Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4069. The Spirit before Pentecost operated on a genuinely different basis from His ministry today, and understanding that difference clears up a great deal of confusion about how Old Testament believers related to God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active throughout the Old Testament, not absent until Acts chapter 2. What changed at Pentecost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4066. A prophetic word is never simply accepted on the strength of someone’s confidence in delivering it. Paul is explicit about this: when someone speaks a word of prophecy in the gathered church, others are to weigh what has been said, testing it rather than receiving it uncritically. That single instruction from 1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4065. Spiritual gifts are not an aspiration to work towards but a settled fact about every believer in Christ. That is a statement of what has already happened, grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament, not a target you have yet to reach. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1036. Creeds and confessions are summaries, not sources. That single sentence answers most of the confusion I encounter around this question. A creed does not add to what Scripture has revealed, and it does not carry authority independent of Scripture. What it does is state, in careful and tested language, what a body of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1034. Special revelation is not God’s only way of making Himself known, but it is His only sufficient way of making Himself known for salvation, and that distinction answers most of what lies behind this question. God has genuinely revealed something of Himself through creation, through conscience, and through the ordinary unfolding of history….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1033. Scripture interprets Scripture is one of those phrases preachers use so often that it risks sounding like a slogan rather than a method. In practice it names something quite specific. When a passage is unclear, ambiguous, or genuinely difficult, I let clearer passages elsewhere in the Bible set the boundaries for how the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1031. biblical sufficiency is the settled conviction that Scripture provides everything a believer genuinely needs for faith and godly living, and I want to be precise about exactly what that claim covers, because it is regularly misunderstood in both directions at once. Some treat biblical sufficiency as though the Bible should directly answer every…
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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1023. The ESV translation philosophy is worth understanding on its own terms rather than assuming it works exactly the same way as every other modern English Bible, because the ESV was built around a deliberate, clearly stated set of translation commitments from the outset. I use the ESV as my standard text for preaching,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1022. formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence describe two competing philosophies of Bible translation, and understanding the difference will genuinely change how you read the footnotes and prefaces of whatever translation currently sits on your shelf. This is not an argument about which translation is somehow holier than another. It is a careful question about…