Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10153. The blessed hope is one of those expressions that has been said so often in Christian circles that it can slide past the ear without registering. Paul used it once, with great precision, and he attached it to a very specific event rather than to a general optimism about things working out. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10152. Maranatha appears once in the New Testament, tucked into the closing lines of a long and often difficult letter, and it is one of the oldest Christian prayers we possess. Paul writes: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22). That last phrase…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10151. Every human being who has ever lived will be raised from the dead, the just and unjust alike, and that is one of the least disputed teachings in the New Testament and one of the least discussed. Death is not the end of anyone’s story, whichever side of the line they are on….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10150. The final judgement in Revelation 20 is described with a terrible economy of words. A great white throne, earth and sky fleeing away, the dead standing before it, and books being opened. Then a second and separate book, the book of life, is opened as well. The plural and the singular are doing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10149. The book of life appears from the Pentateuch to the final chapters of Revelation, and it stands for something of enormous comfort and enormous seriousness at the same time. It is God’s register of those who belong to Him, and at the last judgement it is the book that decides everything. People often…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10148. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are among the most searching pages in the New Testament, and also among the most misused. Some readers treat them as a coded map of church history. Others skip them entirely in their hurry to reach the trumpets and bowls. Both approaches miss what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10147. Who wrote the book of Revelation is not a question for specialists only, because the authority of the last book in our Bible is bound up with the answer. If the apostle John wrote it, then we are reading the final word of the last surviving member of the Twelve. If somebody else…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10146. Whenever a new invention arrives, some part of the Christian world immediately maps it onto prophecy, and modern technology has been identified as the fulfilment of end-times passages more times than I can count. Barcodes were the mark of the beast. Then credit cards were. Then microchips, then smartphones, then digital currency, then…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10145. There is an eschatological tension running through the New Testament that trips up almost every new reader of the Bible sooner or later. You are told you have been saved, and then told to work out your salvation. You are told you possess eternal life, and then told to lay hold of it….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10144. Inaugurated eschatology is the most widely held framework in evangelical scholarship today, and if you have read almost any modern commentary on the Gospels you have met it whether the phrase was used or not. It holds that the kingdom of God has genuinely begun with the coming of Jesus, yet awaits its…