Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus almost certainly spoke day to day. That choice was not an accident of history so much as an instance of providence working through history, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4142. The continuous filling of the Spirit is exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes “be filled with the Spirit” in Ephesians 5:18, and the Greek grammar behind that command tells us something the English translation, on its own, can easily miss. The verb Paul uses is a present tense, passive, imperative….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09081 Ephesians 4:11 lists the gifts Christ has given to the church: “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers.” The phrasing of the final pair in the original Greek has generated a longstanding debate: are “pastors” and “teachers” two separate callings, or is Paul describing a single, combined role? The answer…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 7000 Few passages in Scripture have generated as much theological discussion as Ephesians 2:8-9. The debate centres on a grammatical question with enormous theological implications: when Paul writes “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” what exactly is the gift? Is it faith itself that God gives us? Is it…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11046 Every Christian has heard it thousands of times. Prayers end with it, hymns close with it, and congregations say it together as naturally as breathing. But what does “Amen” actually mean, and why do we say it? The Meaning of the Word The word Amen (Hebrew: אָמֵן, ‘amen; Greek: ἀμήν, amēn) derives from…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 6004 Scripture uses several different words to describe our moral failure before God, and each one sheds light on a different aspect of what we have done wrong. When David confessed his sin after his adultery with Bathsheba, he used all three major terms: “Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,…