Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10171. Daniel 12 contains the clearest statement about resurrection in the whole Old Testament, and it arrives at the end of the strangest chapter in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Two destinies, one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10179. 2 Peter 3 contains the most violent description of the end of the present order anywhere in the New Testament. The heavens will pass away with a roar, the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. What is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5199. The final destiny of the human person is one of those questions that people think they have already answered until you press them on it. Ask a congregation where they are going and most will say heaven. Ask what they will be doing there and the answers thin out considerably. Ask whether they…
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….