Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9112. The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of the most liberating ideas in the New Testament. Paul uses the word repeatedly in Ephesians and Colossians, and he treats it as the thing that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a great deal. It affects who we appoint, what we expect of them, and how we read the qualification lists in the Pastoral Epistles. The verse…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08121. Spiritual warfare is not an optional interest for unusually dramatic Christians. It is the reality every believer already lives inside, whether or not they have a vocabulary for it, and the only question is whether we will fight with the equipment God supplied or with something we invented. A great deal of what…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7047. Being in Christ is Paul’s favourite way of describing a Christian, and I suspect most of us read straight past it. He uses the phrase, or one of its near relatives, more than a hundred and sixty times. He does not usually call people Christians. He calls them those who are in Christ…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7000. Paul calls our salvation the gift of God in one of the best known sentences he ever wrote, and generations of readers have argued about which part of it he meant. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,…
Reading Time: 7 minutesStanding with Israel in Biblical Truth and Justice Q10141 Preamble As an Evangelical Baptist committed to the authority of Scripture and the unchanging promises of God, I find myself compelled to respond to recent statements from Baptists Together, BMS World Mission and Baptist Union of Wales that mischaracterise Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence and misrepresent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09200. The mystery of Christ is Paul’s own name for a truth he regarded as the hidden centrepiece of his ministry: that Jew and Gentile would be joined in one body, the Church, on completely equal terms. “When you read this,” he wrote, “you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” (Ephesians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6003. The consequences of sin reach further than most people ever suspect, and understanding them is essential if we are to grasp what the Lord Jesus actually accomplished on the cross. God warned Adam plainly: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, and did not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09002 The word “church” is one of the most familiar in the Christian vocabulary, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. In popular usage it refers to a building, a denomination, or a vague spiritual community. The New Testament has something far more precise in mind. Understanding what the church actually is,…