Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10036 Two phrases in the New Testament sound similar enough to be confused but refer to entirely different realities. “The times of the Gentiles” and “the fullness of the Gentiles” describe distinct aspects of God’s programme, one relating to political dominion over Jerusalem and the other to the ingathering of Gentile believers into the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10010 The number 666 is one of the most recognised symbols in all of Scripture, and one of the most misunderstood. Revelation 13:18 introduces it with a direct invitation to the reader: “This calls for wisdom: let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10014 Eschatology does not float free from the rest of Scripture. The Bible’s teaching about the last things is built on a covenantal foundation that stretches from Genesis to Revelation, and unless those covenants are understood properly, the prophetic picture will always be distorted. The question of how the biblical covenants relate to eschatology…
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: 4 minutesQuestion 09022 Western Christianity has a persistent individualism problem. The dominant assumption in many evangelical and charismatic contexts is that the believer’s relationship with God is a private transaction, and that discerning the Spirit’s voice is primarily a personal skill to be developed in isolation. Scripture tells a different story. The gathered church is not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4089 Dreams occupy an interesting position in the biblical record. They are neither marginalised as purely psychological phenomena nor elevated as the primary channel of divine communication. Scripture treats them with a seriousness that neither the sceptic nor the enthusiast fully honours — the sceptic too quick to dismiss them entirely, the enthusiast too…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4081 Two commands in the New Testament describe ways believers can disrupt their relationship with the Holy Spirit: “do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30) and “do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19). These are distinct warnings, and collapsing them into a single idea loses something important from each. Understanding…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01119 The Old Testament prophets occupy a remarkable place in the history of divine communication. They were not merely gifted teachers or insightful moralists; they were men to whom God actually spoke, and the variety of ways in which He did so tells us something important about both the nature of prophecy and the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04092 The nineteenth chapter of 1 Kings is one of the most psychologically and spiritually rich passages in the entire Old Testament. Elijah, the prophet who had called down fire from heaven on Carmel and executed the prophets of Baal, is found forty days later under a broom tree in the wilderness begging to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04116 The question of whether the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament remain available to the church today is among the most practically consequential theological debates of the modern era. For much of evangelical Christianity in the West, the answer has been shaped not primarily by careful biblical exegesis but…