Dr Paul Allen

A few years ago, I received this unexpected request from one of my church members with multiple sclerosis: “When you have time, could you please do a Bible study on how to prepare for death?”  This person knew that her condition was incurable, and although death still seemed a reasonably long way off, she was anxious to receive advice on how to face it. I was taken aback by that request, but I should not have been.  This was a very sensible idea.  Why wouldn’t every church member be interested in such a Bible study? Yet, I could not remember when I preached or heard a sermon on that topic. The Bible is very upfront about the reality of death but also very clear that it is possible to die well.  It is perhaps significant that one of the best-known Hebrew words in the Old Testament, the word shalom, which we associate with peace and well-being, first appears in the context of death (Gen. 15:15). Knowing how we may die “in peace” should be an essential concern for us all. Reflecting on th

Those who reject Christ's claims will reject the Bible as a whole, so we are not surprised when we find non-Christians questioning the stories and teachings of Scripture. We are living in a funny age, however, when even many professing Christians want to cast the Bible in a negative light.  It is not uncommon for people who claim to be followers of Christ to question God's character or reject the truthfulness of entire portions of Scripture because they believe specific biblical stories and events contradict God’s mercy.  The invasion of Canaan is one of those stories that prompts many people, including many professing Christians, to question the Scriptures. Charges that “God commanded genocide” are frequently uttered.  Even after responding to the charge of genocide, however, we still need to consider how the story fits into the broader biblical revelation of the character of God.  THE PROBLEM IS US When we encounter something that troubles us in Scripture, we are tempted to t

When Christians are asked which millennial view they hold, some of the more cynical among them will sometimes answer: “I’m a panmillennialist. I believe it will all pan out in the end.”  Much of this cynicism is due to frustration over the seemingly never-ending debates about the last things. In some cases, it may also be due to exasperation with the endless train of falsified predictions of the rapture and/or second coming of Christ. For centuries, misguided teachers have repeatedly promised or strongly suggested to their contemporaries that they are the generation that will finally witness the end.  Isn’t it as plain as day that Napoleon Bonaparte was the Antichrist and his exile was a sign that the end of the world was imminent? Some Christians who lived in that generation thought so. Their generation was not the first to fall into the trap of date-setting, and it certainly wasn’t the last. For centuries, numerous Christians have compared the headlines of their day with the books of

The Jesuits have a history of subverting Scripture to promote propaganda. To discredit the clarity of Scripture in counter-Reformation polemics, Jesuit luminaries like St. Robert Bellarmine and Fr. Diogo de Payva de Andrada resorted to the subterfuge of disparaging the Bible as obscure, even on matters of salvation. When Pope Sixtus V published his edition of the Latin Vulgate, into which he had introduced at least two thousand errors, Bellarmine, who bombastically designated the pontiff as “vice-God,” hushed up the scandal and falsely blamed the errors on the typesetters. Bellarmine sneered at the Hebrew manuscripts when they contradicted mistranslated Vulgate texts. He upheld, for example, the copyist’s error from the proto-evangelium of Genesis 3:15, which read: ” she [Mary] shall crush your head” instead of “he [Jesus] shall crush your head”—an error finally corrected by the Vatican in the Nova Vulgata of 1979. The iconic Jesuit even defended fornicating priests over against clergy

Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3). I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean. Open My Eyes to See Psalm 119:18, Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostl

We live in a world in which we have so many technological advances—so many things at our disposal to make our lives easier—from microwaves and dishwashers to cell phones and Siri. Yet, in the midst of all these things that exist to make our lives easier and more simplified, it still seems that our lives are overwhelmingly complicated.  Many people are stressed out, confused, and full of anxiety. Counseling centers have become as prolific as coffee shops, and most pastors would acknowledge that there are more people in the church who need counseling than there are resources to adequately care for them. We live in a world that abounds with anxiety. But as Christians, we can turn to the Bible for God’s solution to anxiety: focusing on Christ and the hope we have in Him. And here, we read Romans 8:18–30 as the primary text for our encouragement. The trials and challenges we endure are in many ways not new. “There is nothing new under the sun”—including anxiety (Eccl. 1:9). The first-centur

Anxiety is mystifying and elusive. Some people have experienced debilitating anxiety that has found them in the back of an ambulance, while others have the occasional anxious thought that passes briefly through their minds before they fall into a peaceful sleep. For some, anxiety can make it difficult to perform daily rudimentary tasks. For others, anxiety comes around only a few times every year and doesn’t significantly disrupt everyday life. Whatever form anxiety takes, Christians need to know how to meet it with biblical directives and wisdom for our unsettled hearts. When anxiety rears its ugly head, what are we to do? When anxiety is a constant companion for the Christian, how do we remain faithful? Before considering these questions, it’s worth noting that our God-given fight-or-flight instincts are good.   God created our brains to alert us to potential danger. But our brains are subject to the effects of the fall, so our danger-sensing systems can sometimes lead us astray. No

We cannot enjoy God apart from glorifying Him. And the Westminster Shorter Catechism wisely goes on to ask, “What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?” But notice that Scripture contains the “rule” for enjoying God as well as glorifying Him. We know it abounds in instructions for glorifying Him, but how does it instruct us to “enjoy him”? Enjoying God is a command, not an optional extra: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). But how? We cannot “rejoice to order,” can we? True. Yet, Scripture shows that well-instructed believers develop a determination to rejoice. They will rejoice in the Lord. Habakkuk exemplified this in difficult days (see Hab. 3:17–18). He exercised what our forefathers called “acting faith”—a vigorous determination to experience whatever the Lord commands, including joy, and to use the God-given means to do so. Here are four of these means—in which, it should be noted, we also glorify God. Joy in Salvatio

Systematic theology is a method that pulls Scriptures from across the Bible into organized topical categories.  Biblical theology seeks to summarize the teaching of a biblical author or text without imposing systematic categories on the text of Scripture by allowing it to speak for itself in its’ original context separate from contemporary concerns.  Christian students of the Bible will use both theological methods. The question is: Which should hold precedent? We hold biblical theology in higher regard than systematic theology and have tried to come to these convictions by studying books of the Bible in detail and examining Scriptures in their context. Admittedly, a biblical-theological method will result in systematic theological convictions. The problem with every systematic theological tradition is that the Bible does not neatly fit our categories and each team has to emphasize some Scriptures, and minimize or explain away others, to make everything fit because the Bible is a lot l

B.B. Warfield once summarized the mystery surrounding the two natures of Christ when he wrote, “Because he is man he is capable of growth in wisdom, and because he is God he is from the beginning Wisdom Itself.” The Scriptures, at one and the same time, insist that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and forever and that He “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man” ( Luke 2:52 ).  Believers profess to understand what it means that Jesus never changes inasmuch as He is God, but they have a harder time understanding what it means that Jesus grew in wisdom as a true man. The explanation that we discover by means of scriptural allusions might surprise many Christians. In short, as a man, Jesus needed to learn the Scriptures. Jesus had to grow in His capacity for sinless human development to the extent that one can grow at each age and at each stage of human experience. As a twelve-year-old, Jesus was filled with divine wisdom to the extent that a twelve-yea