Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08079 Satan’s role in the tribulation is described more fully than at any other point in Scripture, and Revelation gives us a sequence rather than a snapshot. He is thrown down, he pursues, he empowers, he deceives, and finally he is seized and bound. I write as a pretribulational premillennialist, so I take that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08085 Demonic judgement is a subject Scripture treats with more restraint than most of us would like. We are told plainly that fallen angels face a reckoning, and we are told a good deal about Satan’s end, but the fine detail of how the two relate is sketched rather than spelled out. That should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08083 Satan’s release at the end of the thousand years is one of the strangest turns in the whole prophetic landscape, and I understand why people stumble over it. God has bound the enemy. Jesus reigns in person from Jerusalem. The earth has known a thousand years of justice, peace and visible righteousness. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8033. The bottomless pit turns up at some of the most dramatic moments in Scripture, and it is easy to read past it as atmosphere. It is not atmosphere. The abyss is presented as a real location in the unseen world, a place of restraint for spirit beings, and the demons who met Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8026. Paul says that we will judge angels, and he says it in the middle of telling off a church for suing one another. “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!” It is one of the great throwaway lines of the New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8018. The four angels bound at the great river Euphrates appear in Revelation 9:14 and 15, and the detail that stops most readers is not the binding but the timing. They are released for the hour, the day, the month, and the year. That is a strange way to describe a moment. It is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8017. Abaddon and Apollyon are two names for a single figure, and Revelation 9:11 gives us both because John is writing for readers in two languages. He is called the angel of the bottomless pit, and both of his names mean the same thing: Destroyer. That is a rare piece of transparency in a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8007. Can angels die? Jesus answered part of this question directly, and His answer is the natural place to begin. Speaking of the resurrection in Luke 20:36, He says the redeemed cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God. So the deathlessness of angels is used as a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 8019 Among the most striking descriptions in all of prophetic Scripture are the living creatures of Ezekiel’s inaugural vision and John’s throne-room vision in Revelation 4. They defy easy description, they surround the immediate presence of God, and they have provoked more theological reflection than almost any other category of angelic being. Mercifully, the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07016. Glorification is the final stage of salvation, the point at which the believer receives a glorified body and is made entirely like Jesus, with sin not simply restrained but permanently absent. It is the third tense of salvation. I have been saved from sin’s penalty, I am being saved from sin’s power, and…