Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11022. Ask about unreached peoples and you are really asking two questions at once. There is the practical one about the millions who live where no church exists, and there is the harder one underneath it: what happens to those who die without ever hearing of Jesus? I want to answer both, and to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09014. Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the new birth is conveyed through the water of baptism, so that a person is regenerated in and by the act itself rather than by faith in Jesus prior to it. It is held in various forms by Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, many Lutherans and Anglicans, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08136. Peter says that angels long to look into the things announced to us through the gospel, and it is one of those half-verses that people read past for years before it suddenly stops them. Why would beings who stand in the presence of God be craning to see something we hold in our…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7999 The question of what a person must do to be saved is the most important question anyone ever asks, and Scripture gives an answer so short that people often refuse to believe it. When the Philippian jailer asked it, Paul and Silas said, believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7103 Whether Jesus is the only way to God is the question that makes Christians most uncomfortable in polite company, and it is the one the New Testament answers most bluntly. Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6)….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7094 Whether water baptism is necessary for salvation is a question that has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by quoting one verse loudly. There are passages which appear at first glance to make baptism part of the transaction, and any honest treatment has to deal with them rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7078. To believe on Jesus is the single condition Scripture attaches to salvation, and it is worth being precise about it, because the English word believe has grown thin. In ordinary speech we believe things we are fairly confident about and nothing follows from it. I believe the train leaves at ten past. That…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7077. The place of confession in salvation is one of those subjects where a single verse has been made to carry more weight than it can bear. Romans 10:9 mentions the mouth, and a whole practice of guided prayers and public declarations has been built on it, sometimes with the implication that a person…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7075. The gospel message can be stated in a sentence, and it needs to be, because most of the conversations in which it matters will not give you twenty minutes. At the same time a summary that leaves out something essential is not a shorter gospel but a different one. So the task is…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 7045. Scripture says plainly that Jesus died for all, and just as plainly that not everyone will be saved. Put those two statements next to each other and many people feel a contradiction opening up. Either the death of Jesus did not accomplish what it set out to do, or the all is not…