Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…