaits its...
- [What is realised eschatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10143-what-is-realised-eschatology/): 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 great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus,...
- [Is the kingdom of God present or future?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10142-is-the-kingdom-of-god-present-or-future/): 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 who has been reading one author who insists it is entirely present and another who insists it is entirely future, and has concluded that theologians...
- [How does Elam fit into the last days?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10199-how-does-elam-fit-into-the-last-days/): Question 10199. Elam in prophecy is one of those subjects where careful reading and confident speculation part company very quickly. The territory sits in what is now south western Iran, around the ancient capital of Susa, and Jeremiah devotes the closing paragraph of his oracles against the nations to it. So what does the Bible...
- [What form does worship take in the Millennium, and are Ezekiel's sacrifices memorial?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10198-millennial-worship-and-ezekiels-sacrifices/): Question 10198. Millennial worship is described in more detail than most Christians realise, and the details are the reason the subject causes trouble. Ezekiel spends nine chapters on a temple, a river, a prince, a priesthood and a calendar of offerings, and anyone who believes the sacrifice of Jesus was once for all wants to...
- [How does the new covenant operate during the Millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10196-new-covenant-in-the-millennium/): Question 10196. The new covenant is the promise God made through Jeremiah that He would write His law on the heart, forgive iniquity and remember sin no more, and that promise finds its fullest national expression in the Millennium. That is where a Baptist has to be careful, because we live in the blessings of...
- [When are fallen angels judged in relation to the Millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10195-judgement-of-fallen-angels/): Question 10195. The judgement of fallen angels does not happen all at once, and that is what makes the question worth asking carefully. Scripture describes some spirits already confined, others still active, a leader bound for a thousand years and then released, and a final sentence carried out at the end. Put the passages in...
- [What is the prophetic significance of Israel becoming a nation in 1948?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10162-prophetic-significance-of-israel-becoming-nation-1948/): 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 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...
- [Will believers have different levels of millennial authority based on faithfulness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10193-different-levels-of-millennial-authority/): Question 10193. Scripture does appear to teach that millennial authority will not be identical for every believer, and that what we do with what we have been given now has consequences for the responsibility we carry then. That makes some Christians uneasy, because it sounds like a league table in the kingdom. Let me show...
- [Why does anyone rebel after a thousand years of Christ's visible rule?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10192-why-does-anyone-rebel-after-the-millennium/): 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 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...
- [Has Revelation already happened?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10187-has-revelation-already-happened/): Question 10187. Every few months somebody writes to me convinced that the preterist view has settled the whole question, and that the book of Revelation describes events which came and went in the first century. It is not a silly suggestion. Revelation opens by announcing things that must soon take place, and Jesus did tell...
- [Has the Church replaced Israel in God's purposes?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10009-has-the-church-replaced-israel/): 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 would argue, one of the most consequential wrong turns in Christian history. It sounds plausible, it has distinguished defenders, and it is refuted by an...
- [What is the kingdom of God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10140-what-is-the-kingdom-of-god/): 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 in casual conversation over coffee, and if I stopped ten believers in the church car park and asked each of them what it meant, I...
- [What is the New Covenant and how does it relate to Israel and the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10007-new-covenant-israel-and-the-church/): 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 and said, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood,” to a table of Jewish disciples about to...
- [Were there Jews in the land before the State of Israel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10170-were-there-jews-in-the-land-before-israel/): 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 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...
- [What is the Davidic covenant?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10006-what-is-the-davidic-covenant/): 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, made three thousand years ago to a shepherd-king, is the hinge on which the identity of Jesus, the shape of the Millennium, and the meaning...
- [What is progressive dispensationalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10004-what-is-progressive-dispensationalism/): 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 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...
- [What is the difference between dispensational theology and covenant theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10003-dispensational-vs-covenant-theology/): 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 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...
- [What is dispensationalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10001-what-is-dispensationalism/): 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 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...
- [What is posttribulationism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10026-what-is-posttribulationism/): Question 10026. The posttribulation rapture is the view that the Church will pass through the entire seven-year Tribulation and be caught up only at its very end, meeting the returning Lord and coming straight back to earth with Him. Posttribulationism is probably the oldest of the rival timings, and it is held by many sincere...
- [What are the signs of the times?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10021-what-are-the-signs-of-the-times/): Question 10021. The phrase the last days stirs up more confusion than almost any other in Christian conversation, because people reach for it every time an earthquake or a war fills the news. So let me draw a careful line through the subject. The signs of the times are real, the Bible speaks of them...
- [What are the trumpet judgements in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10033-what-are-the-trumpet-judgments-in-revelation/): Question 10033. The trumpet judgements in Revelation are the second great series of judgements that fall on the earth during the Tribulation, following the seal judgements and exceeding them in severity. When seven angels sound seven trumpets, one after another, the natural world is struck with devastating blows, and I want to take the trumpet...
- [What is premillennialism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10050-what-is-premillennialism/): 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 name itself quietly announces the timing, since pre means before, so premillennialism places the return of Christ before the millennium rather than after it....
- [What is the rapture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10042-what-is-the-rapture/): Why we should believe in the 'Rapture' (from the Latin for 'caught up')
- [What are the covenants with Israel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10068-what-are-the-covenants-with-israel/): 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, and four are unconditional promises that God binds Himself to keep regardless of the nation’s behaviour. A covenant in Scripture is not a contract between...
- [Who are Gog and Magog in Revelation 20? Are they different to the Ezekiel ones?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10096-who-are-gog-and-magog-in-revelation-20/): Question 10096. Gog and Magog appear in two very different places in Scripture, and a great deal of confusion comes from assuming they must be the same event. Ezekiel devotes two long chapters to an invasion of the land of Israel by a coalition led by Gog of the land of Magog. Revelation 20 uses...
- [Does God still have a plan for Israel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10067-does-god-still-have-a-plan-for-israel/): 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 chapters of Romans to the question and answers it in terms that leave very little room for manoeuvre. The plan for Israel is not a...
- [What happens at the end of the millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10095-what-happens-at-the-end-of-the-millennium/): Question 10095. The end of the millennium brings one of the strangest sequences in Scripture. After a thousand years of Christ reigning in person from Jerusalem, with the enemy bound and righteousness enforced, there is a rebellion. Not a small one either. Revelation says the number of the rebels is like the sand of the...
- [Will we remember our earthly life in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10127-will-we-remember-our-earthly-life-in-heaven/): Question 10127. Questions about memory in heaven usually arrive from one of two directions. Either somebody desperately hopes they will remember the people they have loved, or somebody desperately hopes they will forget the things they have done. Both instincts are understandable and Scripture speaks to both. My conclusion, held with reasonable confidence, is that...
- [Will we eat and drink in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10126-will-we-eat-and-drink-in-heaven/): Question 10126. Will we eat and drink in heaven? On the evidence of Scripture I think the answer is yes, and I say that with more confidence than you might expect, because the Bible mentions food in the world to come far more often than most Christians realise. The question is not trivial either. It...
- [What does it mean that God will dwell with His people?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10125-what-does-it-mean-god-will-dwell-with-his-people/): Question 10125. When Revelation announces that God will dwell with His people, it is not introducing a new idea at the end of the Bible. It is closing a circle that opened in a garden, and the sentence is deliberately built out of language God had been using for well over a thousand years. This...
- [Why is there no temple in the New Jerusalem?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10124-why-is-there-no-temple-in-the-new-jerusalem/): Question 10124. There is no temple in the New Jerusalem because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, and once you grasp what a temple was for, that sentence stops being a puzzle and becomes the point of the whole Bible. John gives us the reason in the same breath as...
- [Why is there no sea in the new earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/10123-why-is-there-no-sea-in-the-new-earth/): Question 10123. John writes that there will be no more sea on the new earth, and for anyone who loves the coast that sounds less like a promise and more like a threat. I have been asked about this verse by fishermen, sailors and small children, and the question is always the same underneath: is...
- [What is Tartarus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10122-what-is-tartarus/): Question 10122. The prison of Tartarus is named exactly once in the whole Bible, in a single verb tucked into 2 Peter 2:4, and it refers to the place where God has confined a particular group of fallen angels until judgement. One verb, one verse, and a good deal of careful thinking required. Most English...
- [What is Hades?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10120-what-is-hades/): Question 10120. The realm of Hades is the New Testament word for the place where the dead are held between dying and rising, and it is not the same thing as the lake of fire. That single distinction clears away most of the confusion people carry about this word, and it is worth getting straight...
- [What is Sheol?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10119-what-is-sheol/): Question 10119. Sheol and Hades are the Old and New Testament words for the realm of the dead, and they cover the same ground. Sheol is the Hebrew term, used sixty-five times, and the Greek translators of the Old Testament almost always rendered it with Hades. So when we ask what Sheol is, we are...
- [What is Abraham's bosom?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10118-what-is-abrahams-bosom/): Question 10118. Abraham’s bosom is the expression used in Luke 16 for the place of comfort where the righteous dead waited before the resurrection of Jesus. The ESV renders it Abraham’s side, which is closer to the picture Jesus was drawing, and the picture is of reclining next to Abraham at a feast rather than...
- [What is historicism in biblical interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10138-what-is-historicism-in-biblical-interpretation/): Question 10138. The historicist view reads Revelation as a continuous panorama of church history, unrolling from the apostle’s own day through to the return of Jesus, with each seal, trumpet and bowl corresponding to a particular event or era along the way. For several centuries it was the standard Protestant reading, and today it has...
- [Will the earth be renewed or replaced?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10133-will-the-earth-be-renewed-or-replaced/): Question 10133. Whether the new earth is this present planet purged and transformed, or a fresh creation raised in its place, is one of the questions I refuse to settle dogmatically, and I want to explain why at some length. Both readings are held by serious men who take Scripture literally, and both can point...
- [What does it mean that we will reign with Christ?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10131-what-does-it-mean-that-we-will-reign-with-christ/): Question 10131. The promise that we will reign with Christ is one of the most repeated and least discussed statements in the New Testament. Paul says it, Revelation says it several times, and Jesus said it before either of them, yet you will rarely hear a sermon on it. I suspect that is because it...
- [What is the tree of life in Revelation 22?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10130-what-is-the-tree-of-life-in-revelation-22/): Question 10130. The tree of life in Revelation 22 stands on both banks of the river that flows from the throne, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, with leaves for the healing of the nations. It is the same tree that stood in the middle of Eden, and its reappearance is...
- [What is the river of life in Revelation 22?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10129-what-is-the-river-of-life-in-revelation-22/): Question 10129. The river of life is the stream John sees flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the New Jerusalem, bright as crystal, with the tree of life growing on either bank. Two verses, and a great deal of Scripture flowing into them....
- [How can heaven be joyful if loved ones are in hell?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10128-how-can-heaven-be-joyful-if-loved-ones-are-in-hell/): Question 10128. How there can be joy in heaven while someone we loved is not there is, to my mind, the hardest question in the whole field of last things, and I have never once been asked it as an abstract puzzle. It comes from people with a name and a face in mind. So...
- [What does 'Maranatha' mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10152-what-does-maranatha-mean/): Question 10152. Maranatha appears once in the New Testament, tucked into the closing lines of a long and often difficult letter, and it is one of the oldest Christian prayers we possess. Paul writes: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22). That last phrase...
- [What is the resurrection of the just and unjust?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10151-what-is-the-resurrection-of-the-just-and-unjust/): Question 10151. Every human being who has ever lived will be raised from the dead, the just and unjust alike, and that is one of the least disputed teachings in the New Testament and one of the least discussed. Death is not the end of anyone’s story, whichever side of the line they are on....
- [What are the books opened at the final judgment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10150-what-are-the-books-opened-at-the-final-judgement/): Question 10150. The final judgement in Revelation 20 is described with a terrible economy of words. A great white throne, earth and sky fleeing away, the dead standing before it, and books being opened. Then a second and separate book, the book of life, is opened as well. The plural and the singular are doing...
- [What is the book of life?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10149-what-is-the-book-of-life/): Question 10149. The book of life appears from the Pentateuch to the final chapters of Revelation, and it stands for something of enormous comfort and enormous seriousness at the same time. It is God’s register of those who belong to Him, and at the last judgement it is the book that decides everything. People often...
- [Who wrote the book of Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10147-who-wrote-the-book-of-revelation/): Question 10147. Who wrote the book of Revelation is not a question for specialists only, because the authority of the last book in our Bible is bound up with the answer. If the apostle John wrote it, then we are reading the final word of the last surviving member of the Twelve. If somebody else...
- [What did Jesus mean when He said 'this generation will not pass away'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10164-this-generation-will-not-pass-away-meaning/): Question 10164. This generation will not pass away until all these things take place. That sentence, spoken by Jesus on the Mount of Olives, has been called the most difficult verse in the Gospels, and sceptics have used it for two centuries to argue that Jesus predicted his return within a few decades and was...
- [What is the significance of the fig tree in Matthew 24?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10163-significance-of-fig-tree-in-matthew-24/): Question 10163. The fig tree in Matthew 24 has carried more prophetic weight over the last seventy years than almost any other image in the Gospels, and I think it has been asked to carry rather more than it can bear. Jesus tells his disciples to learn a lesson from the fig tree, and a...
- [What is the idealist approach to Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10139-what-is-the-idealist-approach-to-revelation/): Question 10139. The idealist view treats Revelation not as a description of particular events, past or future, but as a symbolic portrayal of the ongoing conflict between good and evil that runs through the whole of history. Sometimes called the spiritual or symbolic approach, it is probably the most widely held reading in academic circles...
- [What is typology in biblical prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10158-typology-in-biblical-prophecy/): Question 10158. Biblical typology is the recognition that God built patterns into the earlier stages of redemptive history which anticipate what He would later do in Jesus and in the last things. A type is a real person, event or institution that foreshadows a greater reality still to come. Handled well it opens up the...
- [What is prophetic double fulfilment (law of double reference)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10157-prophetic-double-fulfilment-law-of-double-reference/): Question 10157. Double fulfilment, often called the law of double reference, is the observation that a single prophetic passage can speak to a near situation in the prophet’s own day and to a far greater event still to come. The nearer event serves as a partial fulfilment and a preview of the larger one. It...
- [How should eschatology affect how we live today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10154-how-should-eschatology-affect-how-we-live-today/): Question 10154. Practical eschatology is not a phrase you will find in Scripture, but it describes something the New Testament does constantly: it tells us about the future and then immediately tells us how to behave on Monday. Prophecy in the Bible almost never arrives without an application attached. That is worth saying, because end-times...
- [What is Gehenna?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10121-what-is-gehenna/): Question 10121. The fire of Gehenna is the image Jesus reached for whenever He spoke about final judgement, and it comes from a real valley on the southern edge of Jerusalem with a very ugly history. Understanding that valley is the shortest route into understanding the warning. Eleven of the twelve New Testament uses of...
