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…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1164. Interpreting biblical prophecy rightly is, I think, one of the more neglected disciplines in the church today, and one of the most abused outside it. Whole sections of the Old Testament, most of the Gospels’ final discourses, and the entire book of Revelation are prophetic material, and yet many believers approach these pages…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been…
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: 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 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 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4099. Receiving the Spirit is exactly what Paul asks these Ephesian men about in Acts 19:2, and the answer they give has been fought over ever since, mostly by people looking for support for a doctrine Luke was not trying to teach. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Paul asks, and…
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…