Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1091. Claiming verses is something I have watched sincere believers do in genuine faith, and something I have also watched leave people confused and hurt when the outcome they claimed never arrived. I understand the instinct. When life is hard, a promise like “I know the plans I have for you” feels like exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say this from experience as much as from study. There have been stretches of ministry where my Bible reading thinned out, and without my quite noticing,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1089. Scripture in counselling is where I keep returning whenever I sit with someone in pain, because the Bible speaks to the whole person, not only to their beliefs about God. I am not a trained clinical psychologist, and I refer people to good professional help when a situation calls for it. But as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1088. Scripture in evangelism is not a set of proof texts we reach for after we have already made our own case. It is the message itself, and the power that makes the message land. I have shared the gospel in enough settings, from the pulpit to a hospital bedside, to know how tempting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1087. Scripture in worship is not decoration set around the edges of a service. It is the very substance of what we say, sing and pray when a church gathers before the Lord. I have led enough services now to know how easy it is to let worship drift into a performance of moods…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1074. Why these sixty-six books, and not more, and not fewer? It is a fair question, and one I would rather answer directly than wave away with an appeal to church tradition alone, since tradition, however venerable, is not itself the final ground of biblical authority. Having already looked at how the canon of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves no favours by either dismissing the question too quickly or panicking as though the whole edifice of Scripture rests on winning every single one of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak carefully about what kind of trust Scripture actually deserves. When we say the Bible is infallible, we are making a statement about its complete trustworthiness…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine the fuller Deep Dive treatment it deserves, because it sits underneath almost every other confidence a Christian holds. If the Bible cannot be trusted in…