Dr Paul Allen

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14) So this is our Lord Jesus — with God, as God, forever from all eternity. He is very, very great. And because he was from the beginning and because he is God, therefore, he was — in his power, in his wisdom, in his goodness — totally on the throne, totally wise, and totally good. On 9/11, in 2001, when 2,996 people in America died during those terrorist attacks, he was fully capable of controlling things, fully capable of explaining things, fully capable of putting all things right. Not only there, but also 30,000 people in Bam, Iran, just a few years later, perished in one night in an earthquake.  And not only 30,000 or 3,000, but a few years later, in 2005, 230,000 people perished in one night in the South Seas off the coast of India in that tsunami. Every day in the world, 150,000 people die. And Jesus reigns from ...

There persists in some evangelical circles a pertinacious little misunderstanding known as “soul sleep” or, to the more erudite, “psychopannychism.” It’s the view that when you die your spirit goes into an unconscious, uncomprehending state until the final resurrection. The reasoning is that since every human being is a body-soul composite (or for our pedantic tripartite readers: body-soul-mind), when your body dies your soul cannot function until it is reunited with your resurrected corpus. This argument isn’t merely a logical one, but putatively a biblical one. Proponents point out that the writers of Scripture routinely referred to the dearly departed as those who had “fallen asleep.”  For example, Jesus referred to the deceased, entombed Lazarus as sleeping: John 11:11-14 … he said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.” Now Jesus had spoken of h...