Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1085. Biblical numbers appear throughout Scripture: forty days of flood, seven churches, twelve tribes, 144,000 sealed servants, 666 as the number of the beast. Are these figures meant literally, symbolically, or sometimes both at once? Understanding how biblical numbers function in Hebrew and Greek literature helps us interpret Scripture accurately, avoiding both wooden literalism…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4148. The Spirit symbolised by fire is one of the most dramatic and recurring pictures in Scripture, reaching its most famous expression at Pentecost, where “divided tongues as of fire” appeared and rested on each of the believers gathered in the upper room (Acts 2:3). Fire runs through the biblical story as a consistent…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4147. The Spirit symbolised by a dove is one of the most visually arresting pictures in the whole New Testament, appearing at the precise moment of Jesus’ baptism when “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him” (Matthew 3:16)….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10123 One of the more curious details in the Bible’s description of the eternal state is the statement in Revelation 21:1 that in the new heaven and the new earth, “the sea was no more.” For readers who love the ocean and find it among the most awe-inspiring features of the natural world, this…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10139 The idealist approach to Revelation, sometimes called the spiritual or symbolic approach, reads the book not as a prediction of specific historical events, whether past or future, but as a timeless portrayal of the ongoing conflict between good and evil, between God and Satan, between the Church and the world. It is the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09064 The question of whether communion is “just” symbolic often arises from a sense that something deeper ought to be happening at the Lord’s Table than the passing of bread and grape juice. Behind it lies a genuine instinct: if the Lord’s Supper were nothing more than a nostalgic re-enactment, it would be difficult…