Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1138. Rightly handling Scripture is what the apostle Paul commands every believer who teaches or studies the Bible to do, and the phrase comes from one of the most important verses in the New Testament for how we approach the text. Paul writes to Timothy, “Do your best to present yourself to God as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1137. The doctrine of Scripture is the foundation everything else in Christian theology is built upon, and most believers use the word Bibliology without ever having had it properly explained to them. See my sermon on this subject here: The Word of God, Our Growing Guide. So what does Bibliology actually mean, and why…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 1136. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections most Christians run into once they start talking about their faith outside the safety of church, and I have lost count of the number of conversations that started with someone reciting a list they found online. Two different genealogies for Jesus. Two different numbers for…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1134. Holy books are not in short supply. Islam has the Quran, Hinduism has the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism has the Pali Canon, and Mormonism has the Book of Mormon, to name only the most obvious examples of the many holy books competing for allegiance around the world today. So what makes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1132. Wooden literalism is the caricature that gets thrown at every Bible believing Christian sooner or later, usually by someone convinced that anyone who trusts Scripture must also believe the four winds are held by four literal angels at the four literal corners of a flat earth. I do not believe that, and neither…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1131. Biblical authority sounds like an old-fashioned phrase to defend in a culture that has largely stopped agreeing there is such a thing as truth to be authoritative about. “Post-truth” was named the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year back in 2016, describing a climate where appeals to emotion and personal conviction carry…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1130. Dispensational hermeneutics gets accused, fairly often and rather confidently, of playing a shell game with the biblical text: reading the Old Testament literally when it suits the argument and switching to symbol whenever a plain reading becomes awkward. I have heard the charge from the pulpit of churches that hold to a very…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1129. Biblical literalism gets blamed for a great deal it never actually claimed, and nowhere is the confusion thicker than in the running argument between Scripture and science. People assume that if I hold to biblical literalism I must also believe the sun is a lamp fixed to a solid dome, because that is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1125. Biblical genealogies have glazed over more eyes than almost any other section of Scripture. “And so-and-so fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so,” page after page, and it is entirely fair to ask whether God will be disappointed if you skip past them on your way to the story. Let me put your mind at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1124. Understanding Scripture is not always straightforward, and if you have ever hit a passage that made no sense at all, read it twice, maybe three times, and remained thoroughly confused, you are in very good company. This is a common experience, and it should not discourage you the way it often does. The…