Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1026. The continuity of Scripture across the Old and New Testaments is one of those questions that sounds academic until you actually try to read the Bible straight through and hit the jarring transition from Malachi’s closing warnings to Matthew’s opening genealogy, and find yourself wondering how these two halves of one book actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1037. Literal interpretation is the single most misunderstood term in the whole discussion of how we read the Bible, mostly because critics and defenders alike often use it to mean something it was never meant to mean. I want to state plainly at the outset what this method actually is, because getting the definition…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1021. How you interpret the book of Revelation shapes an enormous amount of what you go on to believe about the last days, and it is worth being honest from the very outset that faithful, Bible-believing Christians have read this book in several quite different ways across church history. I hold a futurist, literal-grammatical-historical…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices, and the New Testament says Jesus has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4071. When I am asked to compare the doctrine of the Spirit across the Reformed, charismatic and dispensational traditions, I always begin by reassuring people that the disagreements, real and important as they are, sit on top of a vast shared foundation. On the doctrine of the Spirit these three great families of Bible-believing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to know in one go, or unveiled His truth and His purposes step by step across the centuries. It is no dry academic puzzle, because how…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04031 The day of Pentecost is one of those hinge moments in the Bible where the whole story turns. Before that morning the disciples were a frightened, waiting handful; after it they were a Spirit-filled church preaching Christ to the nations. Something happened on the day of Pentecost that had never happened before, and…
Reading Time: 17 minutesQuestion 7199. If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things carry on from one age to the next? The question of temple sacrifices after the cross is one of the genuinely hard knots in Scripture,…
Reading Time: 16 minutesQuestion 10203. Let me tell you plainly why dispensationalism matters so much to me, because it is not a dry label that I wear but a way of reading the whole Bible that has shaped how I see God, how I read history, and where I rest my hope. Dispensationalism is, at its simplest, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…