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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4063. Spirit filled living is commanded, not simply commended as an optional extra, in Ephesians 5:18, and Paul does not leave the command floating vaguely in the abstract for believers to guess at. Read the verses that surround it and three concrete conditions emerge clearly, conditions any believer can act on today rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4062. The relationship between prophecy and Scripture is often assumed rather than genuinely examined, and the assumption usually runs in one of two mistaken directions, either treating every prophetic word as functionally equal to the Bible itself, or dismissing prophecy altogether simply because it is not Scripture. Paul gives us a considerably better way…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4059. The Holy Spirit’s deity is not a matter of theological hair splitting, because how you answer it shapes how you pray, how you read the New Testament, and how seriously you take the words Jesus Himself spoke against dishonouring Him. I have met sincere Christians who speak of the Spirit as a kind…