Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181 Long before the Reformation settled the church on a literal and grammatical reading of Scripture, two great centres of learning pulled the early church in different directions. One sat in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in Antioch in Syria, and the way each handled the Bible shaped Christian interpretation for centuries. To understand…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1187 Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you feel you are hearing three tellings of the same story. Turn to John and the air changes. The parables give way to long discourses, the crowds give way to searching conversations with individuals, and the whole pace slows down to dwell on a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1189 Open the New Testament and you are never far from the Old. The apostles quote it, allude to it, and build their arguments on it, returning again and again to the words this was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet. They were Jewish men steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and when…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1180 A faithful believer once told me she had stopped going to a midweek study because the leader kept reaching for the Greek, and she had begun to feel that the Bible was a locked room and only the scholars held the key. That feeling is more common than we admit, and it does…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1179 Open the middle of your Bible and you arrive in a different country. The thunder of the prophets has faded, the marching narratives of Kings and Chronicles have given way to something quieter and stranger. Here a father pleads with a son, a sufferer argues with God from an ash heap, a teacher…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11001 The Bible is not like any other book. It is the very Word of God, living and active. But many Christians find it difficult to read consistently or to understand what they are reading. How should we approach this book so that it accomplishes its purpose in our lives? With a Heart Ready…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06059 The statement in Matthew 5:29–30 has unsettled readers since it was first spoken, which is probably part of the point. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01068 When Christians speak of the Bible as “inspired,” they mean something far more precise than the casual sense in which we might call Shakespeare inspired or describe an artist’s best work as inspired. Biblical inspiration is a technical theological term describing how God produced Scripture through human authors, and understanding it is essential…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10094 Both historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism affirm that Christ will return before the Millennium and reign on earth for a thousand years. On this they agree, and the agreement is significant. But the differences between the two positions are substantial enough that conflating them produces real confusion. Understanding where they converge and where…