- [What will we do in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10062-what-will-we-do-in-heaven/): Question 10062. What will we do in heaven? I suspect the reason so many Christians secretly dread the question is that the picture they inherited involves an endless church service with no coffee afterwards. Somewhere between medieval art and Victorian hymnody we acquired the notion of clouds, harps and a permanent expression of mild vacancy....
- [What is the Great Tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10045-what-is-the-great-tribulation/): Question 10045. The great tribulation is the second half of the seven-year tribulation, the final three and a half years of unequalled distress that fall upon the earth just before Jesus returns in glory. Jesus Himself gave the period its name in the Olivet Discourse, and the term has stuck fast ever since. When I...
- [What is the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10044-what-is-the-tribulation/): Question 10044. The tribulation period is a future span of seven years in which God pours out judgement on a rebellious world and resumes His unfinished dealings with the nation of Israel. It is the darkest stretch of history still to come, and Jesus Himself said there has never been anything like it and never...
- [When will the rapture happen?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10043-when-will-the-rapture-happen/): Question 10043. When people ask me about rapture timing, they usually mean one of two very different questions, and I try to separate them straight away so we do not talk past each other. The first is when in the prophetic calendar the rapture falls, whether before, during or after the tribulation. The second is...
- [What is the new heaven and new earth?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10060-what-is-the-new-heaven-and-new-earth/): Question 10060. The new earth is where the Bible actually ends, and I think that surprises a great many Christians. We have been handed a picture of eternity that involves clouds, harps and disembodied souls drifting about in a permanent hush, and then we open Revelation 21 and find a city, a river, trees, nations,...
- [What is universalism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10059-what-is-universalism/): Question 10059. Universalism is the belief that in the end every human being will be saved, so that hell is either empty, temporary, or non-existent, and all people are finally reconciled to God. It is an appealing idea, and I understand its pull, for who would not wish it were true? But wishing does not...
- [What is annihilationism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10058-what-is-annihilationism/): Question 10058. Annihilationism is the view that the lost are not punished for ever but are finally destroyed and cease to exist altogether, so that hell ends in extinction rather than in unending conscious suffering. It is also called conditional immortality, since it holds that immortality is a gift given only to the saved. I...
- [Is hell eternal?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10057-is-hell-eternal/): Question 10057. Is hell eternal? I believe the Bible teaches that eternal punishment is real and truly unending, and I hold that conviction with sorrow rather than satisfaction, because it is one of the hardest truths in all of Scripture. Many sincere Christians wrestle with it, and I understand why, for the thought of unending...
- [What is hell?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10056-what-is-hell/): Question 10056. Hell is the final place of conscious, righteous punishment for those who die apart from Christ, the lake of fire into which the unsaved are cast after the last judgment. I do not enjoy teaching on hell, and any preacher who does has something wrong with him, but I dare not soften what...
- [What is the Great White Throne judgment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10054-what-is-the-great-white-throne-judgment/): Question 10054. The Great White Throne is the final judgment of the unsaved dead, described in Revelation 20, when they stand before God at the end of the millennium to be judged by their works and consigned to the lake of fire. It is the most solemn scene in all of Scripture, and I never...
- [What is postmillennialism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10052-what-is-postmillennialism/): Question 10052. Postmillennialism is the view that the gospel will gradually triumph across the world, ushering in a long golden age of righteousness and peace, after which Jesus finally returns at the end of that era. The name itself captures the timing neatly, since post means after, so the position places the return of Christ...
- [What is amillennialism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10051-what-is-amillennialism/): Question 10051. Amillennialism is the view that there will be no literal thousand-year reign of Christ upon the earth, and that the millennium of Revelation 20 is a symbolic description of the present age lying between the two comings of Jesus. The prefix a simply means no or not, so the term means, roughly, no...
- [Where Do Believers Go Immediately When They Die?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10102-where-do-believers-go-when-they-die/): Question 10102. When believers die they go immediately into the conscious presence of the Lord Jesus. There is no interval of unconsciousness, no holding area, no process of purification and no delay until the last day. The soul and spirit of the Christian are at home with the Lord from the moment the heart stops,...
- [What is the Intermediate State?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10101-what-is-the-intermediate-state/): Question 10101. The intermediate state is the condition of a person between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body, and Scripture presents it as conscious, personal and, for the believer, immediately in the presence of the Lord. It is called intermediate because it is temporary. It is not the end of the...
- [What is the Lake of Fire?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10100-what-is-the-lake-of-fire/): Question 10100. The lake of fire is the final and permanent place of judgement for Satan, for the beast and the false prophet, and for every person whose name is not written in the book of life. I want to say that plainly at the start, because this is one of those subjects where people...
- [What is the second death?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10099-what-is-the-second-death/): Question 10099. The second death is Revelation’s name for the final state of everyone who dies without saving faith in Jesus. The phrase appears four times, all in that one book, and John defines it for us so that we are not left guessing. The lake of fire is the second death. That is the...
- [What is the second resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10098-what-is-the-second-resurrection/): Question 10098. If the first resurrection is the raising of the blessed, the second resurrection is its opposite number. It is the raising of everyone who has died without saving faith in Jesus, and it takes place at the end of the thousand year reign, for one purpose. They stand before the Great White Throne...
- [What is the first resurrection?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10097-what-is-the-first-resurrection/): Question 10097. The first resurrection is named only once in Scripture, in Revelation 20, and yet it carries an enormous weight of meaning. John sees those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, says they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years, and then adds, “This is the first...
- [What is the Olivet Discourse?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10078-what-is-the-olivet-discourse/): Question 10078. The Olivet Discourse is the sermon Jesus preached on the Mount of Olives during the last week of His earthly ministry, recorded in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13 and Luke 21. It is the longest block of teaching about the future that we have from His own lips, and everything else in...
- [What are the birth pains Jesus mentions in Matthew 24?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10077-what-are-the-birth-pains-jesus-mentions-in-matthew-24/): Question 10077. The birth pains Jesus mentions in Matthew 24 are the opening troubles of the end times: false messiahs, wars and rumours of wars, famines and earthquakes in various places. Having listed them He says, “All these are but the beginning of the birth pains” (Matthew 24:8). The image is deliberately chosen and it...
- [What is the role of Israel during the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10076-what-is-the-role-of-israel-during-the-tribulation/): Question 10076. The role of Israel during the tribulation is central rather than incidental. That seven-year period is not primarily about the nations, the beast or even the judgements. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Daniel says the seventy sevens were decreed about “your people and your holy city.” Once the...
- [What is Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10075-what-is-daniels-70-weeks-prophecy/): Question 10075. Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is, to my mind, the single most remarkable predictive passage in the Old Testament. In four verses Gabriel gives Daniel a measured period of 490 years for the nation of Israel, sets out what it will accomplish, divides it into three unequal portions, and pins its starting point to...
- [What happens to those who take the mark of the beast?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10074-what-happens-to-those-who-take-the-mark-of-the-beast/): Question 10074. What happens to those who take the mark of the beast? Revelation gives an answer of terrible clarity, and it is the most severe warning in the book. Those who receive it drink the wine of God’s wrath and are tormented in the presence of the Lamb, with no rest day or night....
- [What signs precede Christ's return?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10073-what-signs-precede-christs-return/): Question 10073. What signs precede Christ’s return? The answer depends entirely on which return you mean, and that is not a piece of clever footwork. Scripture describes the Lord coming for His people and coming with His people, and the two events are given very different treatment. For the Second Coming in glory, Scripture supplies...
- [What is the Day of the Lord?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10072-what-is-the-day-of-the-lord/): Question 10072. The Day of the Lord is the Bible’s name for that extended period when God steps out of the shadows and deals directly with human sin, rescues His people, and establishes His King. It appears more than twenty times in the Old Testament and several more in the New, and it is one...
- [What is the battle of Armageddon?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10071-what-is-the-battle-of-armageddon/): Question 10071. The battle of Armageddon is the gathering of the armies of the world against Jerusalem at the end of the tribulation period, and its abrupt conclusion when Jesus returns in glory. The word has entered ordinary English as a byword for nuclear catastrophe, which is a pity, because the Bible’s picture is rather...
- [What is the millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10049-what-is-the-millennium/): Question 10049. The millennial kingdom is the literal, thousand-year reign of Jesus on the earth that follows His Second Coming, when He rules the nations from the throne of David in Jerusalem. When people ask me what the millennium actually is, this is the very heart of my answer to them. It is a real,...
- [What is the Second Coming?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10048-what-is-the-second-coming/): Question 10048. The Second Coming is the visible, glorious and physical return of Jesus to the earth to defeat His enemies, rescue Israel, and reign as King. When I speak of the Second Coming I mean something quite specific and utterly certain, an event as real and bodily as the first coming in Bethlehem long...
- [What is the mark of the beast?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10047-what-is-the-mark-of-the-beast/): Question 10047. The mark of the beast is a coming token of allegiance to the Antichrist, imposed during the tribulation so that no one may buy or sell without it. I want to handle this subject carefully, because few themes in prophecy have attracted more wild speculation and more needless fear than the mark of...
- [Who is the Antichrist?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10046-who-is-the-antichrist/): Question 10046. The Antichrist is a coming world ruler who will oppose God, deceive the nations, persecute the saints, and set himself up as an object of worship during the tribulation. When people ask me who he is, they usually want a name, and that is exactly the one thing I cannot and will not...
- [Who are the 144,000?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10070-who-are-the-144000/): Question 10070. Who are the 144,000 in Revelation? John tells us plainly enough: they are sealed servants of God drawn from the twelve tribes of Israel, twelve thousand from each, protected through the judgements of the tribulation period for a purpose God has assigned them. The reason the question generates so much heat is that...
- [Will the temple be rebuilt?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10069-will-the-temple-be-rebuilt/): Question 10069. Will a third temple be rebuilt in Jerusalem? I believe the answer is yes, and not because of anything in the newspapers. Several prophecies about the last days assume a functioning sanctuary standing on that site, with sacrifices being offered in it and a man of appalling arrogance eventually desecrating it. That said,...
- [Are there degrees of punishment in hell?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10064-are-there-degrees-of-punishment-in-hell/): Question 10064. Are there degrees of punishment in hell? This is one of the heaviest questions I am ever asked, and I want to handle it with the seriousness it deserves. Scripture does teach that the judgement of the lost is measured, that God distinguishes between the informed and the ignorant, and that not every...
- [Are there degrees of reward in heaven?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10063-are-there-degrees-of-reward-in-heaven/): Question 10063. Are there degrees of reward in heaven? Scripture answers yes, and it does so often enough that I am always a little surprised how rarely the subject is preached. We are so anxious to protect grace from any hint of earning that we quietly drop a whole strand of New Testament teaching about...
- [Is America Mystery Babylon in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10175-is-america-mystery-babylon-in-revelation/): Question 10175. Is America Mystery Babylon? The question has sold a remarkable number of books, and it surfaces in every prophecy conference I have ever heard about. The woman of Revelation 17 with the title written on her forehead has been identified with Rome, with the papacy, with apostate Protestantism, with the United Nations and,...
- [Will people be saved during the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10040-will-people-be-saved-during-the-tribulation/): Question 10040. I am often asked whether tribulation salvation is possible, and the short answer I give is a glad and immediate yes. When the Church has been caught up and the door of this present age of grace seems to slam shut, Scripture does not describe an empty earth abandoned to judgement and left...
- [What is the time of Jacob's trouble?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10039-what-is-the-time-of-jacobs-trouble/): Question 10039. The time of Jacob’s trouble is a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah that describes the coming Tribulation as it falls upon the nation of Israel, and it is one of the clearest windows we have into the purpose of that terrible period. When I speak of Jacob’s trouble I mean the seven-year Tribulation...
- [What is the image of the beast?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10038-what-is-the-image-of-the-beast/): Question 10038. The image of the beast is one of the strangest and most sinister objects in the whole book of Revelation, an idol set up in honour of the Antichrist that is given a kind of life and demands the worship of the entire world. When I speak of the image of the beast...
- [Who is the false prophet?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10037-who-is-the-false-prophet/): Question 10037. The false prophet is the third figure in the unholy trinity of the Tribulation, alongside Satan and the Antichrist, and he is the great religious deceiver of the end times. When I speak of the false prophet I mean the second beast of Revelation 13, who rises to promote the worship of the...
- [What about Messianic Jews?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09045-what-about-messianic-jews/): 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 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...
- [What is the Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09002-what-is-the-church/): Question 09002 The word “church” is one of the most familiar in the Christian vocabulary, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. In popular usage it refers to a building, a denomination, or a vague spiritual community. The New Testament has something far more precise in mind. Understanding what the church actually is,...
- [Is Church Membership a Biblical Requirement or a Human Invention?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09090-is-church-membership-biblical-requirement-or-human-invention/): Question 09090 The objection to church membership is easily stated and deserves a straight answer. Nowhere in the New Testament does anybody sign a form, and no verse says that a believer must join a local congregation. Given that, is the whole apparatus of rolls, interviews and membership classes a human invention that we have...
- [Can a Church Lose Its Identity as a True Church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q09087-can-a-church-lose-its-identity-as-a-true-church/): Question 09087 Whether a congregation can stop being a true church is not a theoretical question in Britain, where a good many buildings still open on Sunday for gatherings in which the gospel has not been preached for two generations. The question is uncomfortable because it requires a judgement about other Christians, and we are...
- [What Is the Synoptic Problem?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1078-what-is-the-synoptic-problem/): Question 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ from each other in the details each writer chooses to include or leave out. Read the feeding of the five thousand in all three Gospels...
- [What Is the Book of Enoch, and Is It Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1184-what-is-the-book-of-enoch-and-is-it-scripture/): Question 1184. What is the book of Enoch, and is it Scripture? This question comes up more often than you might expect, usually prompted by the fact that Jude actually quotes it directly in his New Testament letter, which understandably makes people wonder whether the book itself deserves a place in the canon. It does...
- [When Was the Book of Daniel Written?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1145-when-was-the-book-of-daniel-written/): Question 1145. The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship places the book in the sixth century BC, written substantially by Daniel himself during and shortly after the Babylonian exile, exactly as the book claims...
- [How should Christians react to gender dysphoria?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11103-gender-dysphoria-compassion/): Question 11103 Gender dysphoria is a subject on which the church has managed to be both too loud and too silent, and the people caught in the middle of it are suffering. There are Christians who talk about it only as a culture war headline, and there are others who are so anxious about causing...
