Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I should usually end up, even when a scholar somewhere is telling me otherwise. I get asked this question more than almost any other, usually by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1107. Manuscript discoveries make headlines from time to time, a newly identified papyrus fragment, an early codex found in a monastery library, and each one raises the same anxious question in some readers, could a find like this overturn something Christians have always believed? It is worth answering plainly. No genuine manuscript discovery has…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1106. Biblical preservation is a doctrine people often assume promises far more than it actually claims, and getting the scope right matters enormously, especially once you learn that our thousands of New Testament manuscripts contain small variations between copies. Does that discovery threaten biblical preservation as a doctrine? Not once you understand what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1105. Grammatical irregularities do appear here and there in the Greek New Testament, and the book of Revelation is the most famous case, containing what specialists call solecisms, places where John seems to break standard Greek grammatical agreement, most noticeably around the throne room visions in the early chapters. If Scripture is inspired down…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1104. Old Testament quotations in the New Testament rarely match their source word for word, and if you line up Matthew’s citation of Isaiah next to your Old Testament text, you will often notice small differences in wording almost immediately. Sceptics sometimes present this as proof of error somewhere in Scripture. It is nothing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1103. Verse divisions feel so permanent, printed neatly into every Bible you own, that it is easy to assume they came down from Sinai along with everything else. They did not. The chapter and verse numbers you use to find John 3:16 or Romans 8:28 are a human study aid added many centuries after…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1102. The dual authorship of Scripture is one of those doctrines that sounds like a contradiction until you actually sit with it, because we are so used to thinking of authorship as a single, exclusive category. Either Paul wrote Romans or God wrote Romans, surely, not both at once. But Scripture itself insists on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1101. I hold to verbal plenary inspiration without embarrassment, and it is worth being precise about what the doctrine actually claims, because plenty of people, believers and sceptics alike, picture something closer to the Islamic doctrine of the Qur’an than to what Scripture says about itself. Did God dictate the Bible word for word,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word “meditation” now carries associations that have very little to do with what the Bible means by it. When people hear “meditate”, many picture emptying the mind, sitting cross-legged, chasing a blank…