Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10143. Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10139. The idealist view treats Revelation not as a description of particular events, past or future, but as a symbolic portrayal of the ongoing conflict between good and evil that runs through the whole of history. Sometimes called the spiritual or symbolic approach, it is probably the most widely held reading in academic circles…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10137. The futurist view holds that the visions of Revelation from chapter 4 onwards describe events still to come, and that the great bulk of unfulfilled biblical prophecy will be fulfilled literally in a future period. It is the position I hold and the position I believe the text requires. It is one of…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 10136. The preterist view holds that most or all of biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the first century, chiefly in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in AD 70. The name comes from the Latin praeter, meaning past, and that single word tells you everything about the direction of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10094. Historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism agree on the headline. Jesus returns bodily to the earth before a literal thousand year reign, and He reigns in person over a real kingdom. Against amillennialism and postmillennialism, both stand together, and I want to say clearly at the outset that historic premillennialists are brothers in Christ…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 45. The danger of prooftexting lies in how innocent it looks while doing real damage to sound doctrine. Prooftexting means lifting a single verse or short phrase out of its surrounding context and using it to support a conclusion the passage, read in full, may not actually teach, or may even directly contradict. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1178. New Testament epistles make up a large part of the New Testament, thirteen from Paul alone, plus further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to the Hebrews, and they contain some of the richest doctrinal teaching in all of Scripture, alongside deeply practical instruction for ordinary Christian living. Reading them…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1177. Old Testament narrative makes up a larger share of Scripture than any other single genre, the accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, the exodus from Egypt, David and Saul, Elijah and the kings of Israel, and yet it may be the genre most often misread in ordinary Bible study. Christians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden meaning behind every single detail rather than asking what one main point Jesus was actually making. I want to give you the method I use,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option…