Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2097 The settled answer of Scripture is that God cannot lie, and that single truth quietly holds up everything else we believe. If there were even one occasion on which God might shade the truth, every promise He has ever made would carry a question mark, and the whole life of faith would rest…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1188 If we want to learn how to read the Old Testament, 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 ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled them is not one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1170 When we say that the Bible is the Word of God, we at once raise a question about the men who actually wrote it. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people who lived in real times and wrote with their own hands. How then can the words they wrote be at…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1182 If the Alexandrian school taught the early church to look beneath the words of Scripture for a hidden spiritual meaning, the school at Antioch taught it to honour the words themselves. The two traditions ran alongside each other for centuries, and the difference between them is not a dusty quarrel but a question…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181 Long before the Reformation settled the church on a literal and grammatical reading of Scripture, two great centres of learning pulled the early church in different directions. One sat in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in Antioch in Syria, and the way each handled the Bible shaped Christian interpretation for centuries. To understand…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1187 Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you feel you are hearing three tellings of the same story. Turn to John and the air changes. The parables give way to long discourses, the crowds give way to searching conversations with individuals, and the whole pace slows down to dwell on a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1185 Twice the Old Testament pauses to point outside itself. When the sun stood still over Gibeon, the writer of Joshua adds that this is written in the book of Jashar. When David sang his lament over Saul and Jonathan, the writer of 2 Samuel notes that the song is recorded in the book…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1189 Open the New Testament and you are never far from the Old. The apostles quote it, allude to it, and build their arguments on it, returning again and again to the words this was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet. They were Jewish men steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and when…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1180 A faithful believer once told me she had stopped going to a midweek study because the leader kept reaching for the Greek, and she had begun to feel that the Bible was a locked room and only the scholars held the key. That feeling is more common than we admit, and it does…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1179 Open the middle of your Bible and you arrive in a different country. The thunder of the prophets has faded, the marching narratives of Kings and Chronicles have given way to something quieter and stranger. Here a father pleads with a son, a sufferer argues with God from an ash heap, a teacher…