- [Should Christians be using preferred pronouns?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12026-preferred-pronouns-christian-perspective/): Question 12026 Preferred pronouns have turned an ordinary part of speech into a test of allegiance, and believers are being asked to take that test at work, at university and increasingly in the family. It is a small word with a great deal loaded onto it, which is exactly why it is difficult. I want...
- [What about sexual purity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12024-what-about-sexual-purity/): Question 12024 Sexual purity has become an embarrassing phrase in some circles, partly because it has been handled badly. A generation of young Christians was given rules, fear and a promise that keeping the rules would be rewarded with a happy marriage. When the promise did not materialise, the whole framework collapsed for many of...
- [Should Christians Obey the Levitical Law?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07109-should-christians-obey-levitical-law/): Question 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of...
- [How Do We Apply Old Testament Law Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07042-how-apply-old-testament-law-today/): Question 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and...
- [What Does It Mean Jesus Is Our High Priest?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q3047-what-does-it-mean-jesus-is-our-high-priest/): Question 03047 To say that Jesus is our High Priest is to say that He is the one who represents us before God and brings God to us, the mediator who deals with our sin and keeps us in fellowship with the Father. The title High Priest runs all through the letter to the Hebrews,...
- [What about pornography?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12023-what-about-pornography/): Question 12023 The sin of pornography is the one I am asked about most often in private and preached about least often in public, and that imbalance tells you something. It is in our congregations. It is among our leaders. It is not a marginal problem affecting a few unusually weak people, and pretending otherwise...
- [What about situational ethics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12002-what-about-situational-ethics/): Question 12002 Situational ethics is the view that no act is right or wrong in itself, and that the loving thing in the particular circumstances is the only real moral rule. It was set out most influentially by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s, and although hardly anyone uses the label now, the idea has quietly...
- [Can Christians marry non-Christians?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11060-can-christians-marry-non-christians/): Question 11060. Marrying an unbeliever is a question I have been asked in tears more often than almost any other, usually by someone who already knows the answer and is hoping I will find a way round it. So let me be honest and kind at the same time, because both are needed here. The...
- [What Is the Gospel of Thomas?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1186-what-is-the-gospel-of-thomas/): Question 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the “hidden” or “suppressed” gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered among the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945, and it has become, in certain circles, a...
- [Should we pray for the dead?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11043-should-we-pray-for-the-dead/): Question 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming. So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one....
- [How Does Scripture Function in Evangelism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1088-how-does-scripture-function-in-evangelism/): Question 1088. Scripture in evangelism is not a set of proof texts we reach for after we have already made our own case. It is the message itself, and the power that makes the message land. I have shared the gospel in enough settings, from the pulpit to a hospital bedside, to know how tempting...
- [What about contraception?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12015-what-about-contraception/): Question 12015 Birth control is one of those subjects on which Christians have grown noticeably quieter, and I think that silence has left couples to work it out alone with very little help. The Bible does not address the modern question directly. That is not the end of the matter, but it does mean anyone...
- [What about IVF?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12016-what-about-ivf/): Question 12016 IVF treatment is a subject I approach carefully, because behind almost every question about it is a couple carrying a grief that most people around them know nothing about. Infertility is a quiet sorrow. It comes with monthly disappointment, awkward conversations, and a church full of babies. Anything said about this must be...
- [What does the Bible say about homosexuality?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12017-what-does-bible-say-about-homosexuality/): Question 12017 Homosexual practice is the subject on which the church in the West is most frequently accused of cruelty, and it is the subject on which we most often deserve at least part of the accusation. Not because the biblical teaching is unclear, but because the manner of our teaching has too often been...
- [What about transgenderism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12019-what-about-transgenderism/): Question 12019 Transgender identity is not really a question about pronouns, bathrooms or sport, though those are where the arguments usually happen. It is a question about what a human being is, and whether the body has anything authoritative to say about that. Everything else follows from the answer. I want to handle this at...
- [What Books are Recommended for Pastors?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11026-recommended-books-for-pastors/): Question 11026. Asking for recommended books for pastors is a bit like asking a builder which tools he would keep if the van were stolen. The honest answer is that a few things do the heavy lifting and the rest are conveniences, and the danger is buying the conveniences first. I get asked this often...
- [What about cremation vs burial?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12013-cremation-vs-burial/): Question 12013 Cremation and burial is one of those questions that arrives at the worst possible moment. A family is grieving, a decision is needed within days, and somebody asks whether God minds. I have sat in those front rooms more times than I can count, and the last thing anyone needs is a lecture....
- [Should we memorise Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11016-should-we-memorise-scripture/): Question 11016. Memorising Scripture strikes many Christians as a relic, something belonging to Sunday school prizes and an age before search engines. Why store what you can look up in four seconds? I want to make the case that this is one of the habits worth recovering, and that the reasons for it are rather...
- [What about tattoos?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12004-what-about-tattoos/): Question 12004 Christians and tattoos is a subject that produces a good deal of confident assertion and rather little careful reading. One verse gets quoted, the conversation stops, and a young believer with a cross on his forearm is left feeling that he has done something shameful. I think we can do better than that....
- [What about entertainment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12036-what-about-entertainment/): Question 12036. Every discussion about Christian entertainment eventually arrives at the same awkward moment, when someone asks whether a particular film, box set or video game is acceptable and everyone in the room quietly hopes the answer will land on their side of the line. I have been in that room many times. I have...
- [What about alcohol?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12003-what-about-alcohol/): Question 12003 Few subjects generate more heat and less light among British believers than Christians and alcohol. Some congregations treat total abstinence as a settled biblical command. Others treat drinking as so unremarkable that they never mention it at all. Both are avoiding what Scripture actually says, which is more careful than either position and...
- [Should Christians attend gay weddings?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12059-should-christians-attend-gay-weddings/): Question 12059. Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture warriors. They are usually someone whose brother, colleague or oldest friend has sent an invitation, and who loves that person and does not want to...
- [What about cohabiting before marriage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12058-what-about-cohabiting-before-marriage/): Question 12058. Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation arrives with a great deal of embarrassment attached on both sides. I want to answer the doctrinal question honestly and then spend most of the...
- [Is it biblical to love the sinner and hate the sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12064-love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin-analysis/): Question 12064. The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which surprises people. It comes closest to a line of Augustine’s about loving people and hating their faults, and it reached English through Gandhi of all...
- [What about alternative medicine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11097-what-about-alternative-medicine/): Question 11097 The phrase alternative medicine covers such an enormous range of things that treating it as one subject is the first mistake most of us make. It stretches from a cup of peppermint tea for indigestion all the way to practices that involve summoning spirit guides, and lumping those together produces either needless panic...
- [Should Christians use doctors?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11096-should-christians-use-doctors/): Question 11096 Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in a low voice by someone who has been told by a well-meaning friend that real believers trust God rather than the NHS. The question deserves...
- [Should Christians take medication?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11101-should-christians-take-medication/): Question 11101 Should Christians take medication, particularly the sort that works on the mind? I get asked this quietly, often after a service, usually by someone who has already been taking it for months and has never told anyone at church. The secrecy tells you everything about how badly we have handled this subject. My...
- [What is biblical marriage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12010-what-is-biblical-marriage/): Question 12010 Biblical marriage is not a religious variation on a general human institution. It is the institution, given by God before there were nations, laws, courts or churches, and every later arrangement is a departure from it or an approximation to it. That is a bold claim, so let me show you where it...
- [What about singleness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11106-what-about-singleness/): Question 11106 Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times a year and on singleness roughly never, and then we wonder why unmarried believers in their thirties quietly drift away from congregations where they have...
- [Are there any 'white lies'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12009-are-there-any-white-lies/): Question 12009 White lies are so woven into ordinary life that most of us have never stopped to examine them. “You look wonderful in that.” “The meal was lovely.” “I am fine, thanks.” Nobody is harmed, everyone feels better, and the social machinery keeps turning. That is the theory, at any rate. The question for...
- [What about lying?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12008-what-about-lying/): Question 12008 The sin of lying looks like the easiest ethical question in the Bible. God says do not lie, so do not lie. Case closed. Then somebody asks about the Hebrew midwives, or about hiding a family from a death squad, and the simple answer starts to wobble. I want to take both parts...
- [What about self-defence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12007-what-about-self-defence/): Question 12007 Biblical self-defence stops being an abstract question the moment you hear glass breaking downstairs at two in the morning. I have been asked about this by fathers, by women living alone, by shopkeepers who have been robbed twice. It is not a seminar topic for them, and it should not be treated as...
- [What about war?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12006-what-about-war/): Question 12006 Just war thinking has been the settled position of most Christians for something like sixteen centuries, and yet I find that very few believers could tell you what it actually claims. War is one of the most painful realities in human history, and the Christian conscience has never been comfortable with it. Nor...
- [What about capital punishment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12005-what-about-capital-punishment/): Question 12005 Capital punishment is one of those questions where sincere believers land in different places, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else. Nobody should be treated as a heretic for wrestling with it. But this is not a question Scripture leaves untouched, and my concern is that we listen...
- [How do we make moral decisions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12001-how-do-we-make-moral-decisions/): Question 12001 Most moral decisions a Christian faces are not the dramatic ones. They are whether to say something about a colleague’s expenses claim, whether the tax return is entirely honest, whether to take the job that pays more and will swallow your Sundays. Nobody writes books about those small choices, and they are where...
- [What is Christian ethics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12000-what-is-christian-ethics/): Question 12000 Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make this year falls under it. What you do with your money, how you speak about an absent colleague, what you accept at work, how you...
- [What is Preaching versus Teaching?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11025-preaching-versus-teaching/): Question 11025. The difference between preaching and teaching is one of those questions that sounds academic until you sit through a service where somebody got it wrong. I have heard lectures delivered from pulpits and I have heard rousing appeals delivered in Bible studies, and in both cases the congregation went home slightly hungry without...
- [What does it mean to be a disciple?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11024-what-it-means-to-be-a-disciple/): Question 11024. Being a disciple is not a rank within Christianity; it is what a Christian is. The New Testament uses the word for the whole company of believers, and it carries a meaning our English ‘follower’ has largely lost. So what does it actually mean, day by day, in a life with a job,...
- [What is the Great Commission?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11023-what-is-the-great-commission/): Question 11023. The Great Commission is the standing order Jesus gave His followers between the resurrection and the ascension, recorded most fully at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is quoted constantly and examined rather less often. So let me take it apart slowly. What is actually commanded, to whom was it given, what authority...
- [When we say 'all Israel will be saved' what do we mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10108-when-we-say-all-israel-will-be-saved-what-do-we-mean/): Question 10108. When Paul writes that all Israel will be saved at Romans 11:26, I understand him to mean the ethnic descendants of Jacob who are physically alive at the Second Coming of Jesus, turning to their Messiah in a national conversion at the end of the Tribulation. It does not mean every Jew who...
- [What is missions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11021-what-is-missions/): Question 11021. Christian missions is the deliberate sending of people across barriers of geography, language and culture so that Christ is made known where He is not yet named. That is the working definition I use, and each part of it is doing something. The word itself comes from the Latin for sending, which is...
- [What is discipleship?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11019-what-is-discipleship/): Question 11019. Christian discipleship has become a word we use for programmes: a course, a booklet, a six-week series for new believers. The New Testament uses it for something considerably larger, and considerably less optional. A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher in order to become like him. That is the whole idea,...
- [How do we share the gospel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11018-how-do-we-share-the-gospel/): Question 11018. Most Christians want to share the gospel and do not, and the reason is rarely a lack of conviction. It is that the moment arrives and they have no idea what to say, so they say something about church instead and spend the evening annoyed with themselves. So this is a practical answer...
- [How do we make disciples?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11020-how-do-we-make-disciples/): Question 11020. Jesus told His followers to make disciples, and the church has spent two thousand years discovering how easy it is to do something else instead. We gather crowds, run courses, fill diaries, and quietly hope that formation happens somewhere in the middle. So this is a practical answer to a practical question. What...
- [What Biblical guidance is there for single Christians on marriage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11062-biblical-guidance-for-single-christians/): Question 11062. Single Christians are frequently handed a mixture of unhelpful advice, ranging from the assurance that God has someone lined up to the suggestion that they should stop looking and then he will provide, which are two ways of saying that the situation is temporary and slightly embarrassing. Scripture does something much better than...
- [Can Christians date non-Christians?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11061-can-christians-date-non-christians/): Question 11061. Dating unbelievers is a question the Bible never addresses directly, for the simple reason that dating as we know it did not exist when Scripture was written. That has allowed a good deal of creative reasoning over the years, most of it arriving at the conclusion the person wanted before they started. So...
- [What about soul ties?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11055-what-about-soul-ties/): Question 11055. Soul ties come up more often than you might expect, usually from a believer who has been told that a past relationship has left an invisible spiritual attachment which must be broken by a specific prayer before they can move on. The teaching arrives with real pastoral urgency and often with genuine distress...
- [Why are prayers unanswered?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11049-why-are-prayers-unanswered/): Question 11049. Few things wound a believer more quietly than unanswered prayer. You have prayed for the marriage, the diagnosis, the wayward son, the job, and heaven has felt like a ceiling rather than an open door. I have sat with people in that place, and I have been in that place myself, and I...
- [How does doctrine help me in times of suffering?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11073-how-does-doctrine-help-in-times-of-suffering/): Question 11073 Doctrine in suffering sounds, at first hearing, like the least useful thing on offer. When someone is sitting in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, a paragraph about the attributes of God can feel like being handed a manual while the house burns. I have sat in those corridors, and I...
- [How do I balance doctrinal conviction with humility?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11074-balance-doctrinal-conviction-humility/): Question 11074 Doctrinal conviction and humility are usually presented as rivals, as though a man could have one only by giving ground on the other. The confident believer is assumed to be arrogant, and the humble believer is assumed to be vague. I have met both caricatures in the flesh, and I have also met...
- [What Bible reading plan should I use?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11075-what-bible-reading-plan-should-i-use/): Question 11075 A Bible reading plan is a tool, and like every tool it is only as good as the job you are asking it to do. People usually ask me which Bible reading plan they should use when what they really want to know is why the last three collapsed by the middle of...
- [How much time should I spend reading the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11076-how-much-time-reading-bible/): Question 11076 Daily Bible reading raises a question of quantity almost immediately, and the question is usually asked with a slightly guilty face. How long is long enough? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Is there a figure that would settle the matter and let me stop worrying about it? I understand why people want a number....
- [What is the difference between cheap grace and costly grace?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7064-what-is-the-difference-between-cheap-grace-and-costly-grace/): Question 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let...
- [Is re-dedication different from being saved again?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7061-is-re-dedication-different-from-being-saved-again/): Question 07061 Christian re-dedication is not being saved again, and the difference matters more than it might sound. Salvation happens once and cannot be repeated, because the new birth is not the kind of thing that can be undone and redone. Re-dedication is the renewal of a commitment that has gone cold, and that can...
