Dr Paul Allen

What is your greatest fear? There’s no doubt about how David, Israel’s mighty king, would have answered: “Lord, do not cast me away from Your presence. And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11). Does that ever happen? Can we ever lose the Holy Spirit? David’s worst fear of losing the Holy Spirit was based on both positive and negative experiences. When he was a young man he had been anointed by Samuel. With that anointing, the shepherd was given the supernatural power of the Spirit.  He became a charismatic leader of others.   His personality became magnetic and inspiring. He did spectacular things as a warrior and king of Israel. Reading his psalms of praise and supplication, we know David gave God the glory, and therefore, the flow of the Holy Spirit was persistent and consistent in his times of deepest need.  Why, then, would he fear that the Spirit would be taken from him? It was an educated fear. David had observed the tragic thing that had happened to ...

A young adult ministry leader from a Texas megachurch recently shared five ways believers can battle against the temptation of “secret” sexual sins, such as porn, lust, and masturbation.  JD Rodgers of Watermark Community Church in Dallas, Texas, who serves as the young adults' creative director of The Porch Ministry, warned a primarily young adult audience about the perils of sexual freedom, labeling it “one of the biggest rip-offs or scams that the world sells us.”  In a sermon titled “Battling Sexual Sin,” Rodgers began by reminding the audience that they were instructed in last week’s sermon to write on a card the thing that makes them most shameful and to submit it to the ministry. Rodgers recalled how when The Porch leaders reviewed the "thousands upon thousands" of cards, a lot of them mentioned struggles with lust, pornography addiction, homosexuality and "past sexual perversion."  He then listed five steps that all start with the letter “R” that young a...

David’s career path was a roller coaster: from teenage nobody to the ace commander, from fugitive to the king, from high-on-God to lost-in-sin. He lived ecstatic triumphs and devastating failures. What can we learn about success and failure from David’s drama?” David is a compelling personality, strong and charismatic and yet enigmatic, too. How was he lifted so high? Why did he fall so low?  “David’s Son” is Jesus . There’s a reason he was so often referred to as “Son of David,” and it’s more than genealogy. David’s story is captivating, but it only really has meaning when embedded in God’s story that culminates in Jesus. When you explore the many parallels between Jesus’ and David’s lives, it shows how Jesus completes David’s story. We learn to see David in Jesus’ redemptive light. The real David is not a Sunday school hero, but a deeply flawed, deeply troubled, deeply blessed human being—a king, a warrior, a poet, a husband, and a father. Just like you and I

“The sword devours one as well as another.” (2 Sam. 11:25) These words are some of the most shocking words that we find in scripture. In perhaps one of the most shocking chapters of the Bible. King David, the hero who killed tens of thousands of evil people, the worshipper who penned the most beautiful songs and chapters in the Bible, the man who was anointed by God to be the king of Israel, has become a momentary atheist. I mean he had to, didn’t he? If he wasn’t going to repent right away. He had just committed an unconscionable crime. He had taken Uriah’s wife Bathsheba and impregnated her, he had brought back Uriah, who was out at war and tried to convince him to go to Bathsheba so that he would think it was his baby. Then when Uriah refused, he sent a message to his general ordering the death of Uriah by Uriah’s own hand. And then when Uriah had successfully been killed, what was he supposed to do? How would he live with himself? How could he continue to live in sin? So, he says, ...

Throughout the course of King David’s life, he had some top-ten moments and some not-top-ten moments. The man after God’s own heart is perhaps best known for two events in his life—his number one top-ten play, the defeat of Goliath; and his number one not-top-ten play, the episode with Bathsheba. Both were consequential in the life of Israel, but only one of them moved David to a level of repentance he hadn’t yet known, as David was forced to deal with the consequences of his sin that was broadcast before millions. After the Bathsheba incident, 2 Samuel 12 reveals that it took a prophet’s bold confrontation to elicit David’s repentance, which he subsequently put to paper. David’s psalm of repentance and confession is a beautiful plea for mercy from a man struck by the gravity of his sin, which is recounted in narrative form in 2 Samuel 11. Psalm 51 has soothed many consciences riddled with guilt. It has given words to the penitent sinner to pray when he feels the weight of shame brough...

The circumstances in which David wrote these words were anything but good (1 Samuel 19). When David cried out — “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! — it was despite what he was suffering, not because he was being flooded with blessings. He was resolved, no matter what came, no matter how hard life got, no matter who betrayed or assaulted him, “I will bless the Lord at all times.” Anything but Good David had not yet been crowned king (2 Samuel 5). He was being ruthlessly hunted by the current king of Israel, a man of incredible power and resources (and even more jealousy and anger). As the crowds sang, “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7), Saul’s blood boiled and gave birth to a craving to kill the prized son of Jesse. Saul sent men after David to kill him, but they loved David (1 Samuel 19:1). So, in a moment of rage, he launched his own spear at the young man (19:10). David narrowly escapes and flees. If the enemy at home ...

