Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60018 The word “cult” is used loosely in popular conversation to describe everything from fringe religious movements to high-control organisations to any group someone personally dislikes. This imprecision is unhelpful. A biblical and theological understanding of what constitutes a cult is important, because cults cause real spiritual damage to real people, and identifying them…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01006 The words “prophecy” and “prediction” are often used interchangeably in popular conversation, but they are not the same thing. Understanding the difference is important for reading the Bible accurately, because biblical prophecy involves far more than foretelling the future, and reducing it to prediction alone strips it of much of its meaning and…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60098 The claim that Peter and Paul preached fundamentally different gospels is associated with a strand of dispensational teaching sometimes called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism. In its more extreme forms, this teaching argues that only Paul’s letters, sometimes only his prison epistles, constitute the relevant Scripture for the church today, since Peter was preaching a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 8126 If angels rebelled once, what stops it from happening again? When Satan and his demons are finally thrown into the lake of fire, will the remaining holy angels be safe from falling? It is a fair question, and one that touches on the security of eternity itself. If the new heavens and new…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 8006 This question strikes at the very nature of moral responsibility and the origin of evil. If angels are simply programmed to obey God, how could some have rebelled? If they have genuine freedom to choose, what does that mean for their service to God? The existence of fallen angels demonstrates that the answer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60080 On the surface, certain strands of Eastern Orthodox teaching and New Age spirituality appear to say something strikingly similar: that human beings can become divine. The Orthodox doctrine of theosis, or deification, speaks of humanity participating in the divine nature. New Age spirituality claims that we are already divine, needing only to awaken…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04033 If the Bible is the Word of God, and if its authority depends on its divine origin, then the mechanism by which God produced it matters enormously. Scripture’s own testimony is that the Holy Spirit played the decisive role in the process of inspiration, ensuring that human authors writing in their own styles,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2003 Scripture presents what appears to be a genuine tension. God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), yet plainly not all people are saved. He tells Israel through Ezekiel that He takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2018 Few theological questions carry more emotional weight. Behind the abstract formulation often lies something very personal: a parent who died without faith, a sibling who walked away from the church, a friend who never responded to the gospel no matter how many conversations took place. The question asks why an all-loving God would…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 60094 The account of Noah and the flood in Genesis 6–9 is one of the most contested passages in all of Scripture. At stake is not merely a point of ancient geography but the character of the biblical text itself, the integrity of Jesus’ teaching, the theological significance of the event, and the coherence…