Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion Q04012 The question may seem almost impertinent. Can a divine person be suppressed? Can a member of the Godhead be hindered? Yet Scripture addresses this directly, and the answer it gives has significant implications for how we understand both the Spirit’s work and our responsibility towards it. What the Text Actually Says Paul’s instruction…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2008 The question of whether God speaks today, and how He does so, sits at the intersection of several significant theological debates. Cessationists argue that God speaks exclusively through Scripture now that the canon is complete and that the gifts of the Spirit, including prophecy, have ceased. Many charismatics emphasise direct divine communication through…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4061 Of all the biblical arguments marshalled in support of cessationism — the view that certain spiritual gifts have ceased with the apostolic age — the most frequently cited is 1 Corinthians 13:10: “when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” The cessationist reading identifies “the perfect” as the completed New Testament canon….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4062 The cessationist and continuationist debate turns, at its heart, on a single exegetical decision: are prophecy and Scripture the same category of thing? If they are, then genuine prophecy today would mean adding to the Word of God — an obvious impossibility given that the canon is closed. But if prophecy and Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4066 Someone approaches you after a church meeting, or perhaps contacts you privately, with a message they believe is from God for your life. They may have used the language of prophecy, or they may have phrased it more tentatively as something they felt they should share with you. How do you respond? The…
Reading Time: 14 minutesQuestion 1008 The question of dreams, visions, and prophecy today generates considerable confusion and division in the church. Does God still speak through these means? Should Christians expect or seek these experiences? The answer requires careful biblical thinking that avoids two dangerous extremes: rigidly denying God can work beyond our categories, or elevating subjective experiences…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1066 This is perhaps the most fundamental question anyone can ask about Christianity. If the Bible is not truly God’s Word, then our faith rests on nothing more than human opinion and religious tradition. But if it is what it claims to be—the very words of the living God—then everything changes. Our lives, our…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1081 One of the most compelling evidences for the divine origin of Scripture is fulfilled prophecy. No other religious text contains anything comparable to the Bible’s track record of specific predictions made centuries in advance and fulfilled in verifiable history. Understanding what Scripture itself says about prophecy fulfilment strengthens our confidence in God’s Word…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1039 One of the most fascinating aspects of Bible study is discovering how the Old Testament points forward to Jesus and the New Covenant. This is not something we impose on the text; it is woven into the fabric of Scripture itself. The technical term for this forward-pointing pattern is “typology.” Understanding what typology…