Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting rather than threatening. In 1868 a German missionary named Frederick Klein discovered a black basalt stone in Jordan bearing an inscription from Mesha, king of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1030. The word of God makes some remarkable claims about itself, and I think the place to start is simply to listen to them before we start assessing them. That is not circular reasoning. It is the same courtesy you would extend to any significant witness in a courtroom, hearing the testimony in full…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1027. The unity of Scripture across sixty-six books, more than forty authors and roughly fifteen hundred years of composition is, on reflection, a genuinely remarkable fact, and it is worth pausing to ask directly how a collection this large and this diverse manages to read as a single, coherent book rather than a loosely…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through and hit the jarring transition from Malachi’s closing warnings to Matthew’s opening genealogy, and find yourself wondering how these two halves of one book actually…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1025. Biblical perspicuity, the historic term for Scripture’s own clarity, asks a genuinely practical question every ordinary reader eventually faces: is the Bible clear enough for me to understand on my own, or does its meaning stay locked behind specialist training and expert interpretation. The classic Reformation answer, and the one I hold, is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1024. What happened to the original manuscripts of Scripture is a question that catches many believers off guard the first time it occurs to them, since no autograph, no original document written by Moses, Isaiah, Paul or John, survives anywhere in the world today. That fact unsettles some readers when they first encounter it,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1020. The Bible’s main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching across roughly fifteen hundred years, and I want to state that central message plainly rather than leaving it buried under all that surrounding detail. Getting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1041. Christocentric interpretation reads the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New, as a unified story that finds its centre and its goal in Jesus Christ. This is not a modern invention layered onto the text from outside. It is the reading strategy Jesus Himself modelled and explicitly commanded, and taking it seriously changes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1040. Biblical genre is the single most overlooked factor in careless Bible reading, and identifying it correctly is not an optional refinement of interpretation but a basic requirement of reading any piece of literature responsibly, biblical or otherwise. Nobody reads a newspaper editorial the same way they read a birthday card, and nobody should…