Dr Paul Allen

We often hear people talk about “the problem of hell,” meaning, “How could a good God send billions of people to an eternal hell?” That is certainly a fair question. In fact, I devoted a chapter of my recent book on Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith to that very issue. But have you ever asked yourself a very different question, namely, what if there was no future punishment at all? What kind of problems would that present? To be sure, many specific questions can be asked about the nature of future punishment. Does it consist of eternal conscious torment? Does it end in annihilation and final destruction? Is there a purgatory that some go through before going to heaven? Is the idea of hell in keeping with God’s goodness and love? What about devout people from other religions and non-religious, kind-hearted people. What about them? And what about those who never heard the gospel at all? What happens to them? These are all valid and fair questions, and in the relevant chapter in ...

“He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”  1 John 2:2 The word propitiation, as used by the apostle John in 1 John 2, has been the subject of much debate throughout the centuries. The question is this: Does John mean by propitiation that Jesus Christ, through His death on the cross, obtained forgiveness for us, or does John mean that through His death, Jesus not only obtained forgiveness for us but also satisfied the wrath of God against us? How you answer this question will either lead you to the gospel of Jesus Christ and a saving knowledge of God or to a faulty understanding of who God is and what He requires as payment for our sins. Some would say that God is not a God of wrath.   They would say God does not demand blood sacrifice to satisfy His wrath against sin and sinners. They claim that God is pure benevolence – a loving God who would never have this kind of wrath that needed to be satisfied against sin. The...

  Saint Augustine answered that question at its root when he wrote, “You have made us for Yourself and [therefore] our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” If God has made us and designed us to be happy with him, then nothing else can take his place. God is the food our spirits need to eat. Other things will make our body happy (Eccl 2:24; 3:13; 5:18–20), but not our spirit, our soul, our true self. Other things will make us happy for a while, but not for long. Other things will make us happy on a superficial level, but not deep down. In the Bible, we read that all happiness, all joy, all beauty come from God (James 1:17). The joy of friendship, the beauty of nature, the happiness of human love were all created by God and designed to reflect his joy and beauty, to carry a little of his joy to us as the air carries the light of the sun.  Every joy you ever feel is a reflection of God. God is not one of the many sources of joy, for “religious people” only (whoever they a...

To clarify what total depravity does and does not mean, a few points are helpful. First, depravity is total in that it refers to all people . Paul here speaks of “all”, “none is righteous”, “no, not one”, “no one”, “all have turned aside”, and “no one does good, not even one”. Second, depravity is total in that it infects and affects the totality of our being. Think of it like a cup of clean water that then has polluted water added to it. The polluted water dirties the entire glass in the same way that sin dirties the entire person.  For clarification, total depravity does not mean utter depravity. Utter depravity means a person is as completely sinful and evil as possible. Although people are totally depraved, Romans teaches that they are not utterly depraved for three reasons:  1. God has given us a conscience that knows something of right and wrong even if we do not know God (Romans 2). 2. God has allowed death to occur so that sinners are brought to an end, and to deter p...

It wasn’t too long ago that a Muslim explained to me that on the day of judgment (Qiyamat) scales will be brought before each human being, and, like measuring grain, all of the good deeds that someone has done in their lifetime will be poured on one side of the scale, and all of the bad deeds that someone has done will be poured on the other side of the scale. If the good side weighs more than the bad side, the person will be allowed into Heaven. This scale is not unique to Islam, though . It is the default position of every human being from birth. We all believe that we are inherently good and that one day God will let us into Heaven based on our goodness. There is a simple way to expose this when sharing the Gospel. Simply ask the person if they believe that they are good. Or, even better, ask the question, “If you were to die today and stand before God, and if He were to ask you, “Why should I let you into Heaven, what would you say?” I’ve found that most of the time the person ...

Probably the most difficult Old Testament ethical issue is the divine command to kill the Canaanites. Theologian-turned-atheist Gerd Lüdemann wrote that “the command to exterminate is extremely offensive”—a far cry from the merciful God frequently proclaimed in Scripture.  Consider just one of these passages: Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God. (Deut. 20:16–18) Were the Canaanites That Wicked? According to the biblical text, Yahweh was willing to wait about 430 years because “the sin of the Amorite [a Canaanite people group] has not yet r...

This article is about two views of punishment in Hell.  ANNIHILATIONISM (CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY) VS UNENDING CONSCIOUS TORMENT IN HELL (TRADITIONALIST DOCTRINE) Pinnock argues his case below:  The principles of justice also pose a serious problem for the traditional doctrine of the nature of hell because it depicts God acting unjustly. Like morality, it raises questions about God’s character and offends our sense of natural justice.  Hell as annihilation, on the other hand, does not.   W hat lifestyle, what set of actions, would deserve the ultimate of penalties—everlasting conscious punishment? It is easy to accept that annihilation might be deserved by those whose lives turned in a definitive No to God, but it is hard to accept hell as everlasting conscious torment with no hope of escape or remittance as a just punishment for anything.  It is too heavy a sentence and cannot be successfully defended as a just action on God’s part. Sending the wic...

If you read the entire Bible and categorized every remark about the nature of God , most of the descriptions would regard his overall greatness, power, majesty, authority, reign, or dominion over everything. This is what theologians call the sovereignty of God.  You can see this throughout the creation account in the amazing power God has to make things happen just by speaking; things that didn’t exist came into being just because he said so (Genesis 1; Psalm 33:6, 9). But to take it one step further, because God is the creator of all things, he also owns all things ( Deuteronomy 10:14; Psalm 24:1). And because he is the creator of all things, he has authority over all things—in other words, he has the right to rule (Psalm 47:2).  He is the “God of gods and Lord of lords ” (Deuteronomy 10:17). The title Adonai reflects the sovereignty of God. It appears first in Genesis 15:2, where Abraham refers to God as “Sovereign LORD” (Adonai Yahweh), and nearly 300 times in...

When Scripture calls God , or individual Persons of the Godhead , "holy" (as it often does: Lev. 11 :44, 45; Josh. 24:19; 1 Sam. 2:2; Ps. 99:9; Is. 1 :4; 6:3; 41 :14, 16, 20; 57:15; Ezek. 39:7; Amos 4:2; John 17 :11 ; Acts 5:3, 4, 32; Rev. 15:4), the word signifies everything about God that sets Him apart from us and makes Him an object of awe, adoration, and dread to us. It covers all aspects of His transcendent greatness and moral perfection, and is characteristic of all His attributes, pointing to the "Godness" of God at every point.  The core of this truth, however, is God's purity that cannot tolerate any form of sin (Hab. 1:13), and calls sinners to constant self-abasement in His presence (Is. 6:5). Justice, which means doing in all circumstances things that are right, is one expression of God's holiness. God displays His justice as Lawgiver and Judge, and also as Promisekeeper and Pardoner of sin. His moral law, requiring behavior that matche...