Dr Paul Allen

“Wars will continue to flare up between sinful human beings as long as they live in this fallen world, in which Satan is at work…. Christ himself declared there would continue to be ‘wars and rumours of war’ [Matthew 24:6]…. Only when he returns in glory to bring this world to its end and fully subjugate Satan will war cease.” So says The Lutheran Study Bible, “Divine Warfare,” p. 376. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. We must acknowledge that we’re stuck with warfare, hoping and praying to keep it manageable. But that’s a tall order at the moment, considering that nine countries now hold a total of 12,000 nuclear weapons. The Current Top 10 Most Deadly Conflicts Granted, Russia and the U.S. hold more than 90 per cent of those 12,000 weapons. But as tensions escalate around the globe, that’s hardly reassuring. Here are the most violent conflicts currently being waged around the planet, with their minimum estimated fatalities over the last two years: Russia vs. Ukraine: 98,000 Israe...

“As stewards of the gospel , we must love our Muslim neighbours by presenting Christ to them.” “Since its founding, the Jenkins Center has provided and produced resources to help Christians boldly, respectfully, and relevantly proclaim the gospel to Muslims.” Sharon, who has a burden  to reach the lost, attended a Jenkins Center event, and “I left that hall with tears in my eyes and a burden in my heart.” The Jenkins Center stands on biblical values and offers students a way to learn how to reach their Muslim neighbours. Go Deeper:   Read the full article  here.

“One may understand   a push for a cease-fire for humanitarian reasons or for tactical military needs, but this call for a cease-fire is directly linked to the advent of a Muslim religious month,” writes Dr. A. S. Ibrahim for World. Ramadan is a time when  Muslims around the world observe a month of fasting, prayer, and reading the Quran. “When Muhammad had the chance, he didn’t seek a cease-fire nor did he voice concerns that the fighting was violating Ramadan.” The backlash of Israel  dishonouring Ramadan should be viewed in the context of Islamic history and the teachings of the Quran. “As Israel knows all too well, the fight goes on, Ramadan or not,” writes Dr. Ibrahim. Go Deeper:   Read the full article by Dr. Ibrahim on World.

Where evangelists can’t go, God’s Spirit can, but God is also reaching Muslims by dreams. Read about some of these accounts. Joel’s Prophecy One of the most well-known prophecies in the Bible is found in Joel 2, where Joel the Prophet wrote that “it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28).  Of course, God has not yet poured out His “Spirit on all flesh” yet, but He is apparently drawing some to the Lord Jesus Christ by means of dreams. Many who are Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and even Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses report that they’ve had dreams where they’ve encountered Jesus Christ.  There’s a place on one of our websites where people can click on “Contact Us,” and in the last couple of years, dozens and dozens of men and women have reached out to us to ask what their dreams might mean. Recently, many...

Whenever I teach on Islam, I invariably get asked questions that begin like this: "What would a Muslim think about...?" My standard response is another question: "Which Muslim?" Imagine someone asking a parallel question: "What would a Christian think about such-and-such?" Well, what kind of Christian? A conservative Presbyterian or Southern Baptist? A liberal Methodist? A Pentecostal? A Coptic? A member of an Acts 29 church plant in Seattle or a fundamentalist Baptist church in the Deep South? A pastor, a scholar, or a layman? An American, a Norwegian, a Ukrainian, a Syrian, a Rwandan, or a Malaysian? I'm sure you see the point. In reality, there's as much diversity in the Muslim world as there is in the Christian world. Just as we wouldn't want non-Christians to pigeonhole us with a "one size fits all" view of Christianity, we should acknowledge and respond appropriately to the plurality of perspectives, traditions, and practices...

The Qur’an notoriously denies the crucifixion of Jesus. According to Surah 4:157, “The Jews said, ‘we have killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the Messenger of God.’  They did not kill him nor did they crucify him though it was made to appear like that to them. They certainly did not kill him. God raised him up to himself.”  Well, that's what the Qur’an says, but even the most liberal and sceptical of biblical scholars today will affirm the historicity of the resurrection. Let me give you just one example. This comes from Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who's very critical of the Bible—no friend of Christianity—but he says this in one of his works: “one of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea Pontius Pilate.”  So the challenge for Muslims is this: why should we believe one verse in a book written in Arabia six hundred years after the life of Jesus rather than multiple sources in the ...

