Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 11119. Kneeling in prayer is the picture most of us reach for when we imagine someone truly serious about talking to God, and I get asked fairly often whether it is something we ought to be doing rather than just something pious people in old paintings did. It is a fair question, and an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10000. Biblical eschatology is the study of last things, and it is far more than a hobby for prophecy enthusiasts with wall charts. The word comes from two Greek terms, eschatos, meaning last or final, and logos, meaning word or study. Put them together and you have the doctrine of the last things: what…
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 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the human author himself consciously understood when he wrote it, a meaning only made clear later through subsequent revelation. I want to work through this carefully,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11118. Postures of prayer vary widely across Scripture, and that variety itself is instructive, because it tells us that God has not bound genuine prayer to a single required physical position. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying face down, hands raised, eyes lifted or lowered, all of these appear in the biblical record, offered by faithful…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11117. Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it out among people who inevitably notice when you are not eating. Matthew 6:16-18 gives the clearest teaching on this question anywhere in Scripture, and it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring for it wisely while fasting is not a lack of spiritual seriousness. It is simply taking seriously another thing Scripture plainly teaches: that the body…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from becoming a legalistic box to tick. The Bible records fasts lasting anywhere from a single meal skipped in genuine distress to forty days of complete…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word “meditation” calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation is a thoroughly biblical idea, commanded and commended throughout Scripture, and it is something quite different from what the word usually suggests today. So I…