Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1121. The pretribulational rapture is not, as some of its critics sometimes suggest, a doctrine simply invented out of thin air by nineteenth-century prophecy teachers with no genuine textual foundation behind it. It rests on a specific reading of specific texts, held together by a consistent, literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic applied to prophecy the same way…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1120. Does literal interpretation require a young earth position? I hold both a literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic and a young earth reading of Genesis, and I think the two are connected far more closely than many Christians today assume. This is not a fringe or novel combination. It was the standard reading of Genesis across nearly…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1100. Social justice is a phrase that can mean almost anything depending on who is using it, and I think that ambiguity is exactly why the question deserves careful unpacking rather than a reflexive yes or no. Scripture has an enormous amount to say about justice, about the poor, the widow, the orphan and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1099. Gender ideology is one of the most pastorally sensitive subjects I address, because behind every abstract question sits a real person, often someone genuinely struggling, sometimes a parent frightened for a child, sometimes a young person in real distress. I want to answer carefully and with compassion, because Scripture never lets truth and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1098. Critical race theory has become one of the most contested phrases in public conversation, and church members ask me about it often enough that I want to address it directly rather than duck the question because it feels politically charged. Critical race theory is an academic framework, originating in legal scholarship in the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments online but so we can guard the actual meaning of the text we love. What I mean by the phrase is a pattern of reading…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1086. Numerical patterns in Scripture fascinate people, and I understand why they do. Some claim to have discovered elaborate numerical patterns hidden in the biblical text, patterns they say prove divine authorship beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. Others dismiss all such claims outright as misguided numerology dressed up in scholarly-sounding language. What are we…