Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10115. The doctrine of purgatory teaches that those who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins, or with temporal punishment still owing, undergo a purifying process after death before entering heaven. It is not biblical. It rests on a text outside the canon, on inferences from passages that will not…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10108. When Paul writes that all Israel will be saved at Romans 11:26, I understand him to mean the ethnic descendants of Jacob who are physically alive at the Second Coming of Jesus, turning to their Messiah in a national conversion at the end of the Tribulation. It does not mean every Jew who…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10103. Soul sleep is the teaching that the dead, believers included, pass into a state of complete unconsciousness at death and know nothing at all until they are raised at the last day. On this view there is no experience between dying and rising, so that the moment of death and the moment of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10100. The lake of fire is the final and permanent place of judgement for Satan, for the beast and the false prophet, and for every person whose name is not written in the book of life. I want to say that plainly at the start, because this is one of those subjects where people…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10096. Gog and Magog appear in two very different places in Scripture, and a great deal of confusion comes from assuming they must be the same event. Ezekiel devotes two long chapters to an invasion of the land of Israel by a coalition led by Gog of the land of Magog. Revelation 20 uses…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10094. Historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism agree on the headline. Jesus returns bodily to the earth before a literal thousand year reign, and He reigns in person over a real kingdom. Against amillennialism and postmillennialism, both stand together, and I want to say clearly at the outset that historic premillennialists are brothers in Christ…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10078. The Olivet Discourse is the sermon Jesus preached on the Mount of Olives during the last week of His earthly ministry, recorded in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13 and Luke 21. It is the longest block of teaching about the future that we have from His own lips, and everything else in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10075. Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is, to my mind, the single most remarkable predictive passage in the Old Testament. In four verses Gabriel gives Daniel a measured period of 490 years for the nation of Israel, sets out what it will accomplish, divides it into three unequal portions, and pins its starting point to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10035. Babylon in Revelation is one of the richest and most debated images in the whole book, a figure that appears as a gorgeously dressed prostitute in one chapter and a doomed merchant city in the next. When I speak of Babylon in Revelation I mean the great world system of rebellion against God,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1189. The apostles’ handling of prophetic fulfilment can look bewildering to a modern reader trained to expect a strict one to one correspondence between a prediction and its outcome. Matthew tells us that the flight of the holy family into Egypt fulfilled Hosea’s line, out of Egypt I called my son, a verse that…