Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10006. The Davidic covenant is God’s sworn commitment that a descendant of David will sit on David’s throne for ever, and I want to show you why this promise, made three thousand years ago to a shepherd-king, is the hinge on which the identity of Jesus, the shape of the Millennium, and the meaning…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3017. Jesus and Christ get used interchangeably by most Christians, myself included in ordinary conversation, and there is nothing wrong with that shorthand. But the two words are doing genuinely different jobs, and once you see the distinction between them, several passages of Scripture come into much sharper focus. Let me take each word…
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: 5 minutesQuestion 3056. The genealogies of Jesus look, at first glance, like the least promising material in the New Testament: lists of names, many of them unpronounceable, standing between you and the story. I meet plenty of readers who confess they skip them entirely. I understand the temptation, but I want to persuade you that these…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3045. Messiah and Christ both mean the anointed one, and that single fact unlocks more of your Bible than almost any other piece of vocabulary. Many people assume Christ is simply Jesus’ surname, as though Joseph and Mary were Mr and Mrs Christ of Nazareth. It is nothing of the kind. It is a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3044. Son of David is the very first title given to Jesus in the New Testament: ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’ (Matthew 1:1). Blind men shouted it in the streets, crowds sang it on Palm Sunday, and the religious leaders bristled every time…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3003. The meaning of Christ gets lost the moment we treat the word as though it were simply Jesus’ surname, the way we might say John Smith. It is not a surname, and once you see what the word is actually doing, you hear the New Testament rather differently. “Christ” translates the Hebrew Mashiach,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1081. Prophecy fulfilment is, in my judgement, one of the strongest evidences we have for the divine origin of Scripture, and I do not say that lightly after years of studying the alternatives on offer. No other sacred text in human history contains anything remotely comparable to the Bible’s record of specific predictions made…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4129. The sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah 11 is not a reference to seven separate spirits but to the Holy Spirit in the fullness of His Person and ministry, described through seven distinct dimensions of divine working. Isaiah 11:2 is one of the most richly packed prophetic verses in the entire Old Testament, and it…