Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11003. Ask about Christian tithing in most evangelical churches and you will get a confident answer: ten per cent, off the top, and the Bible says so. Ask for the New Testament chapter and verse that requires it of the Church, and the room usually goes quiet. I want to handle this carefully, because…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08138. The idea of angels at Sinai catches most readers by surprise, because Exodus 19 and 20 describe thunder, smoke, trumpet and the voice of God without mentioning an angelic host at all. Yet three New Testament writers refer to angelic involvement in the giving of the Law as though it were common knowledge….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7081. Law and grace are usually discussed as though they were opponents, with the Christian obliged to pick a side. That framing has produced two centuries of unhelpful argument and a great deal of pastoral wreckage. I want to suggest instead that they are two instruments with different jobs, given by the same God,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 7080. The Mosaic law is one of the places where careless answers do the most damage in either direction. Say that Christians are free from it and somebody will hear permission to sin. Say that Christians are bound by it and you have contradicted Paul on almost every page of Galatians. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 17 minutesQuestion 7199. If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things carry on from one age to the next? The question of temple sacrifices after the cross is one of the genuinely hard knots in Scripture,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10020. Unconditional covenants and conditional covenants are the two hinges on which all of biblical prophecy swings, and learning to tell them apart is, I would argue, the single most clarifying skill a Bible reader can acquire. Get the distinction, and Israel’s history, the security of the believer, and the certainty of the Millennium…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10019. The Mosaic law occupies six hundred and thirteen commandments, three biblical books, and a fair amount of Christian confusion, and the confusion usually begins with a wrong assumption: that the law was given as a ladder to heaven. It was not. Paul asks our exact question, “Why then the law?” (Galatians 3:19), and…