Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand…
Reading Time: 7 minutesStanding with Israel in Biblical Truth and Justice Q10141 Preamble As an Evangelical Baptist committed to the authority of Scripture and the unchanging promises of God, I find myself compelled to respond to recent statements from Baptists Together, BMS World Mission and Baptist Union of Wales that mischaracterise Israel’s legitimate right to self-defence and misrepresent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6010. Presumptuous sins are singled out in one of David’s best-known prayers, and the singling out is deliberate: “Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me!” (Psalm 19:13). David has just prayed about hidden faults, the sins he cannot even see in himself. Then he turns to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6004. Sin, transgression and iniquity appear together so often in Scripture that many readers assume they are interchangeable, but each word carries its own weight, and together they diagnose us more thoroughly than any one of them alone. When David poured out Psalm 51 after his fall with Bathsheba, he reached for all three:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3045. Messiah and Christ both mean the anointed one, and that single fact unlocks more of your Bible than almost any other piece of vocabulary. Many people assume Christ is simply Jesus’ surname, as though Joseph and Mary were Mr and Mrs Christ of Nazareth. It is nothing of the kind. It is a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01156. Imprecatory psalms sit among the most uncomfortable passages a preacher ever has to handle from the pulpit, because verses that call down destruction on enemies, and in one notorious case pronounce a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Psalm 137:9), sit awkwardly beside Jesus’s plain command to love our enemies…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word “meditation” now carries associations that have very little to do with what the Bible means by it. When people hear “meditate”, many picture emptying the mind, sitting cross-legged, chasing a blank…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1029. Hebrew poetry does not work the way English poetry does, and readers who go looking for rhyme or a regular metre come away thinking the Psalms and Proverbs are simply prose with unusual line breaks scattered through them. Once you know what to look for, Hebrew poetry becomes far more accessible, and its…