Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08138. The idea of angels at Sinai catches most readers by surprise, because Exodus 19 and 20 describe thunder, smoke, trumpet and the voice of God without mentioning an angelic host at all. Yet three New Testament writers refer to angelic involvement in the giving of the Law as though it were common knowledge….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10019. The Mosaic law occupies six hundred and thirteen commandments, three biblical books, and a fair amount of Christian confusion, and the confusion usually begins with a wrong assumption: that the law was given as a ladder to heaven. It was not. Paul asks our exact question, “Why then the law?” (Galatians 3:19), and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval art, in films and quiz shows, and most people assume the list must be somewhere in the Bible. It is not. So where did the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3038. The crucifixion of Jesus raises a question most of us have never stopped to ask: why that particular death? If the Son of God had to die for sinners, He could in principle have been stoned like Stephen, beheaded like James, or killed in a hundred quieter ways. Instead, the eternal plan of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4104. walking in Spirit is commanded throughout the New Testament precisely because having the Spirit and yielding to the Spirit are two different things, and the gap between them is where most of ordinary Christian struggle actually lives. Every believer already possesses the Spirit permanently from the moment of conversion. Not every believer, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4141. Receiving the Spirit by faith is the very first argument Paul reaches for when he wants to correct the Galatian churches, and he reaches for it because it settles the whole controversy in one stroke. “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4009. The fruit of the Spirit is Paul’s lovely picture of the character that God grows in a believer’s life, and it is found in Galatians 5 where he lists love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is one of the best loved passages in the New Testament, and also…
Reading Time: 17 minutesQuestion 07048 The question of whether the Christian is under the Mosaic Law is one of the most practical questions in the whole of Christian doctrine, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. Whole denominations have been formed on particular answers to it, Christian consciences have been weighed down or liberated by particular readings of…