Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60025. Modern political thinking has almost no category for national sin. Nations are treated as power structures, economies, or administrative units, and the idea that a country as a country might be morally accountable to God sounds to most ears like something left over from an older world. Scripture takes an entirely different view,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08124. The future of Satan is one of the few subjects on which Scripture is entirely unambiguous. There is no mystery about the outcome, no suspense, and no possibility of a different result, which is more than can be said for many things people are curious about. What the Bible gives is a sequence,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08140. Paul tells the Corinthians that we are to judge angels, and from that single clause a whole industry has grown up teaching that believers hold authority over angels here and now, with instructions on how to exercise it. I want to take the verse seriously and the industry rather less so, because Paul’s…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08085 Demonic judgement is a subject Scripture treats with more restraint than most of us would like. We are told plainly that fallen angels face a reckoning, and we are told a good deal about Satan’s end, but the fine detail of how the two relate is sketched rather than spelled out. That should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8007. Can angels die? Jesus answered part of this question directly, and His answer is the natural place to begin. Speaking of the resurrection in Luke 20:36, He says the redeemed cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God. So the deathlessness of angels is used as a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07021. What happens to those who have never heard the gospel is one of the hardest questions anyone asks me, and it is usually asked with real feeling rather than as a debating point. A student wants to know whether her Hindu grandmother is lost. A man wants to know what God does with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6069. Are there degrees of sin? Yes and no, and both halves of that answer need holding at once or you will end up in one of two ditches. All sin makes a person guilty before a holy God, so in the matter of guilt there are no degrees of sin worth counting on….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10197. There will be unbelievers who die during the thousand year reign of Jesus, and Scripture is not silent about them. That surprises people, because we tend to imagine the kingdom as a place where nobody dies and nobody rebels, but the prophets describe something more textured than that. Two passages carry most of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10195. The judgement of fallen angels does not happen all at once, and that is what makes the question worth asking carefully. Scripture describes some spirits already confined, others still active, a leader bound for a thousand years and then released, and a final sentence carried out at the end. Put the passages in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10168. The location of hell is one of those questions that sounds like idle curiosity and usually is not. People ask it because they want to know whether hell is a real place with a real address, or a state of mind, or a metaphor that preachers use to frighten congregations into behaving. Scripture…