Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10173. Tribulation saints are the believers who come to faith after the Church has been taken, during the seven year period of judgement that Scripture calls Daniel’s seventieth week. They are among the bravest people the Bible describes, and a great many of them will die for their faith. So when are they raised?…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10180. How literal are the numbers in Revelation? It is one of the first questions a thoughtful reader asks, and the answer largely determines what sort of book he thinks he is reading. Sevens, twelves, a thousand years, 144,000, forty two months, 666. The book is full of counting. My working rule is that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 8019. Ezekiel opens his book with a vision so strange that readers have been arguing about it for two and a half thousand years, and at the centre of it are four living creatures. John sees something very like them around the throne in Revelation 4. Between them these two passages have generated more…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century. That has not stopped people writing confidently about them,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60103. Divine hiddenness is the polite name philosophers give to a complaint most of us have made at some point, usually at two in the morning. If God is real and wants to be known, why does He not simply appear? One unmistakable public demonstration and the argument would be over. I do not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60005. Dragons in Scripture turn up more often than most readers realise, and the question of whether anything real stands behind them is not as silly as it sounds. Every continent has dragon stories, and cultures with no contact produced descriptions with striking family resemblances. I am going to take the question seriously without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09087 Whether a congregation can stop being a true church is not a theoretical question in Britain, where a good many buildings still open on Sunday for gatherings in which the gospel has not been preached for two generations. The question is uncomfortable because it requires a judgement about other Christians, and we are…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08082 The great chain of Revelation 20 is one of those details that decides far more than it appears to. How you read it determines whether you place the millennium in the future or in the present, and that in turn shapes your entire understanding of prophecy. So this is not a question about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08081 The False Prophet is the least discussed of the three figures who dominate Revelation 13, and that is a pity, because his role explains a great deal about how the tribulation actually functions. He is the religious arm of a political system, and he is the one who makes the whole thing work….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08080 Satan and Antichrist are not the same being, and confusing them is one of the commonest mistakes in popular prophecy teaching. One is a fallen angelic creature with a history stretching back before the human story. The other is a man, yet to appear, who will hold political power for a limited period….