Dr Paul Allen

Recently, while reading a highly regarded commentary on the Book of Numbers, I realized a fairly common preaching “trope” I have heard from the pulpit for years was quite erroneous. That trope, or “commonly repeated conventional view,” is the reason God prevented Moses from entering the promised land.  It is an exegetical point that may not seem all that important. After all, we realize that Moses, like everyone, was a sinner. And, we know that sinners sin. Moreover, we also know that in doing so, sinners often forfeit the right to what would otherwise be an appropriate reward or “blessing.” This is not a terribly controversial idea in Jewish or Christian theology. It also seems to be a basic fact of experience that anyone can understand, regardless of religious persuasion: if you screw up, you may not get what you want. However, thinking a bit more carefully about it, it does seem a fairly big deal that the greatest prophet of his time; the greatest prophet in all of Jewish histor...

“He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”  1 John 2:2 The word propitiation, as used by the apostle John in 1 John 2, has been the subject of much debate throughout the centuries. The question is this: Does John mean by propitiation that Jesus Christ, through His death on the cross, obtained forgiveness for us, or does John mean that through His death, Jesus not only obtained forgiveness for us but also satisfied the wrath of God against us? How you answer this question will either lead you to the gospel of Jesus Christ and a saving knowledge of God or to a faulty understanding of who God is and what He requires as payment for our sins. Some would say that God is not a God of wrath.   They would say God does not demand blood sacrifice to satisfy His wrath against sin and sinners. They claim that God is pure benevolence – a loving God who would never have this kind of wrath that needed to be satisfied against sin. The...

Many of the most common troubles in the Christian life come from relating to God as if he were like us — as if his kindness were as slight as our kindness, his forgiveness as reluctant as our forgiveness, and his patience as fleeting as our patience. Under impressions such as these, we walk uneasily through the Christian life, insecurity rumbling like distant thunder. John Owen (1616–1683) goes so far as to say, Want of a due consideration of him with whom we have to do, measuring him by that line of our own imaginations, bringing him down unto our thoughts and our ways, is the cause of all our disquietments. (Works of John Owen, 6:500) If we were God in heaven, we would have grown impatient with people like us long ago. Our anger rises quickly in the face of personal offense. Our frustration boils over. Our judgments readily fire. And apart from the daily renewal of our minds, we can easily measure God “by that line of our own imaginations,” as if his thoughts matched our thoughts, an...

  The Bible is a good place to start in finding an answer. Read, in order, these Scriptures: John 17:20–23; 1 Timothy 3:15; 2 Corinthians 5:17; John 21:15–17; Luke 22:31–32; Matthew 16:18; John 14:9–12, 15–17, 23–24. If the Church is only an organization of human beings, then it has no right to tell you what to believe or what to do. But if the Church is the teacher Jesus left on earth to tell us his words and his will and to continue his work on earth, then the Church has its right from Jesus, her founder. Further, Jesus has this right from his Father, for he is the Son of God. He is just as divine as his Father, just as you are just as human as your human father. God has the right to tell us what to do because he created us and designed us (Gen 1:26–27; Rom 5:14–18). He gave us our very existence, as an author gives his character's existence. Doesn’t an author have the right to tell his characters what to do? The analogy fails here, for we have free will, as characters in a piece...

How do your pastors handle their power? That’s right, their power. Does that make you cringe to think about pastors having power? If so, it’s understandable. When we talk about power today, we do so in a particular social climate. Even ordinary folks, unfamiliar with foreign names like Nietzsche and Foucault, have caught the drift, and the negative connotations of power. This is why it might sound jarring in many ears to hear about pastoral power. Power, however, rightly defined, is first a gift and blessing from God, not an evil to be avoided. Power, writes, Andy Crouch, is “our ability to make something of the world” in fulfillment of the charge God gave our race to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, 17). To be human is to have power. With brains and hands, minds and muscles — and a voice — God enables us to fulfill his call, and increases our power as we exercise it effectively, especially as we con...

Romans 12:16–20, specifically verse 19, where Paul writes, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” So how does faith in the future, vindicating justice of God settle us and stabilize us and make it possible for us to live with sanity in a world that will cut us deeply? “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for” — this is the ground, the basis; this is the way you’re able to do it — “it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’” (Romans 12:19). Now, here’s what that implies : that little word for implies that one of the motivations in our hearts for why we can’t return good for evil ; one of the motivations for why it’s so hard not to strike back, not to plan vengeance; one of the reasons it’s so hard is because deep down in our souls, there’s this warranted, justified desire that justice be done. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be done ...

Until recently, the inability to control one’s anger, because it was somewhat rare and exotic, was something we could laugh about. Late-night talk show hosts lampooned road rage. Anger Management was the title of a 2003 comedy film starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson. Today, lack of impulse control is no rarity and no laughing matter. We live in a world aflame with anger. A recent documentary tells the story of the online “Outrage Machine” that, with a little misinformation and a viral hashtag, can rally a social-media mob and destroy a person’s life. On college campuses, many have lost the ability to interact reasonably with opposing viewpoints. Students complain of being triggered by “microaggressions” and demand the summary dismissal of anyone who would offend them, calling for “safe spaces” where fragile perspectives can rest unchallenged by opposing arguments.1 When it comes to public discourse, we have become a culture that sees red. Our constant state of unhinge...

A close encounter with Christianity is an encounter with a God who is capable of anger. Whether we are reading about Moses pleading with a furious Yahweh who wants to wipe out the complaining Israelites and start all over in the book of Exodus (Exodus 32:10-11) or God’s general wrath towards stubborn and unrepentant people (Romans 2:5). The anger of God is not an uncommon theme in Christian theology, either, from Fire and Brimstone Baptist preachers to the famous sermon from the Great Awakening, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. But it’s also not a distant theme in most of our lives as we continue to sin despite being made new in Christ. When we sin it can be difficult to see the infinite grace of Jesus’s death on the cross being offered to us. Instead, the angry face of God can loom menacingly over us even as we turn to His Word for comfort and the promise of forgiveness. Over time, we stop seeing anger as something God experiences in response to sin an...

Has anyone ever said something unkind to you or about you? I think we all have had that experience. Becoming victims of slander or malicious gossip can be difficult to bear. However, God calls us to exhibit a very specific kind of response in such circumstances. Ever had these feelings ranging from despondency and anger, even though I knew I needed to respond with joy (Matt. 5:11–12). T he greatest book ever written about the virtue of love in the Christian life is Jonathan Edwards' classic   Charity and Its Fruits . In this book, Edwards included a chapter on how we are to respond to false charges. There, he makes the biblical point that such attacks should not surprise us; rather, we should expect them and stay determined to keep the faith: Men that have their spirits heated and enraged and rising in bitter resentment when they are injured act as if they thought some strange thing had happened to them. Whereas they are very foolish in so thinking for it is no strange ...