- [What is a backslider and can they return to God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7060-what-is-a-backslider-and-can-they-return-to-god/): Question 07060 A backsliding Christian is a believer who has drifted away from close fellowship with God, and yes, they can come back. In fact the whole of Scripture is arranged to tell them so, and I have never yet met a returning believer whom God turned away at the door. The word backslider is...
- [What about Lot offering his daughters?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60086-lot-offering-his-daughters-genesis-19/): Question 60086. Lot’s daughters are the subject of one of the ugliest sentences in the Bible. The men of Sodom have surrounded the house demanding that Lot hand over his two visitors, and Lot answers by offering his two virgin daughters to the mob instead, telling the crowd to do to them as they please....
- [What is meant by you will be given whatever you ask for in my name?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11077-whatever-you-ask-in-my-name/): Question 11077 Asking in my name is one of the most quoted promises Jesus ever made and one of the most consistently mishandled. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13). Read on its own, that sentence sounds like a blank cheque...
- [What is meant by speak to this mountain?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11078-what-is-meant-by-speak-to-this-mountain/): Question 11078 Speaking to this mountain has become one of the standard phrases of a certain kind of Christian teaching, usually meaning that a believer may address a problem out loud and command it to shift. Debt, illness, a difficult employer, all of these get labelled mountains and are duly spoken to with varying degrees...
- [Why is there no thanksgiving in the Lord’s Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11079-why-is-there-no-thanksgiving-in-the-lords-prayer/): Question 11079 The Lord’s Prayer contains adoration, submission, petition, confession and a request for protection, and somebody always notices that it contains no thanksgiving. For a prayer given by Jesus as a model, in a Bible that commands gratitude on almost every page, that looks like a surprising gap. I have been asked about it...
- [Why pursue holiness if already sanctified?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q7085-why-pursue-holiness-if-already-sanctified/): Question 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who has just grasped the doctrine of positional sanctification for the first time. If my standing cannot improve, what exactly is the effort for? The New...
- [Should Christians keep Jewish festivals?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11044-should-christians-keep-jewish-festivals/): 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 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....
- [Should we worship on Saturday or Sunday?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11092-should-we-worship-on-saturday-or-sunday/): 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 a Hebrew Roots teacher and is genuinely unsettled. Sometimes it comes from someone who simply wonders why the church meets when it does. Either way...
- [What is the role of the law for Christians today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11089-role-of-the-law-for-christians/): 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 obligation. It appears in Galatians 6:2 and again, in a slightly different form, in 1 Corinthians 9:21, where Paul describes himself as not being outside...
- [Is modern Israel prophetically significant?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10065-is-modern-israel-prophetically-significant/): 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 state there since 1948, sits squarely within the pattern of what the prophets said would happen before God finishes His programme with that nation. The...
- [What happens to unbelievers who die during the Millennium?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10197-unbelievers-who-die-during-the-millennium/): Question 10197. There will be unbelievers who die during the thousand year reign of Jesus, and Scripture is not silent about them. That surprises people, because we tend to imagine the kingdom as a place where nobody dies and nobody rebels, but the prophets describe something more textured than that. Two passages carry most of...
- [What is the Land (Palestinian) covenant?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10008-what-is-the-land-covenant/): 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 a land that Scripture never calls Palestine. Yet this neglected covenant answers one of the most contested questions of our age: does the Jewish people...
- [What is the Abrahamic covenant and why is it significant for eschatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10005-abrahamic-covenant-and-eschatology/): 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 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,...
- [How many dispensations are there in the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10002-how-many-dispensations-are-there/): 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 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...
- [What is the abomination of desolation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10031-what-is-the-abomination-of-desolation/): Question 10031. The abomination of desolation is a phrase that comes straight from the prophet Daniel and is picked up by Jesus Himself, and it describes a supreme act of sacrilege that marks the turning point of the Tribulation. When I speak of the abomination of desolation I mean the moment the Antichrist desecrates the...
- [Who are the two witnesses in Revelation 11?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10030-who-are-the-two-witnesses-in-revelation-11/): Question 10030. The two witnesses of Revelation 11 are among the most vivid figures in all of prophecy, two men clothed in sackcloth who prophesy in Jerusalem during the Tribulation, are struck down by the beast, and then rise from the dead before a watching world. I take the two witnesses to be two literal...
- [What is the partial rapture theory?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10028-what-is-the-partial-rapture-theory/): Question 10028. The partial rapture theory teaches that only those believers who are watchful, spiritual and ready will be caught up when Jesus comes, while carnal or careless Christians are left behind to pass through the Tribulation as a kind of discipline. It is an unusual view, held by a sincere minority, and I want...
- [What is the pre-wrath rapture view?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10027-what-is-the-pre-wrath-rapture-view/): Question 10027. The pre-wrath rapture view is a more recent proposal that places the catching away of the Church late in the Tribulation, after most of it has run but before the final outpouring of God’s wrath in the closing months. It became widely known through the writing of Marvin Rosenthal and Robert Van Kampen,...
- [What is midtribulationism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10025-what-is-midtribulationism/): Question 10025. The midtribulation rapture is the view that Jesus will catch the Church up to Himself not before the Tribulation and not at its end, but at its midpoint, roughly three and a half years into the seven-year period. Midtribulationism sits between the pretribulational and posttribulational positions, and it deserves a fair hearing before...
- [What is pretribulationism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10024-what-is-pretribulationism/): 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 through it and not at its end. Pretribulationism is not a fringe curiosity but a reading that flows naturally from taking the whole Bible at...
- [What is the difference between the rapture and the Second Coming?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10023-difference-between-rapture-and-second-coming/): 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 anything else I can name. Keep them distinct and the whole prophetic landscape comes into focus. Blur them and you will be forced to spiritualise...
- [Is the rapture taught in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10022-is-the-rapture-taught-in-scripture/): 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 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...
- [What is the apostasy or falling away before Christ returns?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10085-what-is-the-apostasy-before-christs-return/): Question 10085. A falling away must come before the day of the Lord, according to Paul, and Christians have argued about what he meant ever since. Some read it as a great abandonment of the faith in the last days. Others read it as a technical term for the Rapture itself. The two readings could...
- [What is the man of lawlessness (man of sin)?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10084-what-is-the-man-of-lawlessness/): Question 10084. The man of lawlessness is Paul’s name for the final world ruler who will dominate the Tribulation period, oppose God openly, and be destroyed by the appearing of Jesus. He is called the son of destruction in the same breath, and older translations know him as the man of sin. He is not...
- [What is the restrainer in 2 Thessalonians 2?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10083-what-is-the-restrainer-in-2-thessalonians-2/): Question 10083. A restraining force is at work in the world right now, holding back the emergence of the most evil man who will ever live. That is the claim Paul makes in 2 Thessalonians 2, and it raises the obvious question: what, or who, is doing the holding? The identity of this restraining force...
- [What is the doctrine of imminence?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10081-what-is-the-doctrine-of-imminence/): Question 10081. The doctrine of imminence is one of those phrases that sounds like seminary furniture until you notice how much of your life it touches. Put simply, it means that the Lord’s coming for His Church could happen at any moment, that nothing in prophecy has to occur first, and that no believer is...
- [Why is date setting for Jesus' return wrong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10080-why-is-date-setting-for-christs-return-wrong/): Question 10080. Date setting has a long and embarrassing history in the church, and it keeps coming back because the longing underneath it is real. We want the Lord to come. We read the prophetic Scriptures, we glance at the news, and something in us wants to close the gap between promise and fulfilment by...
- [Can we know when Jesus will return?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10079-can-we-know-when-jesus-will-return/): Question 10079. Can we know when Jesus will return? The short answer is no, and it comes from His own lips rather than from any caution of mine. “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36). That ought to...
- [What are the bowl (vial) judgements in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10034-what-are-the-bowl-vial-judgments-in-revelation/): Question 10034. The bowl judgements in Revelation, sometimes called the vial judgements in older translations, are the last and most severe of the three great series of judgements in the Tribulation. Where the seal judgements and the trumpet judgements struck in part, the bowl judgements fall in full, for in them the wrath of God...
- [What are the seal judgements in Revelation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10032-what-are-the-seal-judgments-in-revelation/): Question 10032. The seal judgements in Revelation are the first of three great series of judgements that fall upon the earth during the Tribulation, and they open the whole terrible sequence. When the Lamb breaks the seven seals of the scroll, wave after wave of judgement is released, and I want to walk through the...
- [What is the difference between historic and dispensational premillennialism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10094-historic-vs-dispensational-premillennialism/): 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 real kingdom. Against amillennialism and postmillennialism, both stand together, and I want to say clearly at the outset that historic premillennialists are brothers in Christ...
- [What role does Jerusalem play in end times events?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10093-role-of-jerusalem-in-end-times-events/): Question 10093. Jerusalem in prophecy is not one topic among many. It is the stage on which the closing acts of the biblical drama are played out. The city God chose, where He set His name, where His Son was crucified and rose, is the place to which He returns and from which He will...
- [What is the significance of the temple in end times prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10091-significance-of-the-temple-in-end-times-prophecy/): Question 10091. The temple in prophecy is one of those threads that, once you see it, runs through the whole Bible and refuses to be tidied away. It begins with a tent in a desert, becomes Solomon’s building, is destroyed and rebuilt, is destroyed again by Roman armies, and then reappears in passages describing events...
- [Is the Church promised deliverance from God's wrath?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10090-is-the-church-promised-deliverance-from-gods-wrath/): Question 10090. Deliverance from wrath is not a secondary curiosity in eschatology. It goes to the heart of what the Church is promised and, in my view, to the heart of the pretribulational case. If God has told His people that they will not face the coming outpouring of judgement, then the timing of the...
- [What is the wrath of God in the tribulation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10089-wrath-of-god-in-the-tribulation/): Question 10089. The wrath of God during the Tribulation is the most sobering subject in prophetic Scripture, and it is the one modern Christians are least comfortable discussing. We would rather speak of love, and rightly, until we notice that the Bible sees no contradiction between the two. Revelation describes a period in which the...
- [What are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10088-four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse/): Question 10088. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are among the most recognisable images in Scripture, borrowed by artists and novelists who have never opened Revelation. They appear as the Lamb opens the first four of seven seals, and each opening sends out a rider whose colour and equipment tell you what he brings. Conquest,...
- [What is the meaning of one taken, one left in Matthew 24?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10087-meaning-of-one-taken-one-left-matthew-24/): Question 10087. The one taken one left saying in Matthew 24:40-41 must be among the most quoted prophetic verses in popular Christianity. It has been printed on bumper stickers, set to music and used as the backbone of novels and films. Almost everyone who quotes it assumes that being taken means being caught up to...
- [What will happen to children at the rapture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10086-what-will-happen-to-children-at-the-rapture/): Question 10086. What happens to children at the rapture is one of the questions I am asked most often by parents, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked with a catch in the voice, usually late in a conversation, by a mother or father who has just realised what the...
- [What is futurism in biblical interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10137-what-is-futurism-in-biblical-interpretation/): 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 be fulfilled literally in a future period. It is the position I hold and the position I believe the text requires. It is one of...
- [What is preterism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10136-what-is-preterism/): 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 Romans in AD 70. The name comes from the Latin praeter, meaning past, and that single word tells you everything about the direction of the...
- [What is the relationship between the Millennium and the eternal state?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10132-relationship-between-millennium-and-eternal-state/): 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 different conditions, different populations and different purposes. Once you have the sequence clear, passages that seemed to contradict each other fall into place, and you...
- [What is the blessed hope?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10153-what-is-the-blessed-hope/): 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 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...
- [What was the Brownsville Revival?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4157-the-brownsville-revival/): Question 4157. The Brownsville Revival was a sustained season of intense meetings that began on Father’s Day in 1995 at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, and continued for several years. It drew enormous crowds, with people queuing for hours and travelling great distances, and it became one of the most talked-about religious events...
- [What was the Toronto Blessing?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4156-the-toronto-blessing/): Question 4156. The Toronto Blessing is the name given to a wave of unusual religious phenomena that began in 1994 at a church near Toronto airport and spread to thousands of congregations across the world. For a few years it was almost impossible to be part of charismatic church life in Britain without encountering it...
- [How is blaspheming the Spirit different from speaking against the Son of Man?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4155-blasphemy-against-the-spirit/): Question 4155. This is one of the genuinely puzzling sayings of Jesus, and blasphemy against the Spirit seems at first to be ranked as worse than blasphemy against the Son himself. ‘Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven’ (Matthew...
- [How can a believer know they have not committed the unforgivable sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4154-fear-of-the-unforgivable-sin/): Question 4154. The fear of the unforgivable sin is one of the heaviest burdens I am ever asked to help carry, and it tends to settle on the most sensitive souls rather than the careless ones. People come convinced they have ruined themselves forever, replaying some thought or word and bracing for a verdict of...
- [Can a Christian commit the unforgivable sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4153-commit-the-unforgivable-sin/): Question 4153. Can a true Christian commit the unforgivable sin? I want to answer that plainly at the very start, because leaving it hanging only prolongs the fear: no, a genuine believer in Jesus cannot commit the unforgivable sin. That answer needs explaining and grounding, but I do not want anyone reading on in needless...
- [What is the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4152-the-unforgivable-sin/): Question 4152. Few questions arrive in a pastor’s study carrying more fear than this one, and the unforgivable sin has tormented more tender consciences than almost any other phrase in the Bible. People lie awake convinced they have crossed a line from which there is no coming back. So I want to handle this with...
- [Why is the Holy Spirit symbolised by water?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4151-spirit-symbolised-by-water/): Question 4151. The Spirit symbolised by water is a picture that would have spoken instantly to people who knew what it was to be thirsty. We turn a tap and water appears, so the force of the image can pass us by. In a dry land, water was the difference between life and death, and...
- [What Is the Practice of Soaking Prayer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4161-soaking-prayer/): Question 4161. Soaking prayer is a style of prayer that grew up in renewal and charismatic circles, in which a person lies down or sits quietly, often with gentle worship music playing, and simply rests in God’s presence for a long stretch without speaking much or asking for anything in particular. The aim is to...
- [What Is Grave Soaking in Charismatic Circles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4160-grave-soaking/): Question 4160. Grave soaking, sometimes called grave sucking or mantle grabbing, is the practice in some charismatic circles of lying on or beside the grave of a famous dead preacher in order to soak up the anointing that supposedly still lingers there. People have travelled to the resting places of healing evangelists of past generations,...
- [What Is the Holy Laughter Movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4159-holy-laughter-movement/): Question 4159. The holy laughter movement is the label attached to a wave of charismatic experience that surged through certain churches from the early 1990s onward, in which whole congregations would dissolve into prolonged, helpless laughter presented as a direct outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I do not come to this as a stranger looking...
