Dr Paul Allen

IS GOD A MALE? If I were to guess, I’d say many Christians’ vision of God the Father is a grandfatherly figure with a beard who lives in the sky. Or maybe he has a deep, soothing voice like Morgan Freeman. We remember that God the Father sent his Son to the earth. Jesus the Son was born as a Jewish man. All these “pictures” of God make us think, maybe implicitly, that God is male or he privileges males. Maybe Christianity even has a masculine feel that tends to exclude females. Amy Peeler, professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, argues in her new book Women and the Gender of God that God is not male. And she argues even more––God doesn’t have certain “male qualities.” Peeler affirms that while orthodox Christians have sustained God is beyond gender, his “maleness has always existed alongside its denial,” creating what some have called a “masculine feel” to Christianity (3). Considering the Incarnation Peeler begins with a discussion of God as male. God isn’t sexualized even in t...

We view Jesus as the supreme Pneumatiker (Spirit-inspired person). Jesus became the Pneumatiker par excellence at his baptism. Jesus was not yet driven by the Spirit, not yet filled with the Spirit, until his baptism.  Only after he received the Spirit at his baptism did Jesus embark on his ministry of preaching and performing wonders. What was the significance of Jesus' reception of the Spirit? What did it mean to become a Pneumatiker?  For Jesus, possession of the Spirit is divine Sonship. There was a difference between Jesus' self-understanding as Messiah and the Son of God. However, both were mediated to Jesus by the Spirit at his baptism. To be a Pneumatiker is to address God as Father. Jesus modelled what it meant to be a Pneumatiker, to experience the power of the Spirit. Although Jesus' disciples had not received the Spirit during his earthly ministry, Jesus promised they would receive the pneumatic gift.  The early church's subsequent reception of the Spirit sh...

Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. –Galatians 5:16–17 This passage can reshape your vision of the Christian life. At one level, the passage is simple. It contains an exhortation (“walk by the Spirit”), a promise (“and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh”), and an explanation or rationale (the conflict described in verse 17). But as we meditate on this passage, we discover that it also offers a threefold vision for the Christian life as a whole. Acknowledge the War Within First, Paul insists that the starting point for the Christian life is recognizing the war between the flesh and the Spirit. I say “starting point” because of the logic of verses 16 and 17. In seminary, I was taught that one way to clarify the logic of a passage like this is to read th...

One of the hottest controversies today about God concerns the traditional exclusive use of the pronoun he. Nearly all Christians admit that (1) God is not literally male, since he has no biological body, and (2) women are not essentially inferior to men. Those are red herrings. There are, however, two reasons for defending the exclusive use of masculine pronouns and imagery for God. One issue is whether we have the authority to change the names of God used by Christ, the Bible, and the Church.  The traditional defense of masculine imagery for God rests on the premise that the Bible is divine revelation, not culturally relative, negotiable, and changeable. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Christians believe God himself has told us how to speak of him.” The other reason for calling God “he” is historical. Except for Judaism, all other known ancient religions had goddesses as well as gods. The Jewish revelation was distinctive in its exclusively masculine pronoun because it was distinctive in ...

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 heavenly angels are those who did not fall from their original service and status as reported in Revelation 12:7–9, “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him” (see also 2 Pet. 2:4 and Jude 6). Heavenly angels are “ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation” (Heb. 1:14). Pharisees equated an angel with a spirit at one of Paul’s trials when they agreed, “We find nothing wrong with this man.… What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” (Acts 23:9). By saying “a spirit or an angel,” the Pharisees constructed a literary parallel that identifies one as being the same as the other one. As a ministering spirit, no heavenly angel is inferior or s...

In every generation, every culture there is a dominant prevailing spirit. The Germans coined a word for it, Zeitgeist, a term that joins two common ideas together. Zeit is the German word for "time," Geist is the German word for "spirit." So Zeitgeist means "spirit of the time" or "spirit of the age." The contemporary Zeitgeist in which the Christian lives is one of secularism. The emphasis is on this world, on this time. Little attention is given to things that are above and beyond this world. Eternity is rarely considered, save for brief moments at a graveside. What counts is the here and now. To live for the moment, for the gusto of the present, is the spirit of this world. The secular spirit of this world has its own modern trends and emphases, but in its essence, it is not new. Every generation has its own form of secularism. We are earthbound creatures. Our focus is on this world. The same was true in Jesus' day. He repeat...

