Dr Paul Allen

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming” ( Matt. 25:13). A day will come when all of humanity will give an account. Each of us will stand before the judgment seat of God , and the book of our lives will be spread open for all to see. God will then make a judgment according to what each person has done. God’s judgment will not be questioned. He shows no partiality, and His judgments are righteous. The standard by which all people will be judged is the perfect law of God. Against the skeptics and the secularists who assert that mankind will not be held accountable for its actions, Jesus told His disciples that one day “All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats” (Matt. 25:32). God has promised that the Day of Judgment will come. It might be tomorrow or it might be in a thousand years. No one knows. The exact time of Christ ’s return to ...

There’s a section in department stores these days called “shapewear.” It’s in both women’s and men’s clothing. These stores are banking on our concern with the shape of our bodies and our willingness to invest in garments that promise to give us the shape we’re looking for. But when we read Paul’s letter to the church in Rome , we discover it’s not what is shaping our bodies that he is most concerned about. He’s concerned about what is shaping our perspective, our priorities, our pursuits, and our opinions . He writes: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God , what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:2) His words force us to ask ourselves:   What external forces are shaping my internal dialogue about what matters?  What pressures me to make the choices I am making about how I spend my money, my time, and my energies?  Am I self-aware enough to know? Eve...

( ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution , Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach have blessed Christian scholarship with a thorough, scholarly, and accessible contribution on the subject of penal substitutionary atonement.  The book is divided into two parts—the first making the positive case for penal substitution on biblical, theological, pastoral, and historical grounds, and the second outlining and answering objections that have arisen against the doctrine. While the authors acknowledge that there have been critics of penal substitution throughout church history, many of those critics have self-confessed outside the boundaries of evangelicalism and have largely been relegated to the upper echelons of academia.  However, recent critics of the doctrine not only regard themselves as evangelicals committed to the authority of Scripture, but are also finding their material published in m...

Jesus taught in front of thousands of people throughout his lifetime. Wherever he went, huge crowds followed him ( Mark 5:24 , Mark 10:1 , Matthew 4:25 , Matthew 8:1 , Matthew 14:13 ). But not everyone that Jesus taught continued to follow him. Not everyone that followed him became his disciple. And even within his disciples, Jesus had an inner circle—the ones he invested in the most ( Mark 9:2–3 ). In The Master Plan of Evangelism , Robert E. Coleman examines Jesus’ strategy: Jesus was not trying to impress the crowd, but to usher in a kingdom. This meant that he needed people who could lead the multitudes. What good would it have been for his ultimate objective to arouse the masses to follow him if these people had no subsequent supervision or instruction in the Way? It had been demonstrated on numerous occasions that the crowd was an easy prey to false gods when left without proper care. . . .Thus, before the world could ever be permanently helped, people would have to be rais...

Image via Wikipedia "And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem , the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced , and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn." ( Zechariah 12:10 )   For centuries now, Jewish scholars have pondered the meaning and interpretation of this verse, and as one might imagine, there have been many varied interpretations.  Since they cannot allow admission that they themselves pierced  Jehovah , some have applied it to the nation of Israel with its persecutions in mind. But to resolve the issue, the question must be answered: Who is this "whom" who has been pierced?   Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word translated "whom" is simply the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet ,  aleph  and  tau , elsewhere denoting completeness and ...