- [How the Spirit Empowers Elders to Lead](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4168-spirit-empowers-elders/): Question 4168. The Holy Spirit empowers elders for the work of leading a local church, and the New Testament shows us how, in the appointing of overseers, in the gifts He gives them, and in the daily strength He supplies for a demanding task. When people ask how the Spirit empowers elders, they often picture...
- [How Is Anointing Oil Used Biblically?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4167-anointing-oil-biblically/): Question 4167. Anointing oil runs right through the Bible, from the consecration of priests and kings in the Old Testament to the instruction in James that the elders anoint the sick with oil, and many believers are unsure what it actually means or whether the church should still use it. There is nothing magical in...
- [The Pentecostal Doctrine of Initial Evidence](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4166-initial-evidence-tongues/): Question 4166. The doctrine of initial evidence is the classic Pentecostal teaching that speaking in tongues is the necessary first sign that a person has been baptised in the Holy Spirit, so that anyone who has not spoken in tongues has not yet received this baptism. It is one of the defining doctrines of the...
- [The Word of Faith View of the Holy Spirit](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4165-word-of-faith-spirit/): Question 4165. The Word of Faith movement is the stream of teaching, popularised through prosperity preachers and broadcast ministries, that treats faith as a creative force released by spoken words and treats the Holy Spirit largely as the power that makes this force work. If you have ever heard that you can speak your healing...
- [Kenneth Hagin's Teaching on the Holy Spirit](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4164-kenneth-hagin-holy-spirit/): Question 4164. Kenneth Hagin, who died in 2003, was the man more than any other who gave the Word of Faith movement its shape, and his teaching on the Holy Spirit has reached far beyond his own ministry into the assumptions of millions of charismatic believers. When people ask me about prosperity teaching, positive confession,...
- [What Was the Latter Rain Movement?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4163-latter-rain-movement/): Question 4163. The Latter Rain movement was a revival that broke out in 1948 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and although it was formally disowned by the main Pentecostal denominations within a few years, its ideas have proved remarkably durable and lie behind a great deal of what we see in charismatic circles today. To understand...
- [What Is Bethel Church's Pneumatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4162-bethel-church-pneumatology/): Question 4162. Bethel Church in Redding, California, has become one of the most influential charismatic ministries in the world, and its doctrine of the Holy Spirit shapes the worship, expectations, and practices of countless congregations far beyond its own walls. When people ask me about Bethel Church, they are usually asking about more than one...
- [The Spirit and Vocational Discernment](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4178-vocational-discernment/): Question 4178. How does the Holy Spirit guide a believer in vocational discernment, in those large decisions about what work to take up, where to live, and how to spend the one life God has given us? Many sincere Christians approach vocational discernment expecting a private message, a voice or an unmistakable sign that will...
- [The Spirit and Your Calling to Ministry](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4177-calling-to-ministry/): Question 4177. What is the Spirit’s role in a person’s calling to ministry, and how can anyone be sure that the call is from God rather than from their own ambition or a passing enthusiasm? This is one of the weightiest questions a believer can face, because a genuine calling to ministry shapes the whole...
- [What Does 'Stir Up the Gift' Mean?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4176-stir-up-the-gift/): Question 4176. When Paul tells Timothy to stir up the gift that is in him, what exactly is he asking his young colleague to do? The phrase has a vivid picture behind it, and once you see the image the meaning opens up. Paul is not telling Timothy to acquire something he lacks; he is...
- [Spiritual Gifts and the Laying On of Hands](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4175-laying-on-of-hands-gifts/): Question 4175. Can a believer today receive a spiritual gift through the laying on of hands, the way Timothy seems to have received something through Paul’s hands? This is a genuinely contested question, and I want to handle it with care, because there are sincere believers on more than one side and the texts themselves...
- [Identifying Spiritual Gifts in a Believer](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4174-identifying-spiritual-gifts/): Question 4174. When it comes to identifying spiritual gifts, believers often reach first for a questionnaire, tick a few boxes, and come away with a printout telling them their top three gifts as though the Spirit could be diagnosed like a personality type. I understand the appeal, and such tools are not worthless, but Scripture...
- [Do Spiritual Gifts Change Over Time?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4173-do-spiritual-gifts-change/): Question 4173. Do spiritual gifts change over time, or once the Spirit gives a gift is it fixed for life like the colour of your eyes? This is a question I hear from believers who served wholeheartedly in one capacity for years and then sensed the Lord drawing them elsewhere, and who wonder whether something...
- [Can a Christian Have More Than One Gift?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4172-more-than-one-gift/): Question 4172. Can a Christian have more than one gift from the Holy Spirit, or are we each handed a single speciality and told to stay in our lane? The short answer is that yes, a believer can certainly have more than one gift, and many believers plainly do. When I read the New Testament...
- [Spiritual Gifts and Talents: The Difference](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4171-spiritual-gifts-and-talents/): Question 4171. The difference between spiritual gifts and talents, and between both of those and a learned ability, is a question I am asked more often than almost any other in this whole area of the Spirit’s work. People want to know whether their flair for music, their head for numbers or their knack for...
- [Spirit-Led Preaching vs Emotion-Led Preaching](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4170-spirit-led-preaching/): Question 4170. The difference between Spirit-led preaching and emotion-led preaching is one of the most practically important things a preacher can learn, and one of the easiest to get wrong. I have stood in services where the atmosphere was electric and the people were moved to tears, and I have come away uneasy, wondering whether...
- [The Holy Spirit and Ordination](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4169-holy-spirit-and-ordination/): Question 4169. The Holy Spirit and ordination are joined together in the New Testament far more closely than our tidy modern ceremonies sometimes let on. We tend to picture ordination as a service of certificates, robes and a kind handshake from the deacons, and there is nothing wrong with marking the moment well. Yet when...
- [How does the Spirit work through preaching to convert sinners?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4188-the-spirit-in-preaching/): Question 4188. Anyone who has preached for long comes to feel the weight of this question, because the work of the Spirit in preaching is the difference between words that only inform and words that actually save. I can prepare a sermon, choose my texts, order my arguments, and deliver them as clearly as I...
- [How does the Spirit comfort a dying believer in their final hours?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4187-comfort-a-dying-believer/): Question 4187. There is no hour in which the ministry of the Spirit is more precious than the last, and to ask how He will comfort a dying believer is to ask about the place where all our theology is finally tested. I have sat at many bedsides, holding the hand of a brother or...
- [How does the Spirit minister to believers in doubt?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4186-the-spirit-in-doubt/): Question 4186. The ministry of the Spirit in doubt is something I wish more Christians understood, because doubt frightens believers far more than it needs to. A question rises that you cannot answer. A wave of unbelief washes over you in the night. You wonder whether any of it is true, or whether you were...
- [What is the Holy Spirit's ministry to believers in wilderness seasons?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4184-spirit-in-wilderness-seasons/): Question 4184. Most believers, if they walk with God long enough, come to know what I call the dry places, and the ministry of the Spirit in wilderness seasons is one of the least understood and most needed truths in the Christian life. By a wilderness season I mean those stretches when God feels distant,...
- [How does the Spirit minister to believers in suffering?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4183-the-spirit-in-suffering/): Question 4183. When we talk about the Spirit in suffering, we are touching one of the most tender places in the Christian life, because suffering is where our theology either becomes real or falls apart. It is one thing to confess that the Holy Spirit indwells the believer when life is calm. It is another...
- [How does the Spirit help the believer overcome a besetting sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4182-overcome-a-besetting-sin/): Question 4182. Almost every Christian I have ever pastored has had at least one sin that seems to cling closer than the rest, and the longing to overcome a besetting sin is one of the most painful and persistent struggles of the believing life. It may be a temper that flares before you can stop...
- [What is the difference between being Spirit-led and being impulse-led?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4181-spirit-led-and-impulse-led/): Question 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong feeling rises up, an urge to speak, to give, to act, to walk away, and we baptise it with the language of guidance. We say...
- [How does the Spirit guide in marriage decisions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4180-spirit-and-marriage-decisions/): Question 4180. When people ask me how the Spirit and marriage decisions relate, they usually want one of two things. Either they are single and longing to know whether a particular person is the one God has for them, or they are already courting and want assurance that they are not making a terrible mistake....
- [What is the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4179-spirit-and-the-conscience/): Question 4179. Few questions touch daily Christian living as closely as the relationship between the Spirit and the conscience, because both of them speak to us from within and we do not always find it easy to tell their voices apart. You feel a check before you say something unkind. You feel a weight after...
- [How is the Holy Spirit the primary missionary of the church?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4198-spirit-primary-missionary/): Question 4198. We talk a great deal about famous missionaries and almost never about the fact that the Holy Spirit is the primary missionary of the church, and I am convinced that this single omission has done more to confuse our thinking about mission than any other. We picture mission as something the church does...
- [How can a church grieve the Holy Spirit corporately?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4197-church-grieve-the-spirit/): Question 4197. We usually think it is possible to grieve the Spirit only as individuals, in the privacy of our own hearts, but Paul’s warning was written to a whole church and aimed at the way its members treated one another. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for...
- [How does the Spirit produce love among believers?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4196-love-among-believers/): Question 4196. The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the Holy Spirit grows. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, He said, if you have love for one another (John 13:35)....
- [What does Philippians 2 mean by being of one spirit and one mind?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4195-one-spirit-and-one-mind/): Question 4195. When Paul calls the Philippians to be of one mind, he is not asking a roomful of different people to think identical thoughts, and a great deal of needless guilt has been laid on believers who assumed he was. The language appears across Paul’s letter to Philippi, in his plea that they stand...
- [What does Paul mean by the unity of the Spirit in Ephesians 4:3?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4194-the-unity-of-the-spirit/): Question 4194. When Paul tells the Ephesians to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3), he hands the church one of its most precious and most misunderstood phrases. People reach for it whenever they want to paper over a disagreement, as though the unity of the...
- [How does the Spirit guard a local church from division?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4193-spirit-and-church-division/): Question 4193. Nothing wounds a congregation quite like church division, and nothing exposes how badly we need the Holy Spirit more clearly than the way a fellowship can tear itself apart over things that will not matter in a hundred years. A fallout over the colour of the carpet, a faction gathering round a charismatic...
- [What is the Spirit's role in church discipline?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4192-spirit-and-church-discipline/): Question 4192. Few subjects make a congregation more uneasy than church discipline, and almost no one stops to ask what the Holy Spirit has to do with it. We tend to picture discipline as a grim, legal business, a committee with folded arms removing a name from a roll. Scripture paints something altogether warmer and...
- [What is the Spirit's role in believer's baptism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4191-spirit-and-believers-baptism/): Question 4191. Ask most people what the Holy Spirit has to do with believer’s baptism and they will picture the water and stop there, as though the Spirit were a spectator at the side of the pool. That gets it exactly backwards. The water is the picture; the Spirit is the reality the picture points...
- [What is the Spirit's role in the Lord's Supper?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4190-spirit-and-the-lords-supper/): Question 4190. We rarely stop to ask what the Holy Spirit is doing at the Lord’s Supper, and I think that is because we have quietly assumed He is not doing much. The bread and the cup are on the table, the words of institution are read, we eat and drink and go home. Yet...
- [How does the Spirit make Scripture come alive during personal devotional reading?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4189-spirit-in-devotional-reading/): Question 4189. There is a world of difference between reading the Bible and meeting God in it, and that difference is the whole point when we ask how the Spirit makes Scripture come alive during devotional reading. You can sit down with the same chapter on two mornings running. One day the words lie flat...
- [What is the Spirit's role in the believer's resurrection and entry into glory?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4199-spirit-and-resurrection/): Question 4199. The bond between the Spirit and resurrection is one of the richest truths the New Testament holds out to us, and it answers a question that sits quietly in the heart of every believer. What happens to me when I die, and how do I ever arrive at the glory God has promised?...
- [What about headship and submission?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11105-headship-and-submission/): Question 11105 Few phrases in Christian teaching have done as much good and as much harm as headship and submission. Used as Scripture uses them, they describe a marriage of extraordinary tenderness. Used as some men have used them, they have kept women in frightening situations and given the whole idea a stench it did...
- [What are the roles of husband and wife?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11104-roles-of-husband-and-wife/): Question 11104 What Scripture asks of a husband and wife has become one of the hardest subjects to discuss calmly, partly because the words have been abused and partly because most people arrive at the conversation with a picture already in their heads. Some imagine a 1950s household with a silent woman and a man...
- [How do I know God's will?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11005-how-do-i-know-gods-will/): Question 11005. Nothing brings people to my study door more often than the problem of knowing God’s will. Should I take the job, marry this person, move to that city, train for ministry, stay or go? Underneath the particular decision there is usually the same anxiety: that God has a single hidden plan, that I...
- [Is divorce ever permitted?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11007-is-divorce-ever-permitted/): Question 11007. Few questions reach my study with more pain attached than the question of the grounds for divorce. Somebody is usually sitting opposite me who did not want any of this, who has read the verses a hundred times at two in the morning, and who is frightened that God is against them as...
- [What about dating and marriage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11006-what-about-dating-and-marriage/): Question 11006. Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern arrangement, and anyone who claims chapter and verse for a particular method is stretching the text. What Scripture does give us is a settled understanding...
- [If Christ Fulfilled the Law, Why Temple Sacrifices?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07199-temple-sacrifices-after-the-cross/): 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 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,...
- [What is fasting?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11002-what-is-fasting/): Question 11002. Biblical fasting is the deliberate setting aside of food, for a set time, in order to give undivided attention to God. That is the whole of it, and everything else people attach to the practice is either application or invention. It is one of the least discussed and most misunderstood habits in Christian...
- [How should Christians read the Bible?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11001-how-should-christians-read-the-bible/): Question 11001. Ask me how Christians should read the Bible and my first instinct is to ask what you expect to happen when you open it. Some people read the Bible the way they read an instruction manual, hunting for the paragraph that solves today’s problem. Others read the Bible the way they read poetry,...
- [How should Christians pray?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11000-how-should-christians-pray/): Question 11000. How should Christians pray? It is one of the first questions a new believer asks and one that mature believers never entirely stop asking. The disciples had watched Jesus pray and their request was not teach us about prayer but teach us to pray, which tells us something about where the difficulty actually...
- [How do I know if something is a sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11088-how-do-i-know-if-something-is-a-sin/): Question 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many things plainly, and then leaves us with hundreds of daily decisions it never mentions: this job, that programme, this investment, that friendship, this way of...
- [What did Jesus mean by cut off your hand if it causes you to sin?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q06059-if-your-right-hand-causes-you-to-sin-cut-it-off/): Question 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear...
