Dr Paul Allen

If I asked you to name a woman in the Bible, who would come to mind? How many could you name? Countless sermons have been preached about Esther and Ruth. We’ve scrutinized the woman at the well’s encounter with Jesus and celebrated Rahab’s strategic participation in the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land.  Throughout Scripture, women have faithfully proclaimed the gospel, offered their time and expertise, ministered to the marginalized, and actively contributed to the life and growth of their communities and the church. What richness can we gain by studying the influence of women like Lydia and Priscilla, Miriam and Deborah, Anna and Phoebe? Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is an example of trusting through obedience -Luke 1:38 Mary, the mother of Jesus, plays an important role in God’s plan of redemption throughout the Gospels and is even depicted briefly in Acts during Pentecost (1:14). The Gospel writers consistently portray Mary as exemplifying faithful obedience and submission...

Dan Delzell Pastor Andy Stanley raised more than a few eyebrows 11 years ago when he shared a story about a couple in his church who got a divorce after the husband began a sexual relationship with another man. Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. described the incident this way: “Stanley clearly and repeatedly stressed the sin of adultery, but then left the reality of the homosexual relationship between the two men unaddressed as sin. To the contrary, he seemed to normalize their relationship.”  And then five years ago, lightning struck again when Andy argued that the Christian faith must be “unhitched” from the Old Testament. Sadly, those who downplay and dismiss the Word of God are terribly misguided and spiritually adrift. Andy continued his assault on Scripture last year when he said, “I know 1 Corinthians 6, and I know Leviticus, and I know Romans 1, so interesting to talk about all that stuff. But just, oh my goodness, a gay man or woman who wants to worship their Heavenly Father, who did ...

Multiverse movies are all the rage these days. Spiderman, Avengers, The Flash…everyone wants to go back in time, correct a mistake in the past, and then live in a new “corrected” timeline that is free of the perceived defect. If We Could Go Back in Time What if the pro-gay theology advocates of the film 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture were able to harness that same power? If they could go back in time, what changes would they make, and what kind of ripple effect would that have on the new universe they created? Specifically, how would their timeline’s changes affect the Bible’s teaching on marriage, homosexuality, and sexual ethics? The film 1946 claims the translation team of the 1946 RSV Bible wrongly translated the Greek word arsenokoitai as “homosexuals” in the Bible (specifically, in 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10). As a result, they claim, the mistaken translation inappropriately influenced future English versions of the Bible to also include the word “homosexuals,” whi...

God’s wrath is his revulsion against evil, his settled displeasure with sin and sinners. The wrath of God is not a popular concept in the liberal West. It is widely ignored, denied, or radically reinterpreted. Yet it is a prominent doctrine in the Bible. In the Old Testament, there are over 580 references, using more than twenty different words. In many instances, God’s wrath is portrayed in dramatically personal terms, as in Nahum 1:2–11. In the New Testament, it is again frequently mentioned, though generally in less personal terms, with few passages stating explicitly that God is angry. It is widely recognized that talk of God’s wrath is anthropomorphic or, to be more precise, anthropopathic. God is portrayed in human terms. It is important not to equate God’s anger with often-sinful human anger: God does not have mood swings and does not “fly off the handle.”  God’s love is also anthropopathic; we must not fall into the error of equating divine love with human love in all its...

Circumcision is a topic mentioned nearly 100 times in the Bible. It is a central focus for Old Testament and New Testament theology (Rom 4:9–12; Gal 2:1–12; 5:1–10). It was the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gen 17:9–14), but circumcision was also widely practiced in the ancient Near East (the method, though, wasn’t always the same). Jeremiah 9:25–26 notes that Israel’s neighbors were circumcised. Archaeologists have also found that it was practiced in Syria and Phoenicia. Textual remains indicate that circumcision in Egypt goes back to at least 2200 bc, centuries before the Israelites were enslaved. Israelite men may have even submitted to Egyptian circumcision while in Egypt since Joshua commanded the men crossing into the promised land to be re-circumcised in order to “roll away the reproach of Egypt” (Josh 5:2, 9). The evidence suggests that circumcision did not distinguish Israelite men from their foreign neighbors. Circumcision in the Bible When God told Abraham to be circu...

The basic message of Hebrews is that Christ is incomparably greater than anyone and anything in the Old Testament and that the Jewish or gentile believers should not even think of returning to the Old Testament religion. In principle, this is in line with the convictions of most Christians. But it creates a problem when the author of this letter goes further than this.  The message is not only that Christ is much greater than anyone and anything in the Old Testament and not only that Christ replaced some of the Old Testament features of worship. Rather, the message is that some very important features in the Old Testament are no longer effective—and even that some never were. The negative use of the Old Testament in Hebrews Let us have a look at the author’s negative views. The priests had to bring the sacrifices regularly, which implies that they were not effective (10:2–4). Instead of really cleansing people from sin, the repeated bringing of the sacrifices reminded people of the...

