Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 03016 The question of why Jesus had to rise is not the same as asking why the resurrection matters, though the two are closely related. To ask why He had to rise is to ask what would have been left incomplete, unresolved, or false had the tomb remained occupied. The answer is sobering: without…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60022 The claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is either the most important fact in human history or the most successful deception ever perpetrated. There is no middle ground. If it happened, it changes everything about what it means to be human, what death is, and who God is. If…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60083 Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg whose influence on twentieth-century theology was enormous and, from an orthodox evangelical perspective, largely destructive. His programme of demythologisation, set out most directly in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” argued that the New Testament is embedded in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3064 The traditional answer is Friday, which is why we call it “Good Friday.” But some have challenged this, arguing for Wednesday or Thursday instead. The debate centres on how we understand Jesus’ statement that He would be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Let us examine…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3066 This question assumes something that is not quite accurate, namely that Jesus, as God, ceased to exist or ceased to function during His death. To answer properly, we need to understand what happened when Jesus died and how His divine and human natures relate to one another. The answer reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 05042 The Bible’s early chapters record lifespans that strike modern readers as extraordinary: Methuselah lived 969 years, Adam 930, Noah 950. Within a few generations of the flood, those figures collapse dramatically until Moses writes in Psalm 90 about seventy or eighty years as the human allotment. This is not incidental data. It raises…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 05044 Few pastoral situations press harder on theological convictions than watching someone disappear behind advancing dementia. The face is familiar; the body is present; and yet something that once defined the person — their memory, their personality, their capacity for recognition or conversation — is gone. What does Scripture say is actually happening to…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 5024 Something notable happens when the biblical story of humanity begins. Before the breath, before the garden, before the command, there is the ground. “The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7). The word translated “dust” is the Hebrew ʿaphar, referring to dry earth, loose soil, the fine powdery…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 5025 There is a single verse in Genesis that contains one of the most remarkable statements in all of Scripture about what human beings are. “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5026 Few questions excite and perplex people in equal measure as this one. What exactly will the resurrection body be? Will it be physical? Will it look the same? Will it be subject to the same limitations as the present body? Paul addresses the question head-on in 1 Corinthians 15, and his answer is…