Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10178. We who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds. That phrase, caught up, is the engine of the whole passage, and it is the reason the English speaking church has a word like rapture at all. Paul chose a strong and slightly violent verb, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a great deal. It affects who we appoint, what we expect of them, and how we read the qualification lists in the Pastoral Epistles. The verse…
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….