How the OT law should be applied was one of the most debated issues during the ministry of Jesus and in the early church. The Jewish authorities constantly were offended by Jesus’ actions and teachings on the law (for example, see Matt 12:1–8). The early church had a major disagreement over whether circumcision should be required of Gentile Christians (Acts 15). Paul even had to warn against useless quarrels about the law (Titus 3:9). Law in the Teaching of Jesus. The popular notion that Jesus set aside the OT law is wrong, in Matthew 5:17 Jesus stated explicitly that He did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. The discussions of the law in Matthew 5:20–48 show that obeying the law is not accomplished by some external act . Rather, obedience to the law of God includes the “heart,” what people think and feel at the core of their being. Jewish teachers understood the focus of the law to be on proper religious observances and on separation from unclean foods a...

The early Christians saw that the Old Testament was incomplete, and they realized that Jesus had fulfilled it. Thus, they expected that the New Testament would be written and quickly recognized the divine authority of these books. These books, as soon as they were written, would have borne the authority of the apostles, and people would have recognized that from the very start. Now, if that's the case, then you don't need to wait 200, 300 years to have a New Testament canon, because you have books written with the authority of an apostle even in the first century that people would have known bore that apostle's authority, and therefore you would have had books with the authority of Christ from the very get-go. So when someone comes along and says, "Oh, Christians could never have conceived of a new collection of authoritative books," I'm thinking to myself, "But what about the books the apostles wrote? They would have been seen as a new collecti...

Dan Brown’s bestselling conspiratorial thriller  The Da Vinci Code  seems like ancient history now. At its peak of popularity, the novel set records both for sales and for irritating scholars with its view that Jesus and the 12 apostles held to gnostic heresies. The book’s bizarre plot focuses on Jesus’ bloodline extending through a child born by Mary Magdalene. Within that narrative, Brown asserts that the New Testament canon was determined by the Roman Emperor Constantine—who was not friendly to gnostic Christianity—at a time much later (fourth century AD) than any New Testament scholar would endorse. Unfortunately, this myth has since taken on a life of its own. The notion that Constantine decided which books should constitute the New Testament springs from the ancient  Life of Constantine  by Eusebius of Caesarea (AD 263–339). Eusebius reports that in a letter written in ad 331, the emperor instructed him to … order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptur...

How do I find God ’s will for my life? It’s always a pressing question on the college campus , and especially in our day of unprecedented options. Like never before, in an anomaly in world history , students loosened from their community of origin, “going off” to college, now make decisions about their future with minimal influence or limitation from their adolescent context. Before asking, “Where is God calling me?” we would do well to first ponder, “Where has God already called me?” — not that your current callings won’t change or take a fresh direction in this formative season of life, but for a Christian, our objective calling from God always precedes our consciousness of it. If it is from him, he initiates. He makes the first move. This is true of our calling to salvation, and also true of any “vocational” assignment he gives us in the world. Consider Three Factors For the college student or young adult who may feel like a free agent — considering options and determining for y...

In one of the more enigmatic verses in the Gospel of Luke , Jesus tells his disciples, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). The question isn’t about the “what” of Jesus’ statement. It’s clear that Satan is under judgment. Rather, the confusion is over the “when” of the statement. It might sound like a reference to when Satan became Satan, before the garden of Eden —abandoning his status among God ’s heavenly host—but that conclusion would be too hasty. We basically have three options when it comes to figuring out the timing of Satan’s fall: before, during, or after Jesus’ own time. Many people have offered opinions. Perhaps the most common interpretation is that Jesus is seeing or remembering the original fall of Satan . This option makes little sense in context. Prior to the statement, Jesus had sent out the disciples to heal and preach that the kingdom of God had drawn near to them (Luke 10:1–9). They return amazed and excited by the fact that demons were...

Sometimes when a New Testament writer quotes the Old Testament, the two passages do not match precisely. Is the New Testament writer misquoting the Old Testament? Or is there another explanation? https://hopecollege.com Luke records that when Jesus began his ministry, he went to the synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath day . When he stood up to read the Scriptures, “The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him” (Luke  4:17 ). Jesus read the description of a climactic arrival of the anointed one from Isaiah 61:1–2, excluding the last half of verse two. That omission is understandable, but if you look at Luke  4:18 –19 and Isaiah 61:1–2 side by side, several dissimilarities in what Jesus read are readily apparent. In the original Old Testament passage, there is no reference to making the blind see. Conversely, Isaiah speaks of “binding up the brokenhearted,” a phrase absent in Luke. Since Luke is clear that Jesus was reading from a scroll, the divergence is...

The New Testament does contain teaching on "separation." Over the centuries, some of the greatest minds have wrestled with how to apply it—Augustine in dealing with the Donatists, Calvin in dealing with radical Anabaptists (in his dauntingly titled Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful Against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists). The New Testament letters refer to various kinds of separation, always in the recognition that we—and indeed the church—remain S imul Justus et Peccator (at the same time just and sinner). The setting apart of the church (sanctification) is not glorification. Until Christ 's return, there is only a pilgrim church here on the earth, not a perfected one. The challenges are therefore fairly obvious. Those who effect separation are themselves, sinners. So the questions of when, why, and how to separate are of cardinal importance. The New Testament gives us principles; it does not provide us with a single, simple s...