Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1051. The Samaritan Pentateuch sounds like the kind of obscure manuscript detail that only specialists need worry about, but it raises a question worth answering plainly: if the Samaritans have their own version of the first five books of the Bible, and it differs here and there from the Hebrew text we use, how…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4100. The Spirit in salvation does far more work than most believers realise, and most of it happens before we are even aware anything is happening at all. Salvation is the work of the whole Trinity: the Father who planned it, the Son who accomplished it at the cross, and the Holy Spirit who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4098. The fruit metaphor Paul chooses in Galatians 5 was not his only option, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. He could have written a list of virtues, a framework every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would instantly have recognised from Aristotle and the Stoics. He could have described the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4097. Character formation is a phrase psychologists reach for almost as often as pastors do, and that overlap is worth pausing on before going any further. Anyone who has watched a believer grow steadily kinder, calmer and more self-controlled over years of walking with Jesus has watched something that both categories, the psychological and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word “meditation” calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation is a thoroughly biblical idea, commanded and commended throughout Scripture, and it is something quite different from what the word usually suggests today. So I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1047. Septuagint quotations appear throughout the New Testament far more often than most readers realise, and noticing this raises a fair question. If Jesus and the apostles regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the very word of God, why do so many of their citations follow the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text underlying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1046. When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every English version on my shelf, including the ESV. But it is not the only ancient witness to the Old Testament, and understanding how it relates…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting rather than threatening. In 1868 a German missionary named Frederick Klein discovered a black basalt stone in Jordan bearing an inscription from Mesha, king of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4095. Scripture does not specify which career I should pursue, which city I should live in, or which of two apparently godly people I should marry. That silence is not an oversight, and understanding why it exists is the key to understanding Spirit’s guidance in the vast majority of ordinary decisions, where the Bible…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4094. Gideon’s fleece has become popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as confirmation of His will. “I am putting out a fleece” has entered the vocabulary of Christian decision making as though it described an approved biblical method. Whether the…