Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2003. God’s will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a child walks away from the faith, or a nation legalises something Scripture calls sin, people sometimes ask in genuine distress whether all of that happened…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within the Godhead. It is called "proper" not because other branches of theology are somehow improper, but because it studies God as the direct subject rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2000. God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would be marked down for. Cases fail to agree, participles hang without a clear subject, and in one notorious verse a preposition governs a nominative instead…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1203. Inspiration and illumination are two words that get used almost interchangeably in casual church conversation, and the blur causes real confusion. People will say a sermon was inspired when they mean it moved them, or that the Spirit inspired their understanding of a verse when they mean he illuminated it. Scripture actually keeps…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1200. Some of the most commonly misinterpreted verses in the whole Bible are also some of the most quoted, which is exactly why the confusion spreads so widely. A phrase gets lifted out of its setting, repeated in a sermon illustration or a social media post, and eventually acquires a popular meaning that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with certainty. The book itself is anonymous. Unlike Paul’s letters, which open by naming their author, Hebrews simply begins with a majestic statement about God speaking…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the Synoptic Gospels. Turn the page to John and the atmosphere changes: the parables thin out, long personal conversations take their place, and the pace slows…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the “hidden” or “suppressed” gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered among the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945, and it has become, in certain circles, a…