Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10007. The New Covenant is announced in Jeremiah with a named addressee, “the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” and yet the Lord Jesus lifted the cup and said, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood,” to a table of Jewish disciples about to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10005. The Abrahamic covenant is the backbone of biblical eschatology, and I choose the word backbone deliberately: remove it and the entire prophetic skeleton collapses into a heap of disconnected hopes. Made four thousand years ago with one man from Ur, this covenant governs the storyline of Scripture from Genesis 12 to Revelation 22,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10003. Covenant theology and dispensational theology are the two great rival frameworks by which evangelical Christians organise the storyline of Scripture, and the difference between them is not a quarrel over charts; it decides how you read prophecy, how you understand Israel, how you relate law to grace, and what you expect God to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10001. Dispensational theology is one of the most misrepresented frameworks in the modern church, dismissed by critics who have rarely read its careful exponents and caricatured as a novelty invented in the nineteenth century. So let me tell you plainly what it actually is. Dispensational theology is, at heart, a commitment to reading the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3081. The fig tree that Jesus cursed has puzzled readers for centuries, and I understand why: at first glance it looks like an overreaction to a piece of vegetation, and Mark even tells us “it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13). Why blast a tree for lacking fruit it was not yet…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3068. The Jewish identity of Jesus is the plainest fact on the pages of the four Gospels, yet the question in our title still catches people out. Was Jesus a Jew or a Christian? Put simply: Jesus was a Jew, with a Jewish identity as thorough as any man who ever lived, and he…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2017. Does God practise divine favouritism, choosing to love some people more than others, or is that impression something we bring to the text rather than something the text actually teaches? I ask this because Scripture does describe God choosing Israel out of all the nations, calling David “a man after his own heart,”…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1130. Dispensational hermeneutics gets accused, fairly often and rather confidently, of playing a shell game with the biblical text: reading the Old Testament literally when it suits the argument and switching to symbol whenever a plain reading becomes awkward. I have heard the charge from the pulpit of churches that hold to a very…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1082. Biblical archaeology has quietly become one of the most persuasive answers I can give a sceptical friend, because it deals in something they cannot simply wave away: dirt, pottery, inscriptions, and dated strata pulled directly out of the ground. For centuries critics dismissed much of the Bible as myth and legend, claiming that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4058. The Spirit in the Millennium is a subject Scripture addresses more directly, and more beautifully, than most believers realise, and I want to trace what the Old and New Testaments actually promise about this coming era rather than leaving the question in vague, general terms. Understanding the Spirit’s role in the eternal state…