Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8022. Whether we may speak to angels is a fair question, because the Bible is full of people who did exactly that. Zechariah answered Gabriel. Mary questioned him. Manoah asked for a name. Nobody in Scripture is ever rebuked for replying to an angel who has come to them. The distinction that matters, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8009. Can angels and demons read our minds? The question matters more than it might first appear, because a great deal of anxious teaching about spiritual warfare quietly assumes that they can, and builds practices on the assumption. My answer is no. Scripture reserves the knowledge of the human heart to God alone, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7104 The phrase personal relationship with Jesus is everywhere in evangelical speech and nowhere in the Bible, which is worth noticing before we go any further. That does not make it wrong. The reality it points to is thoroughly biblical. But the wording has caused a fair amount of confusion, and clearing that up…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, and it stops them dead. John has spent five chapters telling his readers how they may know that they have eternal life, and then, almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10152. Maranatha appears once in the New Testament, tucked into the closing lines of a long and often difficult letter, and it is one of the oldest Christian prayers we possess. Paul writes: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22). That last phrase…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3065. When Jesus prayed, who was listening? It is one of the sharpest questions a sceptic, or a Muslim friend, or an honest child can put to a Christian. If Jesus is God, was he talking to himself in Gethsemane? Does the very fact that Jesus prayed prove he must be something less than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3022. Jesus is not idle in heaven, and His heavenly intercession for believers is only one part, though the most frequently mentioned part, of an active present ministry that Scripture describes in surprising detail. He ascended, but He did not retire. Let me set out the main things the Bible tells us He is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2074. The prayers of unbelievers raise a question I get asked often, usually by someone recalling a moment of crisis, a hospital corridor, a plane hitting turbulence, when they cried out to a God they were not otherwise sure they believed in. Did God hear that? I want to answer honestly rather than with…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2073. Changing God’s mind through prayer sounds, on the surface, like a contradiction of everything else Scripture teaches about His unchanging character. Yet Scripture itself records instance after instance of prayer altering what happens next, and I think the honest answer requires us to hold prayer’s real effectiveness together with God’s fixed, trustworthy nature…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2070. Divine repentance is the term theologians use for those startling verses where God is said to have ‘repented’ or ‘relented’ of something, most famously Genesis 6:6, where the LORD ‘regretted that he had made man on the earth’ (Genesis 6:6). At first glance it looks like a straightforward contradiction of God’s unchanging character,…