Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08098 Understanding how the enemy attacks marriages begins with understanding why he bothers. Marriage was God’s idea before sin entered the world, and Paul tells us it pictures something enormous: the relationship between Jesus and his church. Anything that displays the gospel that clearly is going to draw fire. My wife and I have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08081 The False Prophet is the least discussed of the three figures who dominate Revelation 13, and that is a pity, because his role explains a great deal about how the tribulation actually functions. He is the religious arm of a political system, and he is the one who makes the whole thing work….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08097 Asking whether something is demonic or psychological is one of the most delicate questions a pastor gets, and getting it wrong in either direction causes real damage. I have seen unwell people treated as though they were possessed, and I have seen genuine spiritual trouble waved away as a chemical problem. So let…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08080 Satan and Antichrist are not the same being, and confusing them is one of the commonest mistakes in popular prophecy teaching. One is a fallen angelic creature with a history stretching back before the human story. The other is a man, yet to appear, who will hold political power for a limited period….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08096 Knowing whether you are under spiritual attack is harder than most books on the subject admit, and I want to be honest about that before offering anything more useful. There is no diagnostic checklist in the Bible, no set of symptoms that appears only when the enemy is at work. What Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08079 Satan’s role in the tribulation is described more fully than at any other point in Scripture, and Revelation gives us a sequence rather than a snapshot. He is thrown down, he pursues, he empowers, he deceives, and finally he is seized and bound. I write as a pretribulational premillennialist, so I take that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08095 The idea that a third of the angelic host became fallen angels is so widely repeated that most Christians assume it is stated somewhere in plain terms. It is not. It rests on a single symbolic image in Revelation 12, and the inference drawn from it is reasonable without being certain. I hold…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08078 The prayer of Jabez occupies two verses buried in a genealogy, and for a few years around the turn of the century it was among the best known passages in the English-speaking church. A short book sold many millions of copies and turned these lines into a daily formula for a great many…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08077 Binding and loosing has become one of the most quoted and least examined phrases in contemporary Christian speech. It is used to bind demons, bind sickness, bind circumstances and loose blessing, favour and finances, often within a single sentence. The phrase occurs twice in the New Testament, both times in Matthew, and in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 08093 Satan’s authority is the subject of the strange title Paul gives him in Ephesians 2, where he is called “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” It is a phrase people quote without ever quite deciding what it means, and…