Study guide

Questions

Questions people have asked us about passages that are hard to read, answered from the text itself, with other teachers’ readings set beside our own, and with the limits of the evidence stated.

Start with Chaldeans and Babylon Prophecy and the signs

About these pages

These are questions I have had, and questions I have been asked. What is on these pages is a combination of my own thinking and study with Claude’s research and analysis, worked over together until the answer was one I could stand behind.

So please be a Berean about it (Acts 17:11). Check every page here against Scripture, and where the two disagree, Scripture wins. Where a page is giving an opinion rather than reporting what the text says, I work to say so.

14 questions so far

Hard passages, asked plainly and answered at length: what the text says, how others have read it, where it lands in Christ, and what it still does not settle. Each one has its own page, because a short answer to a question like these is usually a wrong one.

Jeremiah 25:8-14 Why are those from Babylon also called Chaldeans in Jeremiah, and do they exist today as a people?One verse uses both names. The answer to the second half of the question is written into that same verse.Curiosity John 16:33; Daniel 3:16-18 Is “Not my Jesus” a promise Jesus made?The instinct is right and the sentence is not. Jesus predicted tribulation in the same breath as the peace, and the night he said it he prayed that his own would be kept in the world rather than taken out of it.Close to the center 1 Corinthians 10:13; 2 Corinthians 1:8-9 Does God give us more than we can handle?Yes, and deliberately. The verse behind the saying is about temptation, not affliction, and Paul says he was loaded past his own strength precisely so that he would stop relying on it.Understanding God’s ways Luke 24:44-49 Why are these 66 books the Bible, and why not the Catholic ones?Nobody voted on it. The church recognised what it had been given, and the argument over the extra books is older, and more evenly balanced, than either side usually admits.Close to the center Nehemiah 8:1-8 Is there a “best” translation of the Bible?No, but there are better, worse, and a few to avoid, and the reasons are more useful than the answer.Practice, with one hard edge Romans 11:11-32 What does replacement theology mean, and what are the views on it?The name belongs to the worst version of a family of views. Sort the family out and most of the alarm goes, but there are real errors at both ends.Close to the center Revelation 20:1-10 What are the different views in eschatology?Four families of view, one chapter they all have to account for, and three questions that sort them out.Not a test of fellowship Jeremiah 20:1-18 If God is good and loving, why does he let bad things happen to good people?Jeremiah is beaten and put in the stocks for obeying. He does not say God allowed it. He says God prevailed.Understanding God’s ways Genesis 6:1-4; Numbers 13:33 Where did the giants of Canaan come from?The flood blotted out everything not in the ark, and then the spies report Nephilim in Canaan. Most of the puzzle is inside the question.Curiosity Matthew 5:1-12 Are the Beatitudes commands to obey or blessings to receive?Every one of them opens blessed are, Jesus is pronouncing, not requiring. But He is describing people who really do look like this.Close to the center Genesis 3:1-15 How do we know the serpent in Genesis was Satan?Genesis never names him. The New Testament does, and quotes Eden while doing it.Close to the center 1 Timothy 2:11-14 Can a woman teach men from the pulpit?No, and Paul roots it in the order of creation, before the fall, not in Eve’s sin.Church order and practice 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 What is the third heaven Paul was caught up to?The highest heaven, God’s own presence, and Paul tells us almost nothing about it, on purpose.Curiosity 2 Kings 2:23-25 Why did God send bears on boys for teasing Elisha?It was not teasing, and the bears were a covenant sanction already on the books.Understanding God’s ways

What is worth arguing about

Almost nothing on this page decides anyone’s salvation. The Westminster divines said it exactly: all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them (Westminster Confession 1.7). What you must know to be saved was never hidden in a hard passage. It is plain, and it is Christ.

So every question here is labelled with the kind of question it is. The shape of heaven does not carry the same weight as what a church does on Sunday, and neither of them carries the weight of the gospel. Paul told Timothy to have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies because they breed quarrels, and that the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone (2 Timothy 2:23-24). He told Titus the same (Titus 3:9). He reminded the Corinthians that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1).

So study hard and hold it kindly. Calvin’s rule is the one to work by, seek the knowledge of those things only that are necessary to be known, and leave other things to God, and then refuse to build a wall where God did not build one. The line usually quoted as Augustine’s, in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity, was in fact written around 1627 by a Lutheran pastor named Rupertus Meldenius, in the middle of a war fought over religion. He knew what it cost to get this wrong. He was still right.

Read these like a Berean

Everything below is one family’s reading, and everything quoted from anyone else is a man’s opinion about God’s Word, never a substitute for it. The Bereans were called more noble because they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11), and the preacher they were checking was the apostle Paul. Check these pages the same way. Where a teacher never wrote on a passage, we say so instead of attaching his name to a plausible guess.