Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8041. Whether Satan is a literal being or a poetic way of describing the darker side of human nature is not an idle question, and I get asked it far more often than you might expect. Sceptics raise it as an objection. Believers raise it because they have grown uncomfortable with the way some…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8031. Whether demons are fallen angels is a question the Bible answers by implication rather than by definition, which is why it still gets discussed. Scripture never pauses to say here is where demons came from, and readers have to assemble the picture from a number of passages that were written for other purposes….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8006. Angelic free will is one of those doctrines that seems abstract until you realise it is the only way to explain how evil entered a universe made entirely good. Something went wrong before Genesis 3, and it went wrong among creatures who were not deceived by a serpent, because they were the serpent….
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the God who gave her, the woman blamed the serpent, and the pattern has been running ever since. Scripture takes our enemy entirely seriously. It also…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10192. The millennial rebellion is one of the strangest paragraphs in the Bible, and one of the most searching. Jesus has reigned in person from Jerusalem for a thousand years, the earth has been full of the knowledge of the Lord, Satan has been shut away, justice has been swift and honest, and then…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10156. Satan’s final defeat is described in Scripture with a clarity that leaves nothing to the imagination and no room for appeal. He is not an eternal rival to God, he is a creature, and Satan’s final defeat was written into the story long before it began. What surprises people is that the ending…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10095. The end of the millennium brings one of the strangest sequences in Scripture. After a thousand years of Christ reigning in person from Jerusalem, with the enemy bound and righteousness enforced, there is a rebellion. Not a small one either. Revelation says the number of the rebels is like the sand of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6002. The origin of sin is one of the deepest questions a believer can ask, because it presses on the character of God Himself. If God is good, and God created everything, where did evil come from? Did He make it? Did it surprise Him? Scripture does not hand us a philosophical treatise, but…