Dr Paul Allen

Relief and confidence often immediately follow when we’ve finally made a tough decision. After spending days, weeks, or maybe even months gathering information, listening to counsel, and processing with the Lord in prayer, we’ve finally come to the decision. We’ve signed the job contract, placed the down payment on the home, or gone through the church membership class. While I wish I could say those moments of relief on the other side of decision-making steadily remain, they’re often overshadowed by an enemy: fear. “What if” questions pop into our minds at the most inopportune times. What if I chose to become a member at the wrong church? What if I joined the wrong sorority or chose the wrong major? What if I was missing a very important piece of information when I made my decision? What if I thought I was listening to the Lord’s guidance, but I was really chasing the approval of my trusted advisors? Fearful Frames Fear steals focus from God’s ability and wisdom, wrongfully placing a m...

Does the Bible contain contradictions, inexact measures, and perhaps actual errors? And, if so, does this mean that the Bible isn’t real history? There’s something about coming to the end of a film or book and finally understanding the baffling details that have previously made no sense. Like the "Last kingdom" - Different incidents are explained, problems are ironed out, and everything comes to a satisfactory ending. But viewers or readers hate stories that conclude with unanswered questions and inconsistencies, so editors try to eradicate any such untidiness. So well-edited books leave no loose ends and contain no contradictions. Critics of the Bible sometimes mistake it for this kind of literature. They know the claim that the Bible is inspired by God (2 Tim 3:16), so they think that its narrative should be tidy, self-explanatory, and self-consistent. However, ancient historians know that potential contradictions and apparent mistakes are normal in true histo...

The Bible was written at a time when the means for sharing documents were far different from the technology we have today. When the church in Thessaloniki received a letter from the apostle Paul in the mid-first century, the believers there would have read it aloud in their gatherings, and then devoted followers who recognized the value of Paul’s words would have produced handwritten copies of the letter to pass around to a wider audience. By the end of the first century, Paul’s letters were being copied as a collection. Copying manuscripts Hand-copying of the Pauline corpus continued through the centuries, until Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in fifteenth-century Germany. With some variation, this process of repeated hand-copying happened with every book in the Bible—the New Testament books in Greek, and the Old Testament books in Hebrew and Aramaic. In addition to these original language manuscripts, Christians translated their sacred texts into other languages. The Old...

Three hundred years is a long time. What kept Enoch walking with God for three hundred years? He had an awareness of judgment coming. He had a sensitivity to the ungodliness of the age. And he drew closer to God as the reality of these things pressed in upon him. The way to graph it would be to make a circle, space these three items around the circle, and then show by arrows that each one influenced the other. The more Enoch was aware of the judgment, the more sensitive he was to sin. The more sensitive he was to sin, the closer he wanted to walk with God. The closer he walked with God, the more clearly he saw that judgment was necessary. Or the other way: the more clearly he saw the judgment coming, the closer he wanted to walk with God, and the closer he walked with God the more sensitive he was to ungodliness. If you keep close to God, you will keep from sin. But if you sin persistently, you will fall away from God. Then you will rename the sin. You will not talk about pride, ...