Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60091 The Canaanite conquest narratives in Joshua are among the passages most frequently raised as moral objections to the Old Testament, and they deserve honest engagement rather than evasion. The texts describe God commanding the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite populations of the promised land, including women and children, and to leave no survivors…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 009112 Paul uses the word “mystery” in a very specific and technical sense that differs from its ordinary usage. When we speak of mysteries today, we typically mean something puzzling or unknown. Paul’s use of the Greek musterion means something different: not a riddle to be solved by clever reasoning, but a divine secret…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60096 The question of whether Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and survived is one that divides those who approach Scripture assuming miracles cannot occur and those who take the text on its own terms. For the reader who accepts that the God who created the ocean and everything in it is capable…
Reading Time: 2 minutesQuestion 60097 Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the waters at the Exodus. Wind setdown models, tsunami hypotheses, and mistranslation theories arguing that Yam Suph means “Sea of Reeds” and therefore refers to a shallow marsh that dried up in a strong wind: these…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10029 The question of whether modern Jewish people are still God’s chosen people sits at the intersection of some of the most important and most contested doctrines in Christian theology. The answer you give depends heavily on how you read the Old Testament promises, what you understand the relationship between Israel and the church…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10036 Two phrases in the New Testament sound similar enough to be confused but refer to entirely different realities. “The times of the Gentiles” and “the fullness of the Gentiles” describe distinct aspects of God’s programme, one relating to political dominion over Jerusalem and the other to the ingathering of Gentile believers into the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10014 Eschatology does not float free from the rest of Scripture. The Bible’s teaching about the last things is built on a covenantal foundation that stretches from Genesis to Revelation, and unless those covenants are understood properly, the prophetic picture will always be distorted. The question of how the biblical covenants relate to eschatology…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04058 When Christians think about the future, attention tends to focus on the events of the end times: the rapture, the tribulation, the return of Christ, the millennial kingdom. Less commonly asked is what the Holy Spirit will be doing through all of this. Yet Scripture has more to say on the subject than…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 10066 Replacement theology, also called supersessionism, is the belief that the Church has permanently replaced Israel in God’s plan, and that the promises God made to Israel in the Old Testament are now fulfilled spiritually in the Church rather than literally in the nation of Israel. This teaching, whilst widely held throughout church history,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2075 Of all the objections raised against the God of the Bible, this one carries perhaps the most emotional force. The conquest of Canaan, in which God commanded Israel to destroy entire populations, is regularly cited as evidence that the God of the Old Testament is a deity of tribal violence rather than the…