Dr Paul Allen

Hear the word of the LORD, you Israelites, because the LORD has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land ” (Hosea 4:1). The prophets were called by God to bring His covenant lawsuit against the nation Israel. At the beginning of his series of oracles (Hosea 4–14), Hosea summoned the nation to hear God’s charge against them. In Hosea 4:2, God charged them with breaking the Ten Commandments, mentioning cursing, murder, adultery, stealing, and lying. Not only were the people doing these evil deeds, but they were doing them repeatedly, so that “bloodshed followed bloodshed.” God was judging the land already by letting them experience the consequences of their behavior. The land was not yielding its produce, the people were wasting away, and even the animals were dying off (Hosea 4:3). The people were litigious, constantly bringing lawsuits against one another (Hosea 4:4). Why had this come to pass...

"Son of man" appears 25 times in Luke, a copy (c. 800) shown here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Interpreters of John’s Apocalypse have struggled since earliest times with the language that he uses to describe the visions that the risen Jesus Christ granted him. How much of the detail of the three series of judgments, and of the later visions, does John want to be taken literally? How much is symbolic?  Some of John’s descriptions are easy to recognize as symbolic (or metaphorical). For example, when the risen Jesus promises to the Christians in Philadelphia, “If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God ” (Rev. 3:12), even interpreters who want to explain the contents of the book of Revelation as literally as possible state that “this is of course a figure of speech.” Since the Reformation , the importance of a literal interpretation has been recognized and emphasized by evangelical interpreters of Scripture. However, the expression “literal inter...