Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3046. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29). With those words John the Baptist introduced Jesus to Israel, and he chose his image with care. He did not say behold the Lion, or the King, or even the Messiah, though all would have been true. He…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3036. The blood of Jesus is one of the most repeated themes in the New Testament, and yet I find that many Christians are hazy about what it actually means. We sing about it, we hear it invoked in prayer, and some traditions treat it almost as a magic formula. But when Peter writes…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 3076 Few words in all of Scripture carry the weight of those spoken by Jesus from the cross in John 19:30: “It is finished.” In the original Greek, this is a single word, tetelestai (τετέλεσται), and it is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire New Testament. Far from being a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1020. The Bible’s main message gets lost surprisingly easily under the sheer size and apparent diversity of Scripture, sixty-six books, more than forty authors, several languages, a story stretching across roughly fifteen hundred years, and I want to state that central message plainly rather than leaving it buried under all that surrounding detail. Getting…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 08136 Peter’s statement that angels “long to look into” the things of the gospel is one of the most striking and often overlooked remarks in the New Testament. It sits within a passage about the privilege of salvation, and its force depends on grasping what it tells us about the gospel from the perspective…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07029 Redemption is one of the richest words in the New Testament’s vocabulary of salvation. It draws on the world of the marketplace and the world of slavery to describe what God has done for those who trust in Christ, and it carries the weight of a completed transaction that cannot be reversed. To…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07026 Imputation is a theological term that may sound abstract but describes one of the most personally significant realities in the whole of Scripture. It answers the question of how a guilty person can stand before a holy God without condemnation, and it does so by pointing to a transaction that took place at…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6023 The teaching about generational curses has become widespread in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, typically claiming that sins committed by ancestors create spiritual bondages that pass through family lines and require specific prayer to break. The idea is appealing in its apparent explanatory power, and it draws on real biblical language. The question is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 07095 Shame is one of the most corrosive emotions a human being can experience. It whispers that we are fundamentally flawed, irredeemably broken, unworthy of love or acceptance. It goes deeper than guilt, which says “I did something bad.” Shame says “I am bad.” And for countless people, including many Christians, shame is a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7097 The word “atonement” is one of those theological terms that gets used frequently in church but may not be well understood. Yet it describes something absolutely essential to the Christian faith: how sinful human beings can be reconciled to a holy God. Understanding the atonement helps us grasp what Jesus accomplished on the…