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