Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8044. Paul assumes that Satan’s schemes can be recognised. He tells the Corinthians that we are not ignorant of his designs and he tells the Ephesians to put on the whole armour of God so that they can stand against them. Neither statement makes any sense unless the enemy works to a pattern that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8036. Few questions at the meeting point of theology and pastoral care carry higher stakes than whether demons cause mental illness. Get it wrong in one direction and you tell a person with a treatable condition that they need an exorcism. Get it wrong in the other and you leave someone facing a genuinely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8026. Paul says that we will judge angels, and he says it in the middle of telling off a church for suing one another. “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!” It is one of the great throwaway lines of the New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7085. If God has already set me apart, why pursue holiness at all? It is a fair question and a common one, and it usually arrives from somebody who has just grasped the doctrine of positional sanctification for the first time. If my standing cannot improve, what exactly is the effort for? The New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7082. The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7074. Sinless perfection in this present life is taught by a number of sincere traditions, and I want to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves rather than waving it away. The people who hold it are usually not careless Christians. They are often the opposite, people with a high view of holiness…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7073. Positional sanctification describes where you stand before God; practical sanctification describes how you are getting on. Both are scriptural, both matter, and a great many discouraged Christians are discouraged precisely because they have been measuring the first by the second. If you have ever wondered how Paul could call the Corinthians saints with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7071. Religious legalism is the instinct to add something of our own to what Jesus has already finished, and it is remarkably persistent in the human heart. I have never met a Christian who was entirely free of it, including the one writing this. We know that we are saved by grace, we say…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07064 Cheap grace is a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe grace that has been stripped of any consequence, and costly grace is his term for the real thing. The distinction is genuinely useful, and it also needs handling carefully, because it can be pushed until it turns grace into a purchase. Let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07061 Christian re-dedication is not being saved again, and the difference matters more than it might sound. Salvation happens once and cannot be repeated, because the new birth is not the kind of thing that can be undone and redone. Re-dedication is the renewal of a commitment that has gone cold, and that can…