Psalm 18 is a psalm of David, a song celebrating “the day when the LORD rescued him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul.” This psalm, the longest of Book One, praises God for His deliverance. It is also recorded, with slight differences, in 2 Samuel 22. At the centre of this psalm is a strong confession of faith: “With the merciful you show yourself merciful” (v. 25). This psalm begins (vv. 1–6) and ends (vv. 46–50) with praise offered to God. It is praise filled with love and thanksgiving for God’s protection from enemies and from death. The praise rejoices in the victories God has given His king and His people—victories displayed before the world. The central section of the psalm (vv. 20–29) celebrates the faithfulness of David and of God. David served the Lord with integrity (we will look at the difficulties that seem to surround this kind of claim below). The Lord on His part had always been reliable and blessed His king. On each side of this ce...

Adultery or Rape? What happened between David and Bathsheba? I’ve been looking at a number of different scholarly works on this question over the last few days, and I have found a great deal of help in an article written by Alexander Abasili titled “Was It Rape?: The David and Bathsheba Pericope Re-Examined.” This article gets pretty deep into the weeds. Abisili is doing careful work in the Hebrew and Greek texts, so those trained in biblical languages are probably in the best position to benefit from Abasili’s work. In this article, Abasili argues that much of the debate among commentators is due to varying definitions of the term “rape.” He argues that modern definitions of rape differ from that found in the Old Testament. He writes: Some of the opposing views of exegetes are caused by the imposition of today’s definition of rape upon the narrative of 2 Sam 11-12. [pp. 2-3] In the Hebrew Bible, the concept of coerced sexual relationships is not as wide and all-e...

Thirty-three miles east of the Mediterranean Sea on a limestone plateau in the Judaean Hills rests one of the oldest cities in the world: Jerusalem. Jerusalem is mentioned 660 times in the Old Testament and 141 in the New—more if you count all its synonyms like Zion, city of God, and Salem. No city has been written and sung about as much as Jerusalem. Or fought over. It’s been conquered more than 40 times including by the Persians, the Romans, the Ottoman Turks, and the British Empire, and more than 100 battles have been fought for control of Jerusalem. Even its name, which means “foundation of peace,” elicits an emotional response (though historically it’s been anything but a “city of peace”). Out of all the cities in ancient Israel, why did David chose to set up his kingdom here? Scholars and historians offer some interesting reasons. 1. Jerusalem had a natural defense system. Jerusalem’s most advantageous feature was its topography. Three prominent hills surrounded...

“What do you think of the Christ?” In guiding the Jerusalem leaders to contemplate this question of eternal weight, Jesus turned to the authority of what is written “in the book of Psalms,” specifically Psalm 110 ( Matt 22:41–46 ; Mark 12:35–37 ; Luke 20:40–44 ), and asked a question childlike in both simplicity and profundity, the answer to which plunges one into the unfathomable wonder of the incarnation of God: How could David refer to his son as Lord? This probing question was but the application of what Jesus would later declare, that He Himself is the object of all the Scriptures of the Old Testament, summarizing their threefold division in Luke 24:44 as “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms,” with the Psalms standing as the summary representation of the Writings. That much of the Psalms concerns “the Christ” was (and is) commonly accepted; the New Testament’s glorious proclamation is that Jesus is this Christ, the long-expected “Anointed One” of whom these S...

So Saul established his sovereignty over Israel , and fought against all his enemies on every side (1 Sam. 14:47a). In the concluding verses of 1 Samuel 14, we find a summary of Saul’s reign, or at least of his early years as king. Interestingly, the general tone of this summation is positive. Despite the fact that Samuel has told Saul he will not have a dynasty because of his unlawful sacrifice (13:9–14), Saul seems devoted to his duties as the commander of the armies of Israel. He “establishes his sovereignty over Israel,” we are told, meaning he draws the tribes of Israel together into a national unit capable of standing up to (or at least harassing) the other powers around the region. Furthermore, he builds Israel’s army by scouting out and drafting “any strong man or any valiant man,” just as Samuel had said the king would do (8:11). And Saul leads Israel in battle against many of its hostile neighbors, including Moab , Ammon, Edom, Zobah , Amalek , and, above all, the...

Most movies end with the bad guy falling off a cliff or being killed in a gruesome way, knowing that the audience will feel satisfaction. In fact, the movies where the bad guy wins are usually in the horror category, and fewer people walk away satisfied. In 2 Samuel chapter 12, we get a lesson about sin . We get to see it in its full glory and it is a terrible sight to behold. But what makes it even more difficult is the fact that it is that our hero, David , who plays the bad guy in this story. And just like with an incredibly twisted movie, the reader is shocked to be shown the hero’s sin, and by the time the reader is convinced that the hero must die, the Prophet Nathan , in 2 Samuel  2:13 , says some incredible words,  “The Lord also has taken away your sin; you shall not die…” Of course, this is a famous story, and one we’ve heard preached before, but I do believe that, every once in a while, we must be exposed to the dangers sin brings in the ...