Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04098 Paul had other options available to him when he wrote Galatians 5. He could have described the qualities he was commending as virtues, drawing on a framework that every educated reader in the Greco-Roman world would have immediately recognised. He could have presented them as the disciplines of the Christian life, the practices…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04094 Gideon’s fleece has become a popular shorthand in contemporary Christianity for a particular approach to guidance: placing a condition before God and taking the outcome as a sign of His will. “I’ll put out a fleece” has entered the vocabulary of Christian decision-making as if it described an approved biblical method. Whether the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04095 Scripture does not specify which career a believer should pursue, which city to live in, or which of two apparently godly people to marry. The absence of direct biblical instruction on these matters is not an oversight. It is itself a form of teaching about the kind of relationship God intends to have…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04093 The question of how to distinguish between what we want and what the Spirit is actually doing in us is one of the most practically pressing questions in the Christian life. It is not a question of doubt or weak faith; it is the honest recognition that we are fallen people with complex…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01119 The Old Testament prophets occupy a remarkable place in the history of divine communication. They were not merely gifted teachers or insightful moralists; they were men to whom God actually spoke, and the variety of ways in which He did so tells us something important about both the nature of prophecy and the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01141 Popular culture has a habit of borrowing from Scripture without particularly caring about accuracy. The result is a collection of widely repeated phrases that bear some resemblance to biblical language but carry meanings quite different from, or sometimes entirely absent from, the texts from which they are supposedly drawn. This matters not as…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04114 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, announces dramatic healings, and encourages large financial donations as an act of faith. Millions of people watch these programmes. Some are ill and desperately hopeful….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11081 The Samaritan mission in Acts 8 is one of the most theologically charged events in the book of Acts, though Luke narrates it with characteristic restraint. Philip crossed not merely a geographical boundary when he went to Samaria; he crossed a centuries-deep fault line of religious contempt and mutual suspicion. That God used…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04107 Luke is a careful and purposeful narrator, and he places the Simon Magus episode immediately after the account of the Samaritans receiving the Spirit. This is not loose sequencing. Luke is doing what good historians do: following a remarkable account of genuine gospel advance with an equally instructive account of what counterfeit interest…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04106 Philip is one of the more interesting figures in Acts, and his ministry tends to be overshadowed by the drama of the Simon Magus episode and the theological puzzle of the Spirit’s delay. But he deserves attention in his own right. He was not an apostle. He was one of the Seven appointed…