Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 12057 In a culture that treats sexual expression as a fundamental right and virginity as an embarrassment, the question of sex before marriage can feel almost quaint. Yet Scripture speaks to it with clarity that has not diminished with the centuries, and the church’s task is to state what the Bible teaches honestly, compassionately,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 12024 Sexual purity is a concept that the surrounding culture regards as outdated, repressive, and unnecessary. The assumption in much of Western society is that sexual expression is a private matter to be governed by consent and personal preference, with no reference to any standard beyond the individual. Scripture takes a fundamentally different view….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 12023 Pornography is one of the most pervasive and destructive forces operating in contemporary culture, and the church is not immune. The scale of the problem is staggering: internet pornography has made what was once difficult to access freely available on every smartphone, and its consumption cuts across every demographic, including professing Christians. This…
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhy we should believe in the ‘Rapture’ (from the Latin for ‘caught up’)
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10027 The pre-wrath rapture view is a relatively recent entry into the eschatological debate, developed most fully by Marvin Rosenthal in his 1990 book The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church and further defended by Robert Van Kampen. It attempts to chart a middle course between pretribulationism and posttribulationism, arguing that the Rapture occurs during…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10028 The partial rapture theory is perhaps the least well-known of the major rapture positions, and it differs from the others not in its timing but in its scope. While pretribulationism, midtribulationism, posttribulationism, and the pre-wrath view all debate when the Rapture occurs, the partial rapture theory debates who is included in it. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10024 Pretribulationism is the view that Christ will return to gather His Church to Himself before the seven-year Tribulation period begins. It is the position held here at Bible Proclaimer, and it is the view that Ian believes best accounts for the full range of biblical evidence when the text is read according to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10022 Few doctrines provoke more debate among evangelicals than the Rapture, and one recurring challenge comes from those who argue that the concept is not actually taught in Scripture at all. The word “rapture” does not appear in English Bibles, and critics contend that the entire idea was invented in the nineteenth century by…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10023 One of the most common sources of confusion in eschatology is the assumption that the Rapture and the Second Coming are the same event described from different angles. If they are, the debate about timing is largely irrelevant. If they are not, then two distinct future events await, each with its own character,…