Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09043 The question of when the church began is not a matter of historical curiosity but a question with significant theological consequences. The answer determines how we understand the church’s relationship to Israel, the nature of the church itself, and the way we read large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04123 Few topics in modern church life generate as much confusion, controversy, and pastoral difficulty as the question of speaking in tongues. For some believers, tongues is the defining mark of spiritual vitality, the indispensable evidence of the Spirit’s fullness. For others, it belongs entirely to the apostolic era and has no place in…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4069 The Holy Spirit did not arrive at Pentecost as though He had been absent from the universe until that point. He is the eternal third Person of the Trinity, and His activity runs through the Old Testament from the opening verses of Genesis to the closing pages of Malachi. What changed at Pentecost…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04108 Acts records four distinct episodes in which the Spirit’s coming upon a group of people is described with enough detail to note the circumstances and sequence. These episodes are not evenly distributed through the book; they cluster at moments of significant transition in the gospel’s outward movement. And they are not uniform. Each…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04102 John 20:22 sits in the Gospel of John like a question mark. On the evening of resurrection Sunday, Jesus appears to the gathered disciples, breathes on them, and says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The same disciples will be in Jerusalem fifty days later when the Spirit falls with wind and fire at Pentecost….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04030 The Holy Spirit is the same Person in both Testaments. He does not change in nature, character, or divine authority between Genesis and Revelation. What changes is the basis on which He relates to God’s people, the scope of His ministry, and the permanence of His presence in the life of the believer….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04031 Pentecost is one of the most significant events in the entire Bible, and yet it is often reduced to a story about strange languages and tongues of fire. What actually happened in that upper room in Jerusalem, and in the streets that followed, was nothing less than the birth of the New Testament…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04049 Few gifts have generated more controversy in the modern church than the gift of tongues. In some circles it is treated as the essential evidence that a person has received the Holy Spirit. In others it is dismissed entirely as a first-century phenomenon that ended with the apostolic age. Both positions, as this…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 4105 When Philip the evangelist preached Christ in Samaria, the response was extraordinary. People believed, were baptised, and the city was filled with great joy (Acts 8:8). Yet something unusual happened — or rather, something unusual did not happen. The Holy Spirit had not yet fallen on any of them (Acts 8:16). They had…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4000 If you have spent any time in theological study, you have almost certainly encountered words ending in -logy: theology, Christology, eschatology. Pneumatology is one of these, and it refers specifically to the systematic study of the Holy Spirit. The word itself comes from the Greek pneuma (πνεῦμα), meaning breath, wind, or spirit, and…