In Deuteronomy 6:5, Moses admonishes the Israelites to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (ESV). But how well does the English translation “soul” in this verse convey the meaning of the underlying Hebrew word? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers eight definitions for the word. Since we can be certain Moses did not have a copy of this dictionary in hand, we must delve into the Hebrew text in hope of gaining fresh insight into this ancient verse. We can do this in four easy steps. Step 1: Make the Switch to Hebrew and Establish a Preliminary Definition Locating the Hebrew word behind the English word “soul” is made easy with The ESV English-Hebrew Reverse Interlinear Old Testament . In this resource, each word of the English translation is aligned with its corresponding Hebrew word. When we look directly below “soul” in Deut 6:5 we see that nephesh is the Hebrew word behind the translation. Now that we have this Hebrew ...

“The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” ( 1 Corinthians   4:20 ). If we are not disillusioned with how much we have allowed our talk to pass for our walk, discontented with the sparse amount of spiritual fruit we are truly bearing, and disappointed by the impotence of our own efforts, we will never be distressed enough to really plead with God to fill us with the Holy Spirit . If we’re not disturbed by how little we can do in our own power, we’ll never be desperate enough to ask God for his. What Is the Filling of the Holy Spirit? But when we pray for this, what are we asking God for? In the words of Wayne Grudem , we are asking God for “an event subsequent to conversion in which a believer experiences a fresh infilling with the Holy Spirit that may result in a variety of consequences, including greater love for God, greater victory over sin, greater power for ministry, and sometimes the receiving of new spiritual gifts.” ( Grudem , 1242) Now, o...

What body do we occupy between the time our lifeless bodies decompose into worm-fodder and when they are resurrected in glory?  The short answer is that we don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say. Biblically speaking, it’s a secret.  So, let’s start with what the Bible  does  say: Disembodied spirits seem to require a material, animated host , i.e. a person or animal (remember the pigs) in which to operate in the material world. In Scripture we see spirit beings such as angels and demons disengaged from the material dimension until they manifest in a bodily form. Matt  12:43   When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. 2 Kings  6:17   Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. Bodies ...

Whenever you see spirit and flesh set side by side in a passage (“the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” or “the spirit wars against the flesh,” as Paul says here), we’re talking about, not the warfare between the physical body of man and his internal, mental, or spiritual inclinations, but rather the conflict that every Christian experiences between his old nature—his fallen nature, which is corrupt and is filled with desires that are not pleasing to God— and the new nature within him that has been brought to pass by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.  Now, life becomes complicated once we are renewed by the Holy Spirit (when we become a Christian); now we have two principles at war within ourselves: the old inclinations and the new inclinations.  The old inclination is against God, and the new inclination is to obey God and to do that which is pleasing to him. In this Galatians passage, Paul discusses the ongoing battle that all Christians experien...

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (Prov. 16:18). The higher you climb to exalt yourself, the greater your fall. Babylon sought to climb the mountain of glory by crushing her enemies and shaking her fist at God. But what was her fate? An everlasting kingdom like that promised to David? No, death and destruction. This is what Isaiah said about the destiny of Babylon: “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you. How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to the grave, to...

It is very important that we have an accurate understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in spiritual rebirth. One of the best places to gain such an understanding is in the second chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We read there: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (vv. 1–6) The language and imagery the Apostle uses in this text has to do with l...

The fact that the Holy Spirit is a person is seen in a multitude of ways in Scripture. One of the primary evidences is that the Bible repeatedly and consistently uses personal pronouns to refer to Him. He is called “He,” “Him,” and so on, not “it.” Also, He does things that we associate with personality. He teaches, He inspires, He guides, He leads, He grieves, He convicts us of sin, and more. Impersonal objects do not behave in this manner. Only a person can do these things. But the Holy Spirit is seen in Scripture not merely as personal but also as fully divine. We see this in a curious story from the book of Acts: But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? Whil...