Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1184 Few ancient writings stir up as much curiosity as the book of Enoch. It promises secrets about fallen angels and the days before the flood, it claims the name of a man who walked with God and did not see death, and it is quoted by name in the New Testament letter of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1186 Every so often a headline announces that scholars have uncovered a secret Gospel the church tried to bury, and the name that surfaces most often is the Gospel of Thomas. Popular books and documentaries present it as a suppressed witness to a different and more mystical Jesus, hidden away by a power-hungry church….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01068 When Christians speak of the Bible as “inspired,” they mean something far more precise than the casual sense in which we might call Shakespeare inspired or describe an artist’s best work as inspired. Biblical inspiration is a technical theological term describing how God produced Scripture through human authors, and understanding it is essential…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10147 The question of who wrote the book of Revelation is not a matter of idle curiosity. The authority of the book depends upon it. If Revelation was written by the apostle John, the last surviving member of the Twelve, then it carries apostolic authority and takes its place as the capstone of the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1014 Whether God revealed Himself and His purposes all at once or incrementally across time is not a minor academic question. It shapes how we read the whole Bible, how we understand the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and why certain things were clear to some believers that were opaque to others….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1015 The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices; the New Testament says Christ has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples; the New Testament commands love of enemies. The Old Testament permits divorce in certain circumstances; the New Testament tightens the standard. If the same God inspired…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1037 How should we read the Bible? This question lies at the heart of everything we do as Christians. Get interpretation wrong and everything else goes wrong with it. One of the most important principles in biblical interpretation is what we call “literal interpretation,” but this term is often misunderstood. Some think it means…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1130 A common misconception about dispensationalism is that it supposedly uses different interpretive rules depending on which biblical era is being studied. Critics sometimes claim that dispensationalists read Old Testament prophecies one way and New Testament passages another, picking and choosing methods to suit predetermined conclusions. This question deserves careful examination because it touches…
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 01003 The Bible is frequently described as a prophetic book, and with good reason. A substantial portion of its content involves prophecy in one form or another, whether foretelling future events, proclaiming God’s will to a present audience, or doing both simultaneously. The sheer volume of prophetic material is one of Scripture’s most distinctive…