- [What does the Bible say about work?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11009-what-does-the-bible-say-about-work/): Question 11009. Most Christians spend the largest waking portion of their lives in daily work, and a good many of them suspect it does not really count. The hours at the desk or the wheel or the checkout feel like the necessary cost of the parts of life that matter, and the parts that matter...
- [What is evangelism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11017-what-is-evangelism/): Question 11017. Biblical evangelism is the announcement of good news that has already happened. That is what the word means, and getting the definition right settles most of the anxiety that surrounds the subject. Say the word in a congregation and watch the shoulders tighten. People picture doorsteps, awkward conversations and the friend they alienated...
- [What about remarriage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11008-what-about-remarriage/): Question 11008. The question of remarriage after divorce is one of the few where I have watched churches cause real and lasting damage in both directions. Some have treated remarried believers as permanent second-class members. Others have waved the whole matter through as though Jesus had never spoken about it. I want to set out...
- [How does the Spirit minister to believers in depression?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4185-the-spirit-in-depression/): Question 4185. I want to write about the Spirit in depression with great care, because this is a subject where careless words from a pulpit have wounded many sincere believers. Depression is not the same as ordinary sadness that lifts after a good night’s sleep. It is a heavy, often prolonged darkness of mind and...
- [What about gambling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12031-what-about-gambling/): Question 12031 Christians and gambling is a question that cannot be settled by looking up a verse, because there is no verse. The Bible never names the lottery, the bookmaker or the online casino, and anyone who tells you otherwise is quoting something out of context. That does not leave us without an answer. It...
- [Why is dispensationalism important to me?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10203-why-dispensationalism-matters-to-me/): 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 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...
- [Is sex before marriage wrong?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12057-is-sex-before-marriage-wrong/): Question 12057. Is sex before marriage wrong? Yes, and I am aware that saying so plainly puts me at odds with almost everything a young person in Britain has ever been told. What I want to do is show you why Scripture says it, because a rule without a reason will not survive a single...
- [How does the Holy Spirit sanctify us?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4021-how-the-spirit-sanctifies/): Question 4021. How does the Spirit sanctifies us? I love the question because the answer takes us straight to the heart of how God changes a person. To say that the Spirit sanctifies us is to say that holiness is not something I wring out of myself by gritted teeth and willpower, but something God...
- [Is spanking biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12056-is-spanking-biblical/): Question 12056. Physical discipline is the part of this question that gets argued about, though behind it sits a whole theology of children, of authority and of correction. I want to deal with the wider matter first, because most of the heat here comes from people talking past each other. I should also say at...
- [What is the Biblical View on Family Planning and Reproductive Choices?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q12054-family-planning-and-reproductive-choices/): Question 12054. Family planning is one of the few subjects where Christians hold strong private convictions and say almost nothing publicly, which means couples often work it out alone, with no biblical teaching at all and a good deal of unspoken guilt. I want to change that a little. Not by handing down a rule...
- [What about therapy and counselling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11102-what-about-therapy-and-counselling/): Question 11102 Therapy and counselling make some Christians uneasy, and I understand why. The suspicion is that a secular discipline will quietly relocate the problem from sin to circumstance, tell you that you are fine as you are, and hand you a vocabulary of self-actualisation instead of repentance. That does happen. It is not the...
- [What about mental illness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11100-what-about-mental-illness/): Question 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has too often made things worse, and I say that as a pastor who has watched it happen. A believer with depression or an anxiety disorder is told to pray harder, to confess the hidden sin, or to stop being so introspective, and...
- [Should we expect persecution?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11099-should-we-expect-persecution/): Question 11099 Should we expect persecution, or is that something that happens to Christians in other countries and other centuries? It is a fair question for a believer in Britain, where nobody is arresting us and the worst most of us face is an awkward silence in the staff room. Yet the New Testament speaks...
- [Why do Christians suffer?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11098-why-do-christians-suffer/): Question 11098 Christian suffering is the question that empties pews and fills prayer meetings, and anyone who answers it briskly has probably not sat long enough with somebody in the middle of it. If God loves his people and has the power to help, why is the believer in the next street burying a child...
- [What Is the Difference Between Formal and Dynamic Equivalence in Bible Translation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1022-formal-and-dynamic-equivalence/): Question 1022. formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence describe two competing philosophies of Bible translation, and understanding the difference will genuinely change how you read the footnotes and prefaces of whatever translation currently sits on your shelf. This is not an argument about which translation is somehow holier than another. It is a careful question about...
- [Why Are Some Old Testament Passages Written in Aramaic?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1160-why-is-part-of-the-old-testament-in-aramaic/): Question 1160. Aramaic passages appear in the Old Testament at a handful of specific points, and the first time someone notices this in Daniel or Ezra, they usually assume it is a copying error rather than a deliberate feature of the text. It is not an error. Understanding why these Aramaic sections are there tells...
- [Why Was the New Testament Written in Koine Greek?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1161-why-was-the-new-testament-written-in-greek/): Question 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus almost certainly spoke day to day. That choice was not an accident of history so much as an instance of providence working through history, and...
- [What Is Concursive Inspiration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1170-what-is-concursive-inspiration/): Question 1170. Concursive inspiration is the term theologians use for the way God produced Scripture through human authors without either overriding their personalities or leaving the outcome to human judgement alone. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people, writing in real historical circumstances, with their own vocabularies, temperaments, and concerns. Yet what they...
- [How Do We Interpret Biblical Prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1164-how-do-we-interpret-biblical-prophecy/): Question 1164. Interpreting biblical prophecy rightly is, I think, one of the more neglected disciplines in the church today, and one of the most abused outside it. Whole sections of the Old Testament, most of the Gospels’ final discourses, and the entire book of Revelation are prophetic material, and yet many believers approach these pages...
- [How Do We Rightly Interpret Biblical Parables?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1162-how-do-we-interpret-biblical-parables/): Question 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden meaning behind every single detail rather than asking what one main point Jesus was actually making. I want to give you the method I use,...
- [How Should We Read Old Testament Narrative?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1177-how-should-we-read-old-testament-narrative/): Question 1177. Old Testament narrative makes up a larger share of Scripture than any other single genre, the accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, the exodus from Egypt, David and Saul, Elijah and the kings of Israel, and yet it may be the genre most often misread in ordinary Bible study. Christians...
- [What Is the Muratorian Fragment?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1175-what-is-the-muratorian-fragment/): Question 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I am asked often, sometimes by sincere believers who have absorbed a popular but mistaken idea from films and bestselling novels: was the list of New...
- [How Should We Read Hebrew Poetry?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1029-how-should-we-read-hebrew-poetry/): Question 1029. Hebrew poetry does not work the way English poetry does, and readers who go looking for rhyme or a regular metre come away thinking the Psalms and Proverbs are simply prose with unusual line breaks scattered through them. Once you know what to look for, Hebrew poetry becomes far more accessible, and its...
- [How Should We Read New Testament Epistles?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1178-how-should-we-read-new-testament-epistles/): Question 1178. New Testament epistles make up a large part of the New Testament, thirteen from Paul alone, plus further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to the Hebrews, and they contain some of the richest doctrinal teaching in all of Scripture, alongside deeply practical instruction for ordinary Christian living. Reading them...
- [What Translation Philosophy Lies Behind the ESV?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1023-translation-philosophy-behind-the-esv/): Question 1023. The ESV translation philosophy is worth understanding on its own terms rather than assuming it works exactly the same way as every other modern English Bible, because the ESV was built around a deliberate, clearly stated set of translation commitments from the outset. I use the ESV as my standard text for preaching,...
- [What Was the Antiochene School of Biblical Interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1182-what-was-the-antiochene-school-of-biblical-interpretation/): Question 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and its influence on how careful readers approach Scripture still matters today. Centred firmly in the ancient, historic Syrian city of Antioch, this tradition insisted on...
- [What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1181-what-was-the-alexandrian-school-of-biblical-interpretation/): Question 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently from the careful, literal-grammatical-historical method I use and teach today. Centred firmly in the great intellectual city of Alexandria in Egypt, this school of thought...
- [How Did Jesus Interpret the Old Testament?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1188-how-did-jesus-interpret-the-old-testament/): Question 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option...
- [How Does John's Gospel Relate to the Synoptic Gospels?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1187-how-does-john-s-gospel-relate-to-the-synoptic-gospels/): Question 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the Synoptic Gospels. Turn the page to John and the atmosphere changes: the parables thin out, long personal conversations take their place, and the pace slows...
- [What Is the Book of Jasher Mentioned in Joshua and 2 Samuel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1185-what-is-the-book-of-jasher-mentioned-in-joshua-and-2-samuel/): Question 1185. What is the book of Jasher mentioned in Joshua and 2 Samuel, and should its brief, tantalising appearances in Scripture make us curious about a lost inspired text? The book of Jasher is referenced twice in the Old Testament, in Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18, as a source the biblical writers themselves...
- [How Did the Apostles Use Old Testament Prophecy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1189-how-did-the-apostles-use-old-testament-prophecy/): Question 1189. The apostles’ handling of prophetic fulfilment can look bewildering to a modern reader trained to expect a strict one to one correspondence between a prediction and its outcome. Matthew tells us that the flight of the holy family into Egypt fulfilled Hosea’s line, out of Egypt I called my son, a verse that...
- [How Can Christians Study the Bible Without Knowing Greek or Hebrew?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1180-how-can-christians-study-the-bible-without-knowing-greek-or-hebrew/): Question 1180. Can an ordinary believer genuinely study the Bible well without ever learning a word of Greek or Hebrew? I get this question often, usually from someone who has just discovered how much technical vocabulary surrounds serious Bible study and has quietly concluded that real depth is reserved for people with a seminary transcript....
- [How Should We Read Biblical Wisdom Literature?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1179-how-should-we-read-biblical-wisdom-literature/): Question 1179. Wisdom literature occupies a strange and wonderful middle section of the Old Testament, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, and it is read badly more often than almost any other part of Scripture, precisely because readers bring the wrong expectations to it. Proverbs gets treated as a set of ironclad promises...
- [Is it antisemitic to say the Jews killed Jesus?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q60202-jews-killed-jesus/): Question 60202. Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used to justify expulsions, massacres and, eventually, an attempt to exterminate a people. So the question deserves a careful answer rather than a slogan in either...
- [In What Sense Does the Mosaic Law Speak Today?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q01166-mosaic-law-still-speaks-to-christians-2/): Question 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic...
- [When Were the Four Gospels Written?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1152-when-were-the-four-gospels-written/): Question 01152. When the four Gospels were actually written matters more than it might first appear, because a late date, decades after the events described, would leave room for legend to creep in before anyone wrote the story down, while an early date places the record within living memory of eyewitnesses who could still contradict...
- [Was Isaiah Written by One Author or Three?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1144-was-isaiah-written-by-one-author-or-three/): Question 1144. Isaiah authorship became a battleground topic the moment nineteenth century scholars noticed that chapters 40 through 66 read differently in tone, vocabulary, and historical setting from chapters 1 through 39, and concluded that at least two, and often three, separate writers must be responsible for the finished book we call Isaiah. I want...
- [What Is the Evidence for Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1143-evidence-for-mosaic-authorship-of-the-pentateuch/): Question 1143. Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is one of those questions that sounds academic until you realise how much rests on it. If Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and instead a handful of anonymous editors stitched it together centuries later from borrowed sources, then every place where Jesus,...
- [Who Wrote 2 Peter? The Case for Petrine Authorship](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1158-who-wrote-2-peter/): Question 1158. Petrine authorship of Second Peter has taken more scholarly fire than almost any other claim in the New Testament, and I think the letter deserves better than the suspicion it usually receives. The letter opens in the plainest possible terms, naming Simeon Peter as its author, an eyewitness of the Lord’s majesty who...
- [The Case for Pauline Authorship of All Thirteen Letters](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1155-did-paul-write-all-thirteen-letters/): Question 01155. Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name in the New Testament has been challenged by critical scholarship for well over a century, with roughly half of them, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, regularly labelled disputed or even pseudonymous in academic literature. I hold to full Pauline...
- [What Are the Bodmer Papyri?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1174-what-are-the-bodmer-papyri/): Question 1174. The Bodmer papyri are, alongside the Chester Beatty collection, among the most significant early witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament, and together these two collections have done more than almost anything else in the last century to close the historical gap between the apostles and our earliest substantial manuscript...
- [What Are the Chester Beatty Papyri?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1171-what-are-the-chester-beatty-papyri/): Question 1171. The Chester Beatty papyri are among the earliest and most significant witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, and I want to walk through what they are, how they were found, and why they matter so much to anyone asking whether the Bible we read...
- [How Should I Pray for the Sick?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11123-prayer-for-healing/): Question 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary of the excesses they have seen in certain corners of the charismatic movement, quietly stop asking God for physical healing altogether. Scripture never gives us...
- [Why Does God Seem Different in the Old and New Testaments?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2061-gods-unchanging-character/): Question 2061. I hear this question often, sometimes gently and sometimes with real frustration: why does God seem so different in the Old Testament, commanding conquest and judgment, compared to the New Testament, where Jesus speaks of love and mercy? The honest answer begins with God’s unchanging character, because the God of the Old Testament...
- [Why Did God Rest on the Seventh Day If He Doesn't Get Tired?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2007-seventh-day-rest/): Question 2007. Genesis 2:2-3 tells me that God finished His work of creation and rested on the seventh day, and that simple statement about seventh day rest raises an obvious question the moment I stop to think about it, one that catches most thoughtful readers sooner or later. God does not get tired. He does...
- [Is It Right to Raise Hands When Worshipping?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11120-raising-hands-in-worship/): Question 11120. Raising hands in worship is one of those things that can make an otherwise unremarkable Sunday morning feel suddenly loaded, because the moment someone’s arms go up in a congregation that does not usually do that, half the room is thinking about God and the other half is thinking about the person with...
- [Should We Kneel to Pray?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11119-kneeling-in-prayer/): Question 11119. Kneeling in prayer is the picture most of us reach for when we imagine someone truly serious about talking to God, and I get asked fairly often whether it is something we ought to be doing rather than just something pious people in old paintings did. It is a fair question, and an...
- [Should I Trust My Own Reading of Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0063-private-interpretation/): Question 63. Private interpretation is the phrase Peter uses to describe exactly the mistake he warns his readers against, treating a prophecy of Scripture as though it originated from the prophet’s own personal insight rather than from the Holy Spirit carrying that prophet along. The question of whether you should trust your own reading of...
- [What Is Theological Triage?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0062-theological-triage/): Question 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with identical urgency. A broken finger and a heart attack both need attention, but not the same attention, and not on the same timescale. Theological triage...
