Dr Paul Allen

The Son’s generation involves no priority or posteriority, and certainly no inferiority but designates order alone. If it did involve priority or posteriority of any kind, then the Son would be inferior to the Father. The Son is begotten by the Father, but unlike our human experience, Son’s generation is eternal (before all ages, timeless). And if eternal, then the generation of the Son is not the generation of a lesser being (made in time or before time) but the generation of a Son who is equal in deity to His Father. But the reason the Son is not inferior to the Father is that the one divine essence wholly subsists in the Son due to His generation from the Father’s nature or substance.  As the Son is true God from true God, there can be “no diminution of the Begetter’s substance” in the generation of the Son.1 The Father begets His Son, and the two are, to return to that key word from Nicaea, consubstantial, meaning they are to be identified by the self-same divine essence. Prior...

Grief is a wilderness we all travel at multiple times in our lives. Sometimes we grieve the loss of a loved one. Other times, we grieve a broken relationship, a shattered dream, or a ministry failure. Loss takes many shapes, affects us in different ways, and often lingers longer than it seems we can stand it. The Israelites had a liturgy and structure they followed during times of grief. They wept and wailed. They tore at their clothes. They covered themselves in dust and ashes (Job 1:20; 2:12). They cried out to God in sorrow. They sang out in lament. In our culture, we’ve forgotten how to grieve. We rush through painful experiences to put them behind us. When others around us grieve, we are uncomfortable with their tears and do whatever we can to distract them. We might even altogether avoid the grief-stricken around us. But grief is not something to be distracted from, overlooked, or avoided. There’s no timetable and no way to rush through it. Grief is not something that we just ha...

God is a Father who Lost a Son  For parents who have lost a child, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a great comfort. God is a Father, and Jesus Christ is the Son of God. When the Son of God died on the cross, the Father experienced exactly what it feels like to lose a beloved child. Regarding what happens to a child after they die, and whether or not they go to Heaven, the most common Scripture given to answer that question is from the Old Testament. There, David is the father of a beloved child who died. 2 Samuel 12:15–23 says: And the LORD afflicted the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he became sick. David therefore sought God on behalf of the child. And David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. And the elders of his house stood beside him, to raise him from the ground, but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, “Be...

If there is a belief that is central to Israel’s identity in the Old Testament, it is this: God is one (Deut. 6:4). In contrast to the nations surrounding Israel, nations that worshipped many gods, Israel was set apart as a people who worshipped only one God. They were to be monotheists. But we should add that true monotheism is not merely the belief that there is one God. It means also that this God is one. Theologians call this God’s simplicity. This doesn’t mean that God lacks depth. Rather, simplicity refers to God’s oneness. He is not a God made up of parts, let alone divided by parts. It’s not as if you could add up all God’s attributes to get the sum total we call “God.” Instead, God is one. His attributes are His essence1 and His essence His attributes. All that is in God simply is God. To say, then, that God is one not only means that there is only one true God but also that this God is one in essence. THE REVELATION OF THE TRINITY IN THE GOSPEL If you’ve read the...