Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1177. Old Testament narrative makes up a larger share of Scripture than any other single genre, the accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and his brothers, the exodus from Egypt, David and Saul, Elijah and the kings of Israel, and yet it may be the genre most often misread in ordinary Bible study. Christians…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1170. Concursive inspiration is the term theologians use for the way God produced Scripture through human authors without either overriding their personalities or leaving the outcome to human judgement alone. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul were real people, writing in real historical circumstances, with their own vocabularies, temperaments, and concerns. Yet what they…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden meaning behind every single detail rather than asking what one main point Jesus was actually making. I want to give you the method I use,…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus almost certainly spoke day to day. That choice was not an accident of history so much as an instance of providence working through history, and…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1160. Aramaic passages appear in the Old Testament at a handful of specific points, and the first time someone notices this in Daniel or Ezra, they usually assume it is a copying error rather than a deliberate feature of the text. It is not an error. Understanding why these Aramaic sections are there tells…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2000. God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1188. If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ from each other in the details each writer chooses to include or leave out. Read the feeding of the five thousand in all three Gospels…