- [Why Does This Site Avoid the Word Sovereign?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0061-why-avoid-the-word-sovereign/): Question 61. Why this site avoids the word sovereign is a question worth answering directly, since a careful reader will eventually notice the pattern and might reasonably wonder whether something doctrinal is being quietly avoided along with the vocabulary. It is not. God’s absolute rule over creation, history, and every individual life is thoroughly biblical...
- [What Is the Whole Counsel of God?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0060-whole-counsel-of-god/): Question 60. The whole counsel of God is Paul’s own phrase for the complete substance of Christian doctrine, spoken to the Ephesian elders as he prepared to leave them for the last time, warning them that his conscience was clear precisely because he had held nothing back. He had not softened the hard parts, skipped...
- [Is Doctrine the Same Thing as Opinion?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0059-doctrine-or-opinion/): Question 59. Doctrine or opinion is a distinction our culture works hard to blur, treating every confident religious claim as though it were fundamentally a matter of personal preference, one view among equally valid others rather than a claim that could actually be true or false. This pressure seeps into the church too, so that...
- [What Is the Difference Between Theology and Apologetics?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0058-theology-and-apologetics/): Question 58. Theology and apologetics work so closely together that many believers use the two words as though they meant the same thing, but they answer genuinely different questions. Theology asks what Scripture actually teaches, gathering everything the Bible says about God, salvation, and the Christian life into a coherent, carefully reasoned account. Apologetics asks...
- [Why Do Theologians Use Greek and Latin Technical Terms?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0057-theological-vocabulary/): Question 57. Theological vocabulary can feel deliberately designed to shut ordinary believers out, homoousios, hypostatic union, propitiation, sanctification, a wall of unfamiliar words standing between you and a faith that Jesus taught largely through simple stories about farmers, fishermen, and lost sheep. It is a completely reasonable frustration, and I do not want to wave...
- [Why Does Theology Divide Doctrine into Categories?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0056-categories-of-doctrine/): Question 56. Categories of doctrine, Bibliology, Theology Proper, Christology, Pneumatology, Anthropology, Hamartiology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and Eschatology among them, might look at first glance like an artificial academic filing system imposed on Scripture from the outside. It is a completely fair suspicion to raise. Scripture itself was not written as a theology textbook with neat chapter...
- [What Is the Difference Between a Creed, a Confession, and a Catechism?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0055-creeds-confessions-and-catechisms/): Question 55. Creeds, confessions and catechisms often get lumped together as though they were interchangeable, three names for the same kind of document, when in fact each one does a genuinely different job. A creed states the bare essentials of the faith in the fewest possible words. A confession expands considerably on that core, addressing...
- [What Does It Mean to Entrust Sound Doctrine to Others?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0054-entrusting-sound-doctrine/): Question 54. Entrusting sound doctrine to the next generation is the specific instruction Paul gives Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, and it describes a deliberate chain of transmission Paul lays out with striking clarity: what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to...
- [What Is the Difference Between a Statement of Faith and Systematic Theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0053-statement-of-faith/): Question 53. A statement of faith and a systematic theology serve genuinely different purposes even though both attempt to summarise Christian doctrine, and confusing the two leads to unrealistic expectations of documents that were never designed to do the other one’s job. It is deliberately brief, functioning as a boundary marker defining who belongs within...
- [What Is Confessional Christianity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0052-confessional-christianity/): Question 52. Confessional Christianity describes churches and believers who hold to a formal, written confession of faith, a Baptist confession, a Reformed catechism, a denominational statement, as a settled, publicly accountable summary of what they believe Scripture teaches, used to define fellowship, guide teaching, and train new believers. Non-denominational Christianity, by contrast, typically avoids formal...
- [What Is the Analogy of Faith?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0051-analogy-of-faith/): Question 51. The analogy of faith is a hermeneutical principle stating that Scripture should always be interpreted in harmony with itself, so that no single passage is read in a way that contradicts the clear teaching of the rest of the Bible. The underlying conviction is straightforward but far-reaching: because Scripture has one ultimate divine...
- [What Is the Difference Between Systematic and Biblical Theology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0050-what-is-systematic-theology/): Question 50. Systematic theology organises the whole teaching of Scripture topically, gathering everything the Bible says about a given subject, the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, the nature of salvation, into a single coherent, logically arranged treatment. It asks, what does the whole of Scripture teach about this particular subject, drawing together texts...
- [Why Do Christians Disagree on Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0047-doctrinal-disagreement/): Question 47. Doctrinal disagreement between sincere Christians reading the very same Bible is a question that troubles many thoughtful believers, and it deserves a more careful answer than either of the two lazy responses it usually receives: that doctrine doesn’t really matter since everyone disagrees anyway, or that anyone who disagrees with you simply is...
- [Are Christians Still Under the Mosaic Law?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q07048-are-christians-still-under-the-mosaic-law/): Question 07048 The question of whether the Christian is under the Mosaic Law is one of the most practical questions in the whole of Christian doctrine, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. Whole denominations have been formed on particular answers to it, Christian consciences have been weighed down or liberated by particular readings of...
- [What Is the Danger of Prooftexting?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0045-danger-of-prooftexting/): Question 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of its surrounding context and using it to support a conclusion the passage, read in full, may not actually teach, or may even directly contradict. It...
- [What Is Doctrinal Development?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0044-doctrinal-development/): Question 44. Doctrinal development describes the genuine, historically observable way the church’s articulation of certain doctrines has grown sharper and more precise across the centuries, without the underlying truth itself ever actually changing. The doctrine of the Trinity offers the clearest example: the New Testament clearly presents Father, Son, and Spirit as each fully God...
- [What is eschatology?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q10000-biblical-eschatology/): Question 10000. Biblical eschatology is the study of last things, and it is far more than a hobby for prophecy enthusiasts with wall charts. The word comes from two Greek terms, eschatos, meaning last or final, and logos, meaning word or study. Put them together and you have the doctrine of the last things: what...
- [Is It Wrong to Change Your Mind on a Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0043-changing-your-mind-on-doctrine/): Question 43. Changing your mind on a doctrine as you mature is not automatically a sign of instability or spiritual drift, though it can feel that way, especially if you were taught to associate strong faith with never wavering on anything you were first taught. Scripture actually expects growing believers to reach deeper, more accurate...
- [What Is Cafeteria Christianity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0042-cafeteria-christianity/): Question 42. Cafeteria Christianity describes the practice of selecting which biblical teachings to accept and which to quietly set aside, much as a diner moves along a cafeteria line choosing only the dishes that appeal to them while walking past everything else. The image is unflattering by design, and it names something genuinely common: professing...
- [Why Does Catechesis for Children Matter?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0038-catechesis-for-children/): Question 38. Catechesis for children was one of the great recovered priorities of the Protestant Reformation, and the sheer volume of catechetical material the Reformers produced tells you how seriously they took it. Luther, Calvin, and the various confessional traditions that followed them all produced structured question-and-answer documents specifically designed to teach children, and often...
- [How Do I Start Family Devotions at Home?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0036-family-devotions/): Question 36. Family devotions are one of the most consistently commanded, and most consistently neglected, disciplines in ordinary Christian life. Long before Sunday school programmes or church youth groups existed, God gave parents themselves the primary responsibility for teaching their children sound doctrine, woven into the actual rhythm of daily household life rather than confined...
- [How Should a New Believer Start Learning Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0035-learning-doctrine-as-a-new-believer/): Question 35. Learning doctrine can feel like standing at the bottom of a mountain when you are new to the faith, aware that entire libraries have been written about the Trinity, the atonement, eschatology, and a dozen other subjects you barely know how to pronounce, let alone explain. That feeling is completely normal, and it...
- [What Is the Difference Between Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0026-orthodoxy-and-orthopraxy/): Question 26. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy describe two dimensions of genuine Christian faithfulness that Scripture never allows to be separated, even though believers regularly drift toward emphasising one at the expense of the other. Orthodoxy, from the Greek roots meaning right opinion or right belief, concerns what you believe about God, Christ, salvation, and the Christian...
- [What Does It Mean to Guard the Deposit of Sound Doctrine?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0022-guarding-the-deposit/): Question 22. Guarding the deposit is Paul’s own phrase for one of the central responsibilities he hands to Timothy near the end of his life, and it captures something important about how sound doctrine is meant to be treated across generations. Writing what would become his final letter, Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 1:14...
- [How Are Doctrine and Worship Connected?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0021-doctrine-and-worship/): Question 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every act of corporate worship, every song, every prayer, every sermon, teaches something true or false about who God is, whether or not anyone in the...
- [What Is Spiritual Discernment and How Does It Grow?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0014-spiritual-discernment/): Question 14. Spiritual discernment is what allows a believer to tell true teaching from false, and it does not arrive automatically the moment someone trusts Christ. Scripture treats it as a capacity that grows through use, deliberately trained by exposure to sound doctrine and honest practice at telling the difference between what is genuinely from...
- [What Is Divine Accommodation in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q0011-divine-accommodation/): Question 11. Divine accommodation is the term theologians use for a simple but important fact: God, who is infinite, eternal, and utterly beyond our full comprehension, has chosen to reveal Himself through finite, ordinary human language. He speaks of His hands, His eyes, His anger, His footstool, and a thousand other pictures drawn from human...
- [How Should Christians Read the Psalms?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1191-reading-psalms-well/): Question 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to...
- [What Is Sensus Plenior?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q1190-what-is-sensus-plenior/): Question 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the human author himself consciously understood when he wrote it, a meaning only made clear later through subsequent revelation. I want to work through this carefully,...
- [What Postures of Prayer Are Appropriate?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11118-postures-of-prayer/): Question 11118. Postures of prayer vary widely across Scripture, and that variety itself is instructive, because it tells us that God has not bound genuine prayer to a single required physical position. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying face down, hands raised, eyes lifted or lowered, all of these appear in the biblical record, offered by faithful...
- [Should a Christian Fast in Secret or Tell Others?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11117-fasting-in-secret/): Question 11117. Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it out among people who inevitably notice when you are not eating. Matthew 6:16-18 gives the clearest teaching on this question anywhere in Scripture, and it...
- [Are There Health Considerations Christians Should Observe When Fasting?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11116-fasting-and-health/): Question 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring for it wisely while fasting is not a lack of spiritual seriousness. It is simply taking seriously another thing Scripture plainly teaches: that the body...
- [How Long Should a Fast Last?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11115-length-of-fasting/): Question 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from becoming a legalistic box to tick. The Bible records fasts lasting anywhere from a single meal skipped in genuine distress to forty days of complete...
- [What Are the Different Kinds of Fasting in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11114-types-of-fasting-in-scripture/): Question 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,...
- [Should Christians Practise Lectio Divina?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11113-lectio-divina/): Question 11113. lectio divina, Latin for divine reading, is an old monastic practice of slow, meditative Scripture reading that has found its way back into evangelical conversation in recent years, and the question raised is whether Christians should actually practise it. My answer is a careful yes, with real guardrails firmly in place, because the...
- [Biblical Meditation and How It Differs from Eastern Meditation](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11112-biblical-meditation/): Question 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word “meditation” calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation is a thoroughly biblical idea, commanded and commended throughout Scripture, and it is something quite different from what the word usually suggests today. So I...
- [Christian Journalling as a Spiritual Practice](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11111-christian-journalling/): Question 11111. Christian journalling is the practice of writing down what God is teaching us, what we are praying, and how we are responding to His Word, and it raises a fair question. Is keeping a journal a genuinely biblical practice, or is it just a modern self-help habit dressed in Christian clothes? I want...
- [What Is the Discipline of Solitude?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11110-discipline-of-solitude/): Question 11110 The discipline of solitude is the deliberate practice of withdrawing from the company of others and the noise of daily life in order to be alone with God. It is one of the quieter spiritual habits, easily crowded out, yet it runs right through the life of Jesus and the saints of Scripture,...
- [The Discipline of Silence: A Biblical Guide](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11109-the-discipline-of-silence/): The discipline of silence is the deliberate practice of quieting both our surroundings and our own restless talking so that we can attend to God and to His Word without the constant noise that fills ordinary life. It is an old practice with deep roots in Scripture, and in a world of endless notifications it...
- [What Are the Spiritual Disciplines?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11108-spiritual-disciplines/): Question 11108 The spiritual disciplines are the ordinary, repeated practices through which believers place themselves in the way of God’s grace so that they may grow to know and love Him more. They are not a ladder we climb to earn God’s favour, and they are not religious performances that impress Him. They are the...
- [What does the Bible say about parenting?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q11107-what-does-bible-say-about-parenting/): Question 11107 Biblical parenting is a phrase that has sold a great many books, most of which contain considerably more method than the Bible does. Scripture is not a manual on sleep training, screen time or how to handle a fifteen-year-old who has stopped speaking to you. What it gives instead is a small number...
- [The Shema: Does 'The LORD Is One' Deny the Trinity?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2116-the-shema/): Question 2116. The Shema is Israel’s great confession of faith, recited morning and evening by devout Jews for three thousand years, and it stands at the head of every serious conversation about God’s oneness: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The name comes from its first Hebrew word,...
- [Oaks of Mamre: Who Appeared to Abraham?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2115-oaks-of-mamre/): Question 2115. The oaks of Mamre witnessed one of the most remarkable afternoons in the Old Testament: the day God came to lunch. Genesis 18 opens without any drumroll – “And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the...
- [Who Wrestled with Jacob at Peniel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2114-wrestled-with-jacob/): Question 2114. The figure who wrestled with Jacob at Peniel is introduced with deliberate mystery: “And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day” (Genesis 32:24). A man – that is all the narrator will say at first. Yet by sunrise Jacob is limping away from the...
- [Shekinah Glory: The Dwelling Presence of God](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2113-shekinah-glory/): Question 2113. The shekinah glory is the visible, radiant presence of God dwelling among His people – the cloud and fire and brightness that filled the tabernacle, settled on the temple, and made Israel unique among all the nations of the earth. Curiously, the word “shekinah” itself never appears in the Bible. It comes from...
- [Pillar of Cloud and Fire: What Was It Really?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2112-pillar-of-cloud/): Question 2112. The pillar of cloud and fire is one of the most striking sights in the entire Old Testament: a towering column that led two million people through a trackless wilderness for forty years, glowing like a furnace by night and standing like a banner by day. Yet ask what the pillar of cloud...
- [Burning Bush: Who Spoke to Moses from the Flame?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2111-burning-bush/): Question 2111. The burning bush is one of the most famous scenes in the whole Bible, yet ask who actually spoke to Moses from it and you will get a surprising variety of answers. Was it an angel? Was it God the Father? Was it, as I am persuaded, the pre-incarnate Son of God? The...
