Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08092 Spiritual blindness is the whole point of the verse where Paul calls Satan the god of this world, and if we miss that we will misunderstand the title badly. The phrase sounds at first like a rival deity with a throne of his own. It is not that at all. Paul writes, “In…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8051. Paul says something in 2 Corinthians 4 that explains a great deal of what we see in evangelism. The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. The enemy works to blind unbelievers, and he is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8029. The place of angels in evangelism is one of the most encouraging themes in the book of Acts, and one of the most consistently overlooked. Luke keeps showing us angelic activity around the spread of the gospel, and yet he never once has an angel preach it. That combination is deliberate, and once…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty minutes. At the same time a summary that leaves out something essential is not a shorter gospel but a different one. So the task is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07067 Easy believism is a label applied to any presentation of the gospel that reduces saving faith to a bare mental agreement and leaves out repentance, the identity of Jesus, and any expectation that a converted person will be different afterwards. It is a criticism rather than a movement, and hardly anyone claims the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7045. Scripture says plainly that Jesus died for all, and just as plainly that not everyone will be saved. Put those two statements next to each other and many people feel a contradiction opening up. Either the death of Jesus did not accomplish what it set out to do, or the all is not…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7043. Unlimited atonement is my answer to the oldest question in this discussion: for whom did Jesus die? Did He die for every human being who has ever lived, or only for those who would finally believe? The question sounds abstract until you are sitting with a dying man who wants to know whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07028. Reconciliation with God presupposes something most people would rather not admit, which is that a real estrangement exists in the first place. You cannot reconcile parties who were never at odds. So before we can say anything useful about how peace is made, we have to be honest about how the quarrel started…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07024. The sinner’s prayer has introduced more people to the vocabulary of conversion than almost any other set of words in modern evangelicalism, and yet you will not find it anywhere in Scripture. There is no apostolic script, no prescribed formula, no moment in Acts where Peter or Paul asks a crowd to repeat…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they cried out to a God they were not otherwise sure they believed in. Did God hear that? I want to answer honestly rather than with…