Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07018 Grace is perhaps the most distinctive word in the Christian vocabulary, and also one of the most misused. It is not a vague spiritual niceness, nor a technical system requiring specialist knowledge to access. In Scripture it is something breathtakingly concrete: the favour of God given freely to those who have no claim…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 07019 Few theological questions carry more pastoral weight than this one. For many believers, the fear that salvation might somehow be lost produces an exhausting, joyless religious life in which assurance is always conditional on recent performance. Scripture, read carefully, addresses this fear with remarkable directness, and the answer it gives is not a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07015 Sanctification is what God does in the believer after conversion. If justification answers the question of the believer’s standing before God, sanctification answers the question of their state, the actual moral and spiritual condition of their inner life. The two must be carefully distinguished; confusing them is the source of considerable theological muddle…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07016 Glorification is the final act of God’s saving work. It is the moment when everything that salvation promised is fully and finally delivered, when the believer receives a resurrection body, is freed at last from the presence and possibility of sin, and is completely conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. It is…
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 07014 Justification is the word the New Testament uses to describe what happens legally and relationally when a sinner is accepted before God. It is not the whole of salvation, but it is its judicial heart. Getting a clear understanding of it matters enormously, because what you believe about justification determines what you believe…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07027 Salvation is described in the New Testament through a range of images, each of which captures a different dimension of what God has done for those who trust in Christ. Justification addresses legal standing. Redemption addresses bondage and purchase. Reconciliation addresses a broken relationship. Adoption addresses identity and belonging. It answers a question…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07028 Before anyone can be reconciled, there must have been a separation. The New Testament does not soften what that separation looks like: human beings, by nature and by choice, are at enmity with God. Not merely distant from Him, not simply ignorant of Him, but opposed to Him. Reconciliation is the doctrine that…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 07025 This question sits at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation, and it is not merely a historical or academic debate. How a person answers it shapes how they understand the gospel, how they relate to God, and what they think Christian discipleship actually involves. The apparent tension in the New Testament between…
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…