English: Abraham Kuyper 日本語: アブラハム・カイパー (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In 1905, Abraham Kuyper , the Dutch statesman and theologian, set forth on a journey around the Mediterranean Sea , visiting 80 sites and cities in 20 countries. His travels brought him to ancient lands and some of the most revered sites of Christianity . They also brought him face-to-face, for the first time, with the Islamic world . When he returned, he wrote a series of reflections on his travels, now captured in a newly translated volume, On Islam , which includes select writings from his original two-volume work, Om de Oude Wereldzee (Around the Old World -Sea). Through these writings, we see Kuyper’s unique theological and cultural perspective applied across his individual encounters in the Muslim world, as well as to Islam itself. As editor James D. Bratt explains in the book’s introduction, the collection “aims to show how an outstanding thinker from a century ago spoke to a now-pressing issue in our own ag...

Air travel is not what it used to be. In the 1980s and 1990s, you could accompany your relatives or friends to the terminal, sit and talk with them at the gate while waiting for boarding, give your kisses and hugs, and leisurely head back for home.  Teenagers and some “20-somethings” will have no such memories. Now it’s the baleful experience of security lines, searches, removing stuff for the metal detectors, and full body pat-downs. Some of us may also have anxieties about pilots who want to become suicidal “martyrs” by crashing the plane, like the nineteen Islamists who hijacked planes on 9/11, or the pilot of Egypt Air Flight 804 in May 2016, or, perhaps, the pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014 – not to mention potential “shoe-bombers” or “underwear-bombers” who might be missed by such searches. And thanks to Islamic zeal, such security is now a routine experience, every day, at over 41,000 airports around the world – unlikely to change in the for...

I hear people say, "there is this underlining unity, we all believe the same thing." That's not true. What Muslims believe about what is good and the nature of redemption is radically different from what Christianity teaches, for example. Buddha was an atheist who simply claimed to be enlightened, Confucius talked about the veneration of ancestors—that's a long way from the faith of the Scriptures .  And what you don't have in Buddhism and Islam , Confucianism , Shintoism , Taoism , and these other religions is an atonement. You don't have a way of redemption that we have in Christianity, nor do you have a living Mediator. Moses is dead, Buddha is dead, Confucius is dead, and Muhammad is dead. There is no resurrection in these other religions.  Christianity has elements to it, content to it that distinguish it from all other religions, and with that distinction comes the claim of Christ that it [He] is the only true way to God. Related ar...

Jesus tomb is sealed and guarded a. Sir: They gave Pilate a title of honor and respect. But the day before these same religious leaders rejected the King of Kings . They mocked and despised Him, putting Jesus to open shame, but they honored Pilate.   i. On the next day: “It must mean that the chief priests and Pharisees actually approached Pilate on the Sabbath with their request. If they did that, it is clear to see how radically they broke the Sabbath Law.” (Barclay) b. We remember … how that deceiver said, “After three days I will rise”: Ironically, the enemies of Jesus remembered His promise of resurrection better than His own disciples remembered. c. While He was still alive: In this, the enemies of Jesus admit that Jesus is dead. They did not believe the “Swoon Theory,” a conjecture that denies the resurrection, saying that Jesus never really died, but just “swooned” on the cross, and then somehow wonderfully revived in the tomb.   i. A humorous letter t...

In light of the recent execution of 21 Christians and capture of hundreds more in Syria , perhaps it’s time to ask, “Should we be praying the imprecatory psalms against ISIS?” Written in the theocratic context of Israel , when God himself had a throne on earth, these psalms (e.g., Ps. 58 ; 69 ; 109 ) invoke God’s judgment upon Israel’s enemies in terrifying terms (see Ps. 58:8 ). While we profess that all Scripture is profitable ( 2 Tim. 3:16 ), we must carefully consider the ways in which that is true of these psalms. After all, we were once enemies of God ( Col. 1:21-22 ), but are now redeemed and called to love our neighbors ( Luke 10:27 ) and pray for our persecutors ( Matt. 5:44 ; Rom. 12:14 ). May we identify an enemy for divine destruction as the imprecatory psalms do? Can we do so in specific terms or only general ones? Are we not to expect persecution in this age and turn the other cheek ( Mark 13:13 ; Luke 21:17 ; Matt. 5:39 ) as we wait for Christ ’s return ( 2 Cor. 1:5 ...