Dr Paul Allen

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the Great Awakening, is still remembered for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Why is God so eager to pour his eternal blessing on simple people like you and me? It’s a question too many of us don’t ask at all. Life often seems hard and bleak and stressful, and we grow blind to God’s present blessings and the cause for future hopes. God’s people, stuck in Babylonian exile , could relate. Their precious city, Jerusalem , was now a heap of smashed stones. Their temple, burned and trashed ( Isaiah 64:11–12). In the rubble, the hopes and dreams of God’s exiled people probably never got much higher above imagining a return home for a chance to rebuild and restore their home. Isaiah 60 But into the crumbled-down world of God’s covenant people, Isaiah 60 paints a stunning picture of God’s promises and future blessing. Where God’s exiled people may have simply been happy with new walls around old J...

The old liberal view that Jesus taught the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the ethic of love, shattered over and over on the rocks of Jesus’s persistent self-exaltation. This is what drove C. S. Lewis to say, I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. ( Mere Christianity ) I was struck again recently how true this is in the Sermon on the Mount . This is the most famous collection of Jesus’s ethical teachings. Here is where the old liberals found the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the ethic of love. “Blessed are the peacemakers” ( Matthew 5:9...

Cover of The Idea of the Holy C. S. Lewis called modern Christians to recovery of reverence for God —who, in the now-famous Chronicles of Narnia image of the lion Aslan, is depicted as good but not safe. Likewise, evangelical mystic A. W. Tozer complained in the early 1960s that “in the majority of our meetings, there is scarcely a trace of reverent thought … little sense of the divine Presence, no moment of stillness, no solemnity, no wonder, no holy fear. But always there is a dull or a breezy song leader full of awkward jokes.” The first reference to “ fear of God ” in the OT is Genesis 20:11, where the Mesopotamian Abraham complains that there is no “fear of God” in Philistia. It is against this backdrop that “fear of God” (yir’at ’elohim), “fear of the Lord ” (yir’at yhwh/’adonay), and “fear of the Almighty” (yir’at shadday) are to be understood throughout the OT itself.  Indeed, yir’ah alone is sometimes used in the sense of “piety” (Job 4:6; 15:4; 22:4) o...

Matthew 9:32 –34. The Bible makes it clear that demons exist (see Deuteronomy 32:17; 1 Timothy  4:1; James 2:19), and even today we live in a society in which many people believe in angels. They know there are spiritual forces out there, and it’s not too hard to conclude that some might be malevolent. Even Hollywood is very creative with demons, supernatural , witches and so forth. Disney has certainly indoctrinated children with regards to spells, witches and evil.  But what does the Bible say? Has Hollywood overstated their strength and purpose? Where you see God  working, sometimes those forces are more active, and that’s what was probably going on in Jesus ’ time. On this topic psychologist Gary Collins says, “My friends in clinical work have said that sometimes they have seen this, and these are not people who are inclined to see a demon behind every problem. They tend to be skeptical. The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrot...

You will be asked this type of hypothetical question on occasions perhaps while trying to have a meaningful conversation with an unbeliever about the gospel. Some of the atheists are very well versed in theology and Scripture, and have dismissed the gospel after what they consider to be thoughtful enquiry. The Bible cannot answer every question relating to life and godliness—only the ones that actually have answers. The does not speak about blood circulation system, about carbatteries etc. C. S. Lewis , with his towering apologetic intellect could also not answer questions that were posed to him by academic peers, such as “Can God make a square circle?” In A Grief Observed Lewis wrote with relieving candor: "Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical prob...

Medieval book illustration of Christ Exorcising the Gerasenes demonic (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The Bible makes it clear that demons exist (see  Deuteronomy 32:17 ;  1  Timothy 4:1;  James 2:19 ), and even today we live in a society in which many people believe in angels. They know there are spiritual forces out there, and it’s not too hard to conclude that some might be malevolent. Where you see God working, sometimes those forces are more active, and that’s what was probably going on in Jesus ’ time. On this topic psychologist Gary Collins says, “My friends in clinical work have said that sometimes they have seen this, and these are not people who are inclined to see a demon behind every problem. They tend to be skeptical. The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote a bit about this kind of thing in his book People of the Lie. “People who deny the existence of the supernatural will find some way, no matter how far-fetched, to explain a situation apart from...

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church http://www.stjohnsashfield.org.au, Ashfield, New South Wales. Illustrates Jesus' description of himself "I am the Good Shepherd" (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). This version of the image shows the detail of his face. The memorial window is also captioned: "To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of William Wright. Died 6th November, 1932. Aged 70 Yrs." (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” John 6:33 My friend recently completed schooling to become a nutritional therapist. As I describe to her how my body is feeling, she grows concerned. “Your cells are starved,” she alerts me. Not only am I not taking in the right nutrition, she says, but the nutrients I am getting aren’t properly being accessed and used at the most basic level in my body. Is your soul starved? As I rethink my physical health and identify wh...

Jesus and Saint Peter, Gospel of Matthew 4.18-20 Français : Jésus et Saint Pierre, Évangile selon Matthieu 4.18-20 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Matthew 9:32-34 The Bible makes it clear that demons exist (see Deuteronomy 32:17 ; 1 Timothy 4:1; James 2:19 ), and even today we live in a society in which many people believe in angels. They know there are spiritual forces out there, and it's not too hard to conclude that some might be malevolent. Where you see God working, sometimes those forces are more active, and that's what was probably going on in Jesus' time. On this topic psychologist Gary Collins says, "My friends in clinical work have said that sometimes they have seen this, and these are not people who are inclined to see a demon behind every problem. They tend to be skeptical. The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote a bit about this kind of thing in his book People of the Lie. "People who deny the existence of the supernatural will find some way, no...

Image by Skibum415 via Flickr I want you to guess which prominent American public figure said the following: “I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’” He added that what makes a law “just” is that it “squares with the moral law or the law of God,” conversely “unjust” laws are those that are “out of harmony with the moral law.” Well, we just unveiled a statue of him on the National Mall . Yes, Martin Luther King penned those famous words in his 1963 “ Letter from a Birmingham Jail .” Those words and the convictions that prompted them changed America. But today, they would cause the great civil rights leader to be labeled a “theocrat.” “ Theocrat ,” and related words like “ Dominionist ” and “Christianist,” are the latest in a series of epithets directed at Christians who insist that their faith is not merely a private matter. Suggesting Christians want to impo Image via Wikipedia se biblical law on civil society is an attempt to make a comparison betw...

If there’s one thing President Obama wanted his audience to take away from his  speech  in support of the  American Jobs Act  last Thursday night, it’s the urgency of the crisis facing the United States . Repeatedly he exhorted Congress to “pass this bill,” which the president assured would “create jobs right away.” One of the important perspectives the president reminded the nation of is our dependence on the work of those who have come before us. “Where would we be right now?” asked the president, as he urged us to imagine the world without a litany of public spending projects in our nation’s history, from bridges to schools to Social Security. We might just as well ask, too, where we would be right now without the promises of politicians present and past, who have run up the U.S. national debt in excess of $14.7 trillion, or where we would be without generations of innovative enterprise in the private sector. The greatest truth President Obama spoke last Thurs...