Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 7083 The question sounds simple, but it touches on something of real theological importance. Did the rules change somewhere between Genesis and Acts? Were Old Testament believers saved by keeping the law, by performing sacrifices, or by some arrangement that no longer applies? The way this is answered has profound implications not just for…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10029 The question of whether modern Jewish people are still God’s chosen people sits at the intersection of some of the most important and most contested doctrines in Christian theology. The answer you give depends heavily on how you read the Old Testament promises, what you understand the relationship between Israel and the church…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10082 Few eschatological questions generate as much confusion as this one. The idea that the Holy Spirit will be “removed” from the earth during the Tribulation is widely stated in popular prophecy teaching, but it is also widely misunderstood. The answer depends entirely on what is meant by “removed,” and the distinction between the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10036 Two phrases in the New Testament sound similar enough to be confused but refer to entirely different realities. “The times of the Gentiles” and “the fullness of the Gentiles” describe distinct aspects of God’s programme, one relating to political dominion over Jerusalem and the other to the ingathering of Gentile believers into the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10014 Eschatology does not float free from the rest of Scripture. The Bible’s teaching about the last things is built on a covenantal foundation that stretches from Genesis to Revelation, and unless those covenants are understood properly, the prophetic picture will always be distorted. The question of how the biblical covenants relate to eschatology…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4071 Anyone who has engaged seriously with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit across different theological traditions quickly discovers that Christians who share the same Bible and the same Trinitarian confession can hold remarkably different positions on some of the most practically significant questions in pneumatology. The differences between Reformed, charismatic, and dispensational approaches…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11056 Acts 1:8 is the last thing the risen Jesus said before His ascension, and it was not a farewell encouragement. It was a structured programme. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04108 Acts records four distinct episodes in which the Spirit’s coming upon a group of people is described with enough detail to note the circumstances and sequence. These episodes are not evenly distributed through the book; they cluster at moments of significant transition in the gospel’s outward movement. And they are not uniform. Each…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04058 When Christians think about the future, attention tends to focus on the events of the end times: the rapture, the tribulation, the return of Christ, the millennial kingdom. Less commonly asked is what the Holy Spirit will be doing through all of this. Yet Scripture has more to say on the subject than…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 10066 Replacement theology, also called supersessionism, is the belief that the Church has permanently replaced Israel in God’s plan, and that the promises God made to Israel in the Old Testament are now fulfilled spiritually in the Church rather than literally in the nation of Israel. This teaching, whilst widely held throughout church history,…