Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07037. The phrase eternal covenant appears at several points in Scripture, and the question it raises is a fair one: what makes a covenant eternal, and which covenant is being spoken of? The answer matters more than it might first appear, because covenants are the framework on which the whole storyline of the Bible…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10068. The covenants with Israel are the backbone of biblical prophecy, and if you get them right a great deal else falls into place. There are five of them, and four are unconditional promises that God binds Himself to keep regardless of the nation’s behaviour. A covenant in Scripture is not a contract between…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10067. Does God still have a plan for Israel? Yes, and I hold that with more confidence than almost anything else I teach about prophecy, because Paul devotes three chapters of Romans to the question and answers it in terms that leave very little room for manoeuvre. The plan for Israel is not a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10029. Are the Jewish people still God’s chosen people, or did their election end when the nation rejected its Messiah? I answer without hesitation that Israel remains God’s chosen people, because the calling that made them so was never conditional on their performance and has never been revoked. This is one of the places…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10020. Unconditional covenants and conditional covenants are the two hinges on which all of biblical prophecy swings, and learning to tell them apart is, I would argue, the single most clarifying skill a Bible reader can acquire. Get the distinction, and Israel’s history, the security of the believer, and the certainty of the Millennium…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10014. The biblical covenants are the load-bearing walls of eschatology, and once you see how they connect, end-times doctrine stops being a heap of curiosities, beasts here, trumpets there, and becomes what it actually is: the account of God finishing signed commitments. Prophecy is not prediction for its own sake; it is covenant-keeping announced…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10002. The seven dispensations of the classic dispensational scheme raise an immediate question for anyone new to this subject: does the Bible actually number them, or is seven a human tidy-up? Let me be straight with you from the start. Scripture never says, there are seven dispensations, any more than it says, there is…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 1042. Dispensational interpretation is the framework I use to make sense of some genuinely puzzling features of the Bible that I meet almost every week in pastoral ministry. Why did God command animal sacrifices under the Old Testament and then stop requiring them? Why are some commands given specifically to Israel that plainly do…