Dr Paul Allen

  God’s people kept falling back into sexual sin during the days of the Judges, and the pattern continues to this day with the constant lure of wealth, power, success, pleasure, comfort, sex, indulgence, and pornography. These same demons are powerfully at work in our culture, continuing to seduce God’s people into evil and sin.  The rise in everything from worship of the environment (as our sacred goddess Mother); to greed that worships the demon Mamon in everything from crime to skyrocketing debt; to murder of the innocents, starting with the unborn; to the mainstream acceptance of pornography, polygamy, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, transgenderism, and every other sexual deviancy, is all the work of Baal and Asherah waging spiritual warfare that manifests in our physical world. The liberal, progressive, woke, and mainline Protestant “churches” that fly rainbow flags and celebrate tolerance, diversity, and Pride Month are filled not with the Holy Spirit but with unho...

In 1948 a ship named Nora headed from a Yugoslavian port to the Middle East. To the naked eye, the cargo was onions—almost 600 tons of them. Imagine the stench. I get seasick at the best of times; sitting on that many onions would guarantee it. Onions weren’t the real cargo though. It was a stash of Czech rifles making their way into the hands of Israel’s army, but no customs officer was going to dig through mountains of onions to find them. In Judges, Samson’s antics stick in our nostrils like the stench of a shipload of onions. His behaviour is revolting. It’s a crash course in how not to live. But take a deep breath, plug your nose, rummage around a little, and before long you’ll discover the real cargo—the truth that our God can and will bring his plans and purposes to fruition despite his people’s antics. This is the goodness and grace of our God. Even when our actions reek of sin, his steadfast love and faithfulness win the victory. Personal Vendetta (Judg. 15:1–8) In Judges 14, ...

Temptation often prevails against us because of our simple and naive assumptions about temptation. We expect temptation will march through the front door, dressed like a wolf, announcing itself loudly as it comes. But temptation often prefers the back door, and the bedroom window, and that crack between the floorboards. Temptation relies on subtlety and nuance, on deception and surprise, on ignorance and naivete. To begin to taste victory, we have to start treating the war as a war. We have to study the enemy of our souls. We remember the story of Samson and Delilah because she overpowered the strongest man alive. But have we ever stopped to really ask how? How did Delilah subdue a man who had just killed a thousand men? When we unravel the secrets of her seduction, they can become weapons for us against whatever temptation we face. The Ambition of Temptation The first step in taking temptation more seriously is to remember that temptation has a mission: to ruin your soul and rob you o...

A team of scientists sequenced genomes from people who lived in a port city on the Mediterranean coast of Israel between the 12th and 8th centuries B.C. Sometime in the 12th century B.C., a family in the ancient port city of Ashkelon, in what is today Israel, mourned the loss of a child. But they didn’t go to the city’s cemetery. Instead, they dug a small pit in the dirt floor of their home and buried the infant right in the place where they lived. That child’s DNA is now helping scholars trace the origins of the Philistines, a long-standing, somewhat contentious mystery. In accounts from the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines appear mostly as villainous enemies of the Israelites. They sent Delilah to cut the hair of the Israelite leader Samson and thus stripped him of his power. Goliath, the giant slain by David, was a Philistine. The Philistines’ reputation as a hostile, war-mongering, hedonistic tribe became so pervasive that “philistine” is still sometimes lobbed as an insult for a...

Samson in Dagon Temple In Hebrew the title meant simply someone who puts things right, by whatever means. This might include acting in a judicial or legal way to sort out disputes between people, or giving judgments on difficult local problems.  But it could also include leading the people in battle against oppressive enemies, or calling the people to united action against some sudden threat. Some of them seem to have been fairly local heroes, whereas others rose to more national prominence and leadership. One thing that is said quite often about these “judges” is that the Spirit of the LORD ( Yahweh ) would come upon them.  When this happened it was a signal for action. Empowered by the Spirit of the LORD, they could exercise charismatic leadership and do valiant exploits that were recited around the campfires of Israel for generations to come. Here are some examples, all from the book of Judges : The Spirit of the LORD came upon [ Othniel ], so that he became I...

Original, unrestored version of "Jephtha's Rash Vow", by James Gundee & M. Jones, London. Published January 20, 1807. Illustrates the description of Jephtha in Antiquities of the Jews, Book V, by Flavius Josephus NOTE: Due to filesize limitations, this has been cropped somewhat from the original scan, but no other modifications have been applied (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Judges 11 is one of the darkest chapters in the Bible. God ’s judge, Jephthah , offers up his only child as a human sacrifice , under the incredibly sinful assumption that Yahweh is worshiped in the same way the pagan gods are. The story stands as evidence that without faith, God’s people are as depraved as the world, and that Israel is in desperate need of a savior better than a Judge. Two articles ( here and here ) that have argued against that understanding of Judges 11, essentially saying, “no, no…you have it all wrong…God wouldn’t allow one of his Judges to do something that horrible… Je...

Jesus  (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) "And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon , and of Barak, and of Samson , and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel , and of the prophets." ( Hebrews 11:32 ) Hebrews 11 is a thrilling catalog of the faithful servants of God in all the ancient ages. There were Abel, Enoch, and Noah before the Flood; then Abraham , Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph in the patriarchal age; followed by Moses , Joshua, and Rahab in the time of the exodus and conquest. Finally, today’s verse summarizes the periods of the judges (Gideon, Barak, Samson, and Jephthae), the kings (Samuel, David), and the prophets. All these were men and women of great faith, though each had to endure great testing. They, as the writer says, "stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword . . . had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they...

Samson in the Treadmill, by Carl Bloch, Danish painter, d. 1890. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) A stone seal from the 11th century BC , possibly depicting a man fighting a lion, has been discovered at the site of Beth Shemesh . The archaeologists who excavate the site have suggested identifying the scene on the seal with the story of a man fighting a lion, and that this story or legend eventually found its way into the text of the Bible and the Samson story. The seal is approximately 1.5 cm in diameter and depicts what appears to be a long haired man fighting (punching? or standing next to?) a four legged animal with a feline tail which even seems to have a tassel at the tip (unique to lions) and a head that appears to have some type of pointed ears like a feline. Because lions are known from historical records and ancient artwork to have inhabited the Levant in antiquity, identifying the animal figure with a lion is plausible. Beth Shemesh, or "House of the Sun," is loca...