- [What Is a Christophany? Christ Before Bethlehem](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2109-a-christophany/): Question 2109. A Christophany is an appearance of the Son of God before His incarnation – the eternal Christ showing Himself to people in the Old Testament, centuries before Bethlehem. The word is built like its cousin “theophany”: Christos, “Christ”, plus phaino, “to appear”. Where a theophany is any visible appearing of God, a Christophany...
- [What Is a Theophany? A Bible Definition](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2108-a-theophany/): Question 2108. A theophany is a visible appearance of God to human beings, and once you know the word you will start spotting them all over your Old Testament. The term comes from two Greek words: theos, “God”, and phaino, “to appear” or “to show”. Put them together and you have “an appearing of God”...
- [Eternity and Everlastingness: What Is the Difference?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2107-eternity-and-everlastingness/): Question 2107. Eternity and everlastingness sound like two words for the same thing, and most of us use them interchangeably without a second thought. God lives for ever; God is eternal; surely that is one truth dressed in two coats? Not quite. The difference between eternity and everlastingness is one of the most clarifying distinctions...
- [Before Creation: Was There Ever a "Before"?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q2106-before-creation/): Question 2106. Was there a “before” before creation? It sounds like a question a child might fire at you over breakfast, and like most children’s questions it turns out to be one of the deepest anyone can ask. If God made everything, what was happening before He made it? Where was God? What was He...
- [What are the major differences between pneumatology in the Reformed, charismatic, and dispensational traditions?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4071-doctrine-of-the-spirit-traditions/): Question 4071. When I am asked to compare the doctrine of the Spirit across the Reformed, charismatic and dispensational traditions, I always begin by reassuring people that the disagreements, real and important as they are, sit on top of a vast shared foundation. On the doctrine of the Spirit these three great families of Bible-believing...
- [What is the gift of administration?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4090-the-gift-of-administration/): Question 4090. People are sometimes genuinely surprised that the gift of administration appears in the Bible at all, as though spreadsheets and rotas and Spirit-given gifts belonged to two entirely different worlds. But there it plainly is in Paul’s list, and the gift of administration is a Spirit-given ability to steer, organise and steward the...
- [What is the gift of helps and service?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4088-the-gift-of-helps/): Question 4088. I have a real and settled fondness for the gift of helps, because it is the gift that the church most takes for granted and could least possibly do without. The gift of helps is a Spirit-given ability and gladness in practical, hands-on service, the quiet support of others that frees them for...
- [What is the gift of pastoring or shepherding?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4085-the-gift-of-pastoring/): Question 4085. When people ask me about the gift of pastoring, I always start with the picture buried right inside the word itself, because the word pastor simply means shepherd. The gift of pastoring is a Spirit-given heart and ability to shepherd the people of God, to feed them, to lead them, to guard them...
- ['Let Go and Let God': Is It Biblical?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4067-let-go-and-let-god-biblical/): Question 4067. Few slogans have travelled further or faster through Christian circles than let go and let God, and I am regularly asked whether it is actually biblical or just a comforting piece of folk wisdom. My honest answer is that it is a half-truth, and half-truths are slippery, dangerous things, because the half that...
- [What is the gift of teaching?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4064-the-gift-of-teaching/): Question 4064. Of all the gifts I could be asked about, the gift of teaching is one I hold especially dear, because it is the gift God has largely given to me, and I have watched it feed and steady His people over many years. The gift of teaching is a Spirit-given ability to take...
- [What are the 'works of the flesh' versus the 'fruit of the Spirit'?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4043-works-of-the-flesh-and-fruit/): Question 4043. In Galatians 5 Paul sets two lists side by side, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, and I cannot think of a passage anywhere that more honestly maps the daily battle of the Christian life. The works of the flesh are what my old fallen nature produces when...
- [What is the difference between the Spirit's work in the Old and New Testaments?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4030-the-spirits-work-old-and-new/): Question 4030. When I trace the Spirit’s work from the opening chapter of Genesis through to the book of Acts, I find one and the same Person at work throughout, and yet a real and glorious change in the way He works once Jesus is glorified. The Spirit’s work did not begin at Pentecost. He...
- [Can a person reach a point where they can no longer respond to the gospel?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4084-point-of-no-return-gospel/): Question 4084. Few questions are as heavy as this one, and I never treat it lightly: is there a point of no return, a place where a person has so hardened themselves against God that they can no longer respond to the gospel at all? My settled answer, drawn carefully from Scripture, is that yes,...
- [What Is the Unction of the Holy One in 1 John 2:20?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4128-unction-of-the-holy-one/): Question 4128. The phrase “unction of the Holy One” appears in the King James Version of 1 John 2:20 (“But ye have an unction from the Holy One”), and it is a phrase that has lodged itself in Christian consciousness in a way that more modern translations of the same verse – “you have been...
- [How Does the Spirit's Anointing Differ from the Spirit's Filling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4127-spirits-anointing-vs-filling/): Question 4127. The Spirit’s anointing is a phrase that is used very freely in contemporary Christian conversation, not always with a great deal of precision. People speak of ‘coming under the anointing,’ of a preacher or singer as ‘anointed,’ of seeking ‘fresh anointing’ before ministry, and sometimes of ‘transferring the anointing’ from one person to...
- [Is Martyrdom a Spiritual Gift?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4126-martyrdom-spiritual-gift/): Question 4126. The question of whether martyrdom is a spiritual gift – and whether there is a special grace for martyrdom – is one that requires both honest exegesis and pastoral care. I want to answer it carefully, because getting it wrong in either direction has consequences. If we overstate the case – treating martyrdom...
- [Is Singleness a Spiritual Gift?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4125-celibacy-spiritual-gift/): Question 4125. The question of whether celibacy is a spiritual gift tends to generate two opposite responses: either people dismiss it as a peculiarly Roman Catholic concern that has nothing to do with evangelical Christianity, or they embrace it so enthusiastically that they effectively make every unmarried Christian feel as though they must have a...
- [What Is the Gift of Leadership?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4124-gift-of-leadership/): Question 4124. The gift of leadership is one of those gifts about which there is both too much talk and too little clarity in the contemporary church. Leadership has become something of a cultural obsession, and Christian ministry has not been immune to the trend. Books on leadership proliferate; conferences promise to develop leaders; organisations...
- [What Is the Law of the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4122-law-of-the-spirit/): Question 4122. The phrase “law of the Spirit” appears in one of the most important sentences Paul ever wrote. Romans 8:2 reads: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” That single sentence sits at the hinge point of the entire...
- [What Is the Gift of Hospitality?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4115-gift-of-hospitality/): Question 4115. The gift of hospitality is one that sits interestingly between what we would normally classify as a spiritual gift and what Scripture presents as a universal Christian obligation. That tension is worth taking seriously rather than dissolving too quickly in either direction. I want to start with the scriptural picture, then work through...
- [What Is the Gift of Exhortation?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4112-gift-of-exhortation/): Question 4112. The gift of exhortation is one of the motivational gifts Paul lists in Romans 12, and it is worth spending some time on the Greek behind it before diving into what the gift actually looks like in practice. The word is paraklesis – derived from the same root as parakletos, the title Jesus...
- [What Is the Gift of Giving?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4110-gift-of-giving/): Question 4110. The gift of giving is one of those spiritual gifts that Christians sometimes speak about nervously, as though naming it might somehow absolve the rest of us of the responsibility to be generous. That is a misunderstanding worth clearing up from the start, and it is where I want to begin. The gift...
- [What Is the Gift of Mercy?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4091-gift-of-mercy/): Question 4091. The gift of mercy is one of the spiritual gifts listed by Paul in Romans 12, and it is perhaps the easiest to overlook and the hardest to imitate without possessing it. When Paul writes in Romans 12:8 of “the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness,” he is describing something that...
- [What Does It Mean That the Spirit Bears Witness?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4138-spirit-bears-witness-romans-8-16/): Question 4138. “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). This verse is one of the most personally assuring statements in all of Paul’s letters, and the Spirit bears witness in Romans 8:16 in a way that is worth examining both theologically and pastorally. It is the...
- [What is the Spirit of Truth in John 14-16?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4137-spirit-of-truth-john-14/): Question 4137. Three times in the farewell discourse of Jesus, recorded in John 14-16, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth.” The first occurrence is in John 14:17, the second in 15:26, and the third in 16:13. Each appearance of the title adds something specific to our understanding of why this title belongs...
- [What Does Jesus Mean by 'Another Helper' in John 14?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4136-another-helper-john-14/): Question 4136. “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper” (John 14:16). The phrase “another Helper in John 14” is one of the richest descriptions of the Holy Spirit in all of Scripture, and a single Greek word at its centre carries more theological weight than most readers realise. Jesus...
- [Rivers of Living Water: What John 7:38-39 Means](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4135-rivers-of-living-water-john-7/): Question 4135. “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:38). The rivers of living water are Jesus’s own image for the Holy Spirit, and the setting in which He speaks these words adds considerable weight to them. This is not a quiet...
- [What is the Power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1:8?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4134-power-of-acts-1-8/): Question 4134. The power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1:8 is Jesus’s last commission before His ascension, and it is often misread. We tend to hear “power” and imagine a dramatic experience – something intense, overwhelming, perhaps visually or emotionally spectacular. But the word Jesus uses (Greek: dunamis) means effective enabling capacity: the ability...
- [Not by Might Nor by Power: Zechariah 4:6 Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4133-not-by-might-nor-by-power/): Question 4133. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). Of all the Spirit passages in the Old Testament prophets, this is perhaps the most frequently quoted in contemporary Christian contexts. It appears on banners, in sermons, in prayers – and the principle it expresses is...
- [What is the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4132-valley-of-dry-bones-ezekiel-37/): Question 4132. The valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is one of the most dramatic and theologically charged visions in all of Scripture. Bones scattered across an open valley, a prophet commanded to preach to the dead, a vast army rising – the vision lodges in the imagination long before you have worked out...
- [New Heart New Spirit: Ezekiel 36:26-27 Explained](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4131-ezekiel-36-new-heart-new-spirit/): Question 4131. The new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36 stand at the very heart of what the new covenant promises and the Spirit accomplishes. “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give...
- [What Does Joel 2:28-29 Say About the Spirit?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4130-joel-2-spirit-poured-out/): Question 4130. The Joel 2 Holy Spirit prophecy is one of the most significant in the entire Old Testament. “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see...
- [What is the Sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah 11:2?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4129-sevenfold-spirit-isaiah/): Question 4129. The sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah 11 is not a reference to seven separate spirits but to the Holy Spirit in the fullness of His Person and ministry, described through seven distinct dimensions of divine working. Isaiah 11:2 is one of the most richly packed prophetic verses in the entire Old Testament, and it...
- [Why is the Spirit symbolised by fire?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4148-spirit-as-fire/): Question 4148. The Spirit symbolised by fire is one of the most dramatic and recurring pictures in Scripture, reaching its most famous expression at Pentecost, where “divided tongues as of fire” appeared and rested on each of the believers gathered in the upper room (Acts 2:3). Fire runs through the biblical story as a consistent...
- [Why is the Spirit symbolised by a dove?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4147-spirit-as-a-dove/): Question 4147. The Spirit symbolised by a dove is one of the most visually arresting pictures in the whole New Testament, appearing at the precise moment of Jesus’ baptism when “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him” (Matthew 3:16)....
- [What are the names and titles of the Holy Spirit in Scripture?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4146-names-and-titles-of-the-holy-spirit/): Question 4146. The names and titles of the Holy Spirit in Scripture are far more numerous, and far more theologically loaded, than most believers realise, and working through them carefully is one of the best correctives I know to the modern tendency to treat the Spirit as a vague spiritual influence rather than the fully...
- [What does 2 Corinthians 3:17 mean by "where the Spirit is, there is liberty"?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4145-liberty-of-the-spirit/): Question 4145. The liberty of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is the freedom Paul says belongs to everyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, a freedom from the old covenant’s condemning, veiling, life-denying power, and from the despair of trying to please God through a law that could only ever expose sin without removing...
- [What is the ministry of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4144-ministry-of-the-spirit/): Question 4144. The ministry of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3 is Paul’s description of the new covenant he has been entrusted to preach, a covenant written not on stone tablets but on human hearts by the Spirit of the living God, and one that produces life rather than condemnation. “He has made us ministers...
- [What is the spiritual man and the natural man in 1 Corinthians 2?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4143-spiritual-man-and-natural-man/): Question 4143. The spiritual man and natural man in 1 Corinthians 2 are Paul’s two categories for describing how human beings relate to the things of God, and the difference between them is not intelligence, education or moral effort but whether or not a person has the Holy Spirit. “The natural person does not accept...
- [What does the Greek tense of Ephesians 5:18 imply about the Spirit's filling?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4142-continuous-filling-of-the-spirit/): Question 4142. The continuous filling of the Spirit is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes “be filled with the Spirit” in Ephesians 5:18, and the Greek grammar behind that command tells us something the English translation, on its own, can easily miss. The verb Paul uses is a present tense, passive, imperative....
- [What does Galatians 3 mean by receiving the Spirit by hearing with faith?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4141-receiving-the-spirit-by-faith/): Question 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it settles the whole controversy in one stroke. “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by...
- [What is the Spirit of adoption in Romans 8:15?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4140-spirit-of-adoption/): Question 4140. The Spirit of adoption is Paul’s name in Romans 8:15 for the Holy Spirit in His specific work of bringing us, as believers, into the felt reality of being God’s own children rather than His frightened servants. “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you...
- [What is the groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4139-groaning-of-the-spirit/): Question 4139. The groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26 is Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us with what he calls “groanings too deep for words”, at exactly the point where our own prayers have run dry. I have stood at enough hospital bedsides and sat with enough grieving families to know...
- [Why is the Holy Spirit symbolised by oil?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4150-spirit-symbolised-by-oil/): Question 4150. The Spirit symbolised by oil is one of the oldest pictures in the Bible, and it carries a weight that is easy to miss if we only think of oil as something for cooking or for soothing dry skin. In the ancient world oil was the substance of consecration. When something was set...
- [Why is the Holy Spirit symbolised by wind?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4149-spirit-symbolised-by-wind/): Question 4149. There is a reason the Spirit symbolised by wind runs all the way through the Bible, from the second verse of Genesis to the upper room at Pentecost, and it is no poetic accident. The biblical writers reach for wind because they are trying to describe something real about God that no tidy...
- [What was the Lakeland Outpouring?](https://bibleproclaimer.com/q4158-the-lakeland-outpouring/): Question 4158. The Lakeland Outpouring was a series of nightly meetings held in Lakeland, Florida, in 2008, led by a travelling evangelist and broadcast widely over Christian television and the internet. For a few months it gathered large crowds and attracted enormous attention before collapsing amid scandal almost as quickly as it had risen. Of...

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