Dr Paul Allen

Molnár József: Ábrahám kiköltözése (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) "And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son" (Gen. 22:13). Like an old-fashioned grammar text, the Bible is a book in which many of the answers to questions posed early on are to be found in the back of the book. Take the idea that Jesus died for me. We sing Cecil Frances Alexander 's words: We may not know, we cannot tell What pains he had to bear; But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there. And we sing these words because they reflect something we find to be deeply embedded within Scripture. Substitution is the word we have come to employ for this even though, like Trinity , it is not a biblical word. But it is a word that summarizes what we find in the Bible from the very start: that sin is atoned for by the sacrifice of another. Sinners in the Old Testament came and offered sacrifices, symbolically laying their hands on the victim's hea

Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber to be an example of a charismatic religious leader. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) No better answer is given in perhaps all the Bible than in the great eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews . Here a tapestry is unfolded, depicting great examples of faith from the record of Old Testament heroes. In great castles, dark tapestries hang on musty walls to portray the exploits of great knights and lords from long ago, preserving the virtues and valors that made the kingdom great. Hebrews 11 is no musty hallway! It is a spiritual walkway adorned by the weaving of God 's living Word, depicting faith as the key virtue by which God has made His kingdom great. Hebrews 11 is often called the " Hall of Heroes ." But the true hero of this chapter is God who gives faith to His own, by which the smallest of men and women have done great things in His strength. Hebrews 11 shows that faith is so important because God's people are bese

The Academy of Athens. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “As I . . . beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD . Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” ( Acts  17:23 )   The people of Athens were known to be quite religious, worshipping a host of nature gods. They even had set up an altar “to the unknown god.” Paul pounced on this point of contact to declare unto them the God they didn’t know. He starts by laying the foundation: This God, he claims, is the Creator .   He not only “made the world and all things therein” (v. 24), but also is “Lord of heaven and earth.” To cause to exist and then to rule over all of creation, one must be omnipotent. He is much too great to dwell in “temples made with hands.” How ludicrous to think He might need anything, including the worship of men, “seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” (v. 25).   This God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” and “hath