Dr Paul Allen

By faith, he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. (Heb. 11:28) “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” These words from Exodus 12:13 are some of the most comforting in the Old Testament, if not the entire Bible. But comfort (biblically speaking) often comes amid crisis.  When God spoke these words to Israel through Moses, Israel was in anything but a comfortable position. For several hundred years, they had been harshly enslaved by the Egyptians. Their God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—had been deafeningly silent throughout those centuries.  Egypt was a land full of pagan deities, and Pharaoh was a self-proclaimed deity among them—and he knew neither Joseph nor the God of Joseph. Time has a way of chilling warm memories, and all that God had done for Israel and the Egyptians had faded from memory. The people of God now pined away as slaves, labouring under the blighting sun of Pharaoh’s vainglory—a ...

David Mathis Have you ever wondered why we Christians so often sing about Jesus’s blood? It’s a very strange thing to emphasize, is it not? Not simply the cross and his death, but his blood. Just last Sunday, our church sang twice about the blood of Jesus. First in an old hymn: “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood?” Then in a newer song: “By his blood and in his name, in his freedom I am free.” Growing up, I often sang, “There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-workin’ pow’r in the blood of the Lamb.” That was my dad’s favourite. Or one that many of us know: “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” We Bible-believing Christians do not simply recognize the reality of Jesus’s blood and refer on occasion to Jesus’s blood, but we sing about it. We glory in it. That is, in a spirit of worship, in declaring Jesus’s worth to each other, and in praising him for his greatness, we often sing about the otherwise morbid topic of blood. Have you ever stopped ...

The Lord’s Supper has never been a meal that goes down easy. From the beginning, Jesus’s own words about eating his body and drinking his blood were widely misunderstood. “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’” (John 6:60). Not only were they confused, but this proved to be the turning (away) point for many. “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” (John 6:66). So too in the history of the church, the Supper has not gone down easy. Such simple language as “This is my body” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” can be anything but simple to understand and apply in the practical life of the church. For example, during the Reformation, the nature and meaning of the Lord’s Supper became a major flashpoint for debate between Catholics and Protestants. The Supper even became a point of divide among Protestants — and in some instances, the only major point of the divide. What, then, is the Lo...

Thus says the Lord: “By this you shall know that I am the LORD: Behold, I will strike the waters which are in the river with the rod that is in my hand, and they shall be turned to blood” (Ex. 7:17). The Egyptians worshiped the Nile River . They derived so much benefit from it that they looked upon it as divine. To show His sovereignty and superiority over the Egyptians and their gods, the Lord sent this first plague to taint the waters of Egypt, turning the Nile into blood. It must be emphatically stated at this point that this was not a discoloration from the red clays of the Ethiopian highlands that sometimes washed into the Nile, turning it a reddish color. The term used in the text for blood is never used for a color, but for the actual substance of blood. This was a supernatural act of God, a miracle. God had said that He would enable Moses to perform great miracles that would only harden Pharaoh’s heart. If it had been merely discoloration from a natural occurrence, it ...

The Blood of Jesus (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Hematidrosis, is when blood pressure becomes so high that the subject’s subcutaneous capillaries rupture and leak out the pores and tear ducts. Because of the causes of the condition— intense fear in the face of impending death—there are very few stories involving hematidrosis that have a happy ending. So, did Jesus experience hematidrosis? Maybe. Only Luke elucidates Christ ’s Gethsemane prayer with this detail: “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). There are three objections to the hypothesis that Jesus actually sweated blood, each in its own genus: theological, syntactic, and textual. Welcome to the CSI part of a pastor’s sermon prep. The theological objection goes something like this: Jesus had no sin and thus was not vulnerable to the curse on sin in the same way we are. He couldn’t catch the flu, get a boil, or become near-sig...