Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern sensibilities, and the honest question worth asking is why a God who wanted to communicate clearly would give us a book containing so much that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the human author himself consciously understood when he wrote it, a meaning only made clear later through subsequent revelation. I want to work through this carefully,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1097. Woke interpretations of Scripture have become common enough in recent years that I think every believer needs some tools for recognising them, not so we can win arguments online but so we can guard the actual meaning of the text we love. What I mean by the phrase is a pattern of reading…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1096. Bible movies and dramatic readings have exploded in popularity over the last few years, and I get asked about them often enough that I think the question deserves a proper answer rather than a shrug from the pulpit. Series like The Chosen have brought Jesus and the disciples into millions of living rooms…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1093. AI Bible study is something I get asked about often now, usually by people who are not sure whether using a tool like this on their Bible reading is clever stewardship or a shortcut around the very discipline that forms the soul. I do not come to this question as a technophobe. My…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they claimed never arrived. I understand the instinct. When life is hard, a promise like “I know the plans I have for you” feels like exactly…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1086. Numerical patterns in Scripture fascinate people, and I understand why they do. Some claim to have discovered elaborate numerical patterns hidden in the biblical text, patterns they say prove divine authorship beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. Others dismiss all such claims outright as misguided numerology dressed up in scholarly-sounding language. What are we…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1085. Biblical numbers appear throughout Scripture: forty days of flood, seven churches, twelve tribes, 144,000 sealed servants, 666 as the number of the beast. Are these figures meant literally, symbolically, or sometimes both at once? Understanding how biblical numbers function in Hebrew and Greek literature helps us interpret Scripture accurately, avoiding both wooden literalism…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 01069. Verbal plenary inspiration is the technical name for the historic evangelical doctrine of Scripture, and I hold it with real conviction, because I think it is the only view that actually matches the way Jesus and the apostles treated the biblical text in practice. The phrase packs two distinct claims into two words:…