Dr Paul Allen

John Oates This is a follow-up to a question about supposed contradictions in Mark 16 about Mary Magdalene and the resurrection accounts. I establish that all the gospels agree Mary Magdalene was the first to see that the resurrection had happened.) I agree that every account aside from the Mark account states that Mary M was one of the first, if not the first, to see the empty tomb. However, the scribe that writes the ending of Mark states that she was the first to see Jesus, whereas if you read the other gospels, it seems highly unlikely that she was the first to see Jesus. In John, she is one of the first women to see the empty tomb, so she runs to Peter and the rest of the disciples and tells them that the body is not there and she doesn’t know where it’s at.  Luke states that all the women, including Mary M, told the disciples that the tomb was empty. And in Matthew says that as the women were running back, they saw Jesus.  I assume that the women who were running back do...

Hope of Resurrection Paraphrasing the beloved apostle Paul, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:6–8). But there is something better: to be raised in the body is glorified with the Lord. You were made for this. The earthly tent of this body will give way, at the coming of Christ, to the glory of embodied immortality (2 Cor. 4:16–17; 2 Cor. 5:1). What if I told you that a glorified and risen body was not just a New Testament hope? And what if I told you it was rooted in previous biblical revelation? Problem and Solution The New Testament announcements about our future resurrection and immortal physicality are explicit and fully-flowered concepts that grew from earlier divine revelation. The hope of resurrection is an Old Testament idea because death is an Old Testament problem, and God’s steadfast love is an Old Testament reality. Divine love is greater than death, and resurrection will establish this truth forever. The book of Daniel reminds us that peopl...

If sharing the gospel sounds like we’re saying, “Come to Jesus for a better life,” we’re doing it wrong. In a day when religion is appreciated for its moral or therapeutic benefits, someone will hear us telling them about Jesus and presume we’re trying to sell them a version of personal, privatized spirituality. One good option among many. Even when that’s not what we say, that’s what people hear. Just Share Your Testimony? “Sharing your testimony” doesn’t avoid the problem; it sometimes makes the challenge more difficult. I once heard someone recommend a method of evangelism that relied solely on personal testimony. “No one can argue with your testimony!” he said. Exactly. That’s why it’s insufficient. If you talk to your neighbor about what Jesus means to you and how being a Christian has made your life better, how will you respond when your neighbor smiles and says, “I’m so glad Jesus has made your life better.  Here’s a mindfulness app that’s given me peace . . .” or “I’ve been...

I preached from 2 Corinthians 1 where Paul talks about his sufferings as an apostle and about how he constantly faced death because of the gospel. On numerous occasions during his ministry, Paul believed that he would surely die. Paul says that when the clouds began to gather and he felt he was about to perish, the thing that got him through was knowing that even if he died, God would raise him up. 2 Corinthians 1:9 “We had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.” The whole passage is about the hope of the resurrection. I exhorted this congregation that they should make this their hope when they face suffering. They should trust in the God who raises the dead. After the service was over and when I was greeting people, a gentleman who looked to be in his 40’s or 50’s came up to me and said, “You know that was really good except the part about our bodies being resurrected.” And I’m thinking, “Well, that was ki...

The bodily, historical resurrection of Jesus is surely the most momentous event in all of history. I say “bodily” because many have said they believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but it is a spiritual resurrection, not a bodily one. The thinking is that Jesus becomes spiritually “alive” within a person. I say “historical” because many others have denied that Jesus was resurrected as a historical event. The naturalistic mindset certainly resists believing such a magnificent miracle. Is this really all that important? Isn’t it really the death of Jesus that is of ultimate significance for Christianity? Wouldn’t it be easier for many more people to believe if the resurrection were not a central part of what Christians believe—or at least if it were easier to make sense of it?   Why the Resurrection Is Centrally Imperative In truth, Christ’s resurrection is absolutely vital to Christianity and our salvation, and as such, the fact appears in the earliest creeds of the faith, two of the...

The loss of a child is devastating.  I will not say any more. For Christians who believe the teaching of the Bible, the child has a sin nature that separates them from God. People are separated from God for the simple reason of sin. The human nature of sin, inherited from our Father Adam (Romans 5:12-21), is passed on to all generations, not unlike a genetic defect and is part of us before we are born to make conscious decisions. The Bible has a lot to say about the womb because God sees and knows us from the womb . Psalm 53:8 (NKJV) says,  “The wicked are estranged from the womb...” Our problem is not just in what we do in life, but in who we are from conception.  Obviously, no one wants to think of their aborted baby, miscarried baby, stillborn baby, or child who dies at a young as being in hell. Emotionally, the thought is simply too much to bear and contradicts all of the Bible’s teaching about God’s love, God’s grace, and God as a loving and gracious Fath...

