Dr Paul Allen

  Titus 2. It is essential to understand the work of God’s grace not just in the past or the future, but also right here, right now. Sadly, many believers have a big hole in their understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They have a pretty clear understanding of the forgiveness they have received through Jesus's substitutionary work and of their future hope as children of God.  But they are not as clear about the right-here, right-now work of the gospel. Can you identify what God is doing now, between the “already” of Christ’s resurrection and ascension and the “not yet” of your final welcome into his final kingdom? Do you see the work of Jesus in the here and now?  Why did God plan a long period between when he first rescued us by his grace and when he will call us to our eternal home? Wouldn’t it be better for us to believe and immediately be taken into glory? Why must we endure a long, hard journey in this fallen world? The apostle Paul addresses these questions in...

By faith, he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them. (Heb. 11:28) “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” These words from Exodus 12:13 are some of the most comforting in the Old Testament, if not the entire Bible. But comfort (biblically speaking) often comes amid crisis.  When God spoke these words to Israel through Moses, Israel was in anything but a comfortable position. For several hundred years, they had been harshly enslaved by the Egyptians. Their God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—had been deafeningly silent throughout those centuries.  Egypt was a land full of pagan deities, and Pharaoh was a self-proclaimed deity among them—and he knew neither Joseph nor the God of Joseph. Time has a way of chilling warm memories, and all that God had done for Israel and the Egyptians had faded from memory. The people of God now pined away as slaves, labouring under the blighting sun of Pharaoh’s vainglory—a ...

We believe in Jesus miracles but what about today? The most fundamental reason that people don’t believe the miracles in the Bible is that they already believe something else, namely, that miracles are impossible. In other words, they have a worldview that rules out the supernatural from the outset. Thus, it doesn’t really matter how good the evidence for a particular miracle might be. It doesn’t really matter how many eyewitnesses there are. Such factors are irrelevant. Any claim to the miraculous must be rejected in principle. Of course, this approach just raises the obvious question of whether there are good reasons to think miracles are impossible. After all, how does a person know that miracles can’t happen? The sceptic might say, “Because I’ve never seen a miracle.” But that’s not a very good argument. Not personally seeing something doesn’t make it impossible. There are tribes in the remote Amazon that have never seen snow, even in pictures. Their personal experience is uniforml...