Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2011. Ask a room of Christians how the persons of Trinity actually communicate with one another, and you will likely get some puzzled looks. The question seems either too obvious to bother with or too speculative to answer at all. In reality it touches something genuinely profound about the nature of God, and Scripture…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 2010. The fear of the Lord is, in Solomon’s words, “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), and it is also one of the most persistently misunderstood ideas in the whole Bible. Two errors keep turning up whenever I teach on this. The first sentimentalises it, reducing it to polite respect or quiet admiration, emptying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2009. Several passages promise that God forgets our sins, and I find that people respond to this in two opposite ways. Some find it the most comforting language in the whole Bible. Others find it puzzling: if God knows everything, how can He forget anything at all? Getting this right matters, because misunderstanding it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2008. People ask me constantly whether God speaks today, and I understand why the question keeps surfacing. Cessationists tell us God speaks only through the closed pages of Scripture now. Some charismatic circles talk as though a fresh word, vision or impression carries the same weight as the Bible itself. Neither extreme is where…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2003. God’s will is not one simple, single thing, and confusing its several different senses causes no end of pastoral confusion. When a marriage ends in unfaithfulness, or a child walks away from the faith, or a nation legalises something Scripture calls sin, people sometimes ask in genuine distress whether all of that happened…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2001. Theology Proper is the branch of systematic theology devoted entirely to the study of God Himself: His existence, His nature, His attributes, His works, and the relationships within the Godhead. It is called "proper" not because other branches of theology are somehow improper, but because it studies God as the direct subject rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1205. The Greek of Revelation has puzzled and occasionally embarrassed readers since the earliest centuries of the church, because John writes sentences that any first year Greek student would be marked down for. Cases fail to agree, participles hang without a clear subject, and in one notorious verse a preposition governs a nominative instead…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1203. Inspiration and illumination are two words that get used almost interchangeably in casual church conversation, and the blur causes real confusion. People will say a sermon was inspired when they mean it moved them, or that the Spirit inspired their understanding of a verse when they mean he illuminated it. Scripture actually keeps…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1200. Some of the most commonly misinterpreted verses in the whole Bible are also some of the most quoted, which is exactly why the confusion spreads so widely. A phrase gets lifted out of its setting, repeated in a sermon illustration or a social media post, and eventually acquires a popular meaning that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with certainty. The book itself is anonymous. Unlike Paul’s letters, which open by naming their author, Hebrews simply begins with a majestic statement about God speaking…