The conclusion below will be drawn from silence, and cannot be taken dogmatically. It is inferential only, and the final answer will have to be one that we seldom like, ‘we will have to wait and see.’ However, just because something is drawn from silence does not necessarily mean it is not true. We have absolutely no record that Jesus ever bathed, but we can be almost certain that he did. It is certainly true that both Adam and Eve attempted to sidestep their responsibility of eating from the forbidden tree. Adam blamed Eve, while Eve blamed the serpent. However, both did not deny that they had actually violated the command. God has said that if you eat from this tree, “you shall surely die.” (Gen 2:17) That was the explicit punishment, death. Their sentence was to “suffer the punishment of eternal destruction.” (2 Thess 1:9) The reason that this could be said is, justice required death, with no provision for anything else at the time that they were given the command. It does ...

Jesus tells Mary, “Touch Me not” (John 20:17, KJV); but then later, speaking to Thomas, He says, “Reach hither thy finger and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side” (verse 27). The seeming incongruity of Jesus’ statements is resolved when we examine the language Jesus employed and consider the basic difference between the two situations. In John 20:17, the word translated “touch” is a Greek word which means “to cling to, to lay hold of.” This wasn’t just a touch; it was a grip. Obviously, when Mary recognized Jesus, she immediately clung to Him. Matthew 28:9 records the other women doing the same thing when they saw the resurrected Christ. Mary’s reaction was motivated, possibly, by several things. One is simply her loving devotion to the Lord. Mary is overwhelmed by the events of the morning, and as her grief turns to joy, she naturally embraces Jesus. Another motivation is Mary’s desire to restore the fellowship that death had broken. She h...

At Home with the Lord The New Testament answers the very important question about whether Christians at the point of death are in heaven or not with the comfort of the fact that they are “away from the body and at home with the Lord.” The Christian life is not interrupted by death. Yes, at the point of death, the Christian passes into the nearer presence of God. But we shouldn’t confuse this with the whole idea of resurrection. The resurrection of the body will happen at the time of the renewal of all things when Jesus returns. There’s an urgent need for us to be clear on this. Too often, at funerals, we hear a pastor referring to the deceased as now enjoying a body that is free from disease and infirmity. This may bring great comfort to the bereaved, but I don’t believe it is the teaching of the Scriptures. Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that the whole of creation is now groaning as in childbirth awaiting the future resurrection of all things. That is the time we will recei...

Books are written by those who claim to have had an out-of-body experience of going to heaven. They often tell of blinding lights, seeing loved ones, and hearing God or seeing Christ. They record their experiences, true or false, for us at great length. This pattern contrasts sharply with how little attention Paul gives when he was “caught up into paradise.” Why doesn’t he say more? Suppose you had an absolutely stunning supernatural experience, like being in a car accident and having an out-of-body experience so that you were sure you had died and gone to heaven for a few minutes before returning to your body and being brought back to life. How would you handle that experience? Most of us would be consumed with telling others about it. We might even write a book about it and go on a speaking circuit. It’s just too amazing to keep to ourselves.  And more than likely we would feel empowered to use that very experience to authorize our views of heaven. We might f...

  If there is no resurrection of the dead , then not even Christ has been raised  ( 1 Corinthians 15 :13). Death is the last enemy (v. 26). It is not our friend. It is hard, frightening, and absurd. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus and shrank from death on the Mount of Olives . Because death is so fearful, it is difficult to retain faith in the face of it, but thankfully the Holy Spirit enables us to. Philosophers such as Plato and Immanuel Kant have wrestled with the problem of death, but they cannot give us any assurance of a life to come. It is only in the Gospel that we find the facts that enable us to die in faith. Primary among those facts is the resurrection of Jesus Christ . His resurrection in a glorious body proves that there is a new life in glory for believers. Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15 that the resurrected Christ appeared “to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, He appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time, most of who...

Surely God’s purpose for his children in the resurrection is not only that eternal life will replace death, and righteousness replace sin, and health replace sickness, and joy replace sorrow, and pleasure replace pain, but also that unimaginable, unending, ever-increasing ecstasies replace the best of our most intense pleasures in this world. In other words, the age to come is not only an improvement over the  worst  of this world, but over the  best . I say this for three reasons. Even Gains Are Loss First , the apostle Paul did not say, “Whatever  loss  I had, it turned out to be gain because of Christ.” What he said was, “Whatever  gain  I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ” ( Philippians 3:7 ). Christ is an improvement over the best, not just the worst. And I take the word  whatever  seriously — “ Whatever  gain I had . . .” He underlines it in the next verse: “Indeed, I count  everything  [includ...