Equals do not need to fear, obey, and serve each other. But we are NOT equals. We will never be God, and we will forever know our place and know who we are as we worship him and revere him. Again, we rejoice in having a relationship with God, but we still treat God as God. Yes we do it gladly and with a grateful heart, but we still recognise who he is and our proper place before him.

That people all the time get things wrong about God is not surprising. Most folks want to make God in their own image, so they will distort and misrepresent him. That is to be expected of non-believers. But sadly it can often be the case with believers as well. They can get even Christian basics wrong, and twist and mar the fullness of biblical revelation.
Having an interactive website with over 1300 theological articles – among others – I find this happening on a regular basis. People come here all the time. Some will send in comments looking to pick a fight and argue with me about something. Sometimes they are just way off – pushing theological error, heresy and the like.
Sometimes they will get part of the biblical worldview right while getting other parts wrong. As I have said countless times on this site, we must get the biblical balance right on so many key issues. Theological error easily creeps in when we try to undo the biblical balance that is found there.
I also have the recurring problem of someone coming along and missing the point of an article, and/or going off on a tangent. Often this will greatly detract from the point I was seeking to make in a piece. They may just be insistent on pushing their pet theological peeves, or have taken upon themselves the role of a theological enforcer, ‘correcting’ anyone who dares to have a slightly different view on things.
Yet another incident of this took place recently. I had written a piece on atheists, and how they reject the one true God, often setting themselves or something else up as god. In that piece I said this:
They want to be king, not subject.They want to rule, not be ruled.They want to give orders, not take orders.They want to call the shots, not be told what to do.They want to determine what is true and false, not God.They want to determine what is right and wrong, not God.They want to be independent, not dependent.They want to do their own will, not God’s will.They want to live like the devil, not God.They want to rule in hell, not serve in heaven. billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/23/romans-1-and-atheism/
Now all that happens to be perfectly true. Yet I got a comment – not from an angry atheist – but some Christian who thought I was quite wrong. He managed to do two things in his comment that I just mentioned above: he missed the whole point of my article and managed to derail the whole thing, and he managed to present some aspects of biblical truth while rejecting other key aspects. He said this:
The gospel is not that upon regeneration we become a subject people, ruled, ordered and told what to do. This is as far from the great relationship Yahweh promises in Christ as could be conceived. Upon regeneration we are re-born and are filled with Christ’s Spirit caught up at last into his family, adopted sons of the great Yahweh, our goals perfectly aligned with his, our life now in line with his will and in joy unimaginable as Paul teaches us.
If your preaching of the gospel is to ‘repent and become a subject, ruled, ordered and told what to do’ you are inviting people to become prisoners, not members of the family of God and feeding into the atheist’s vain distortion of who our Creator is and his call to live in step with him.
Oh dear. As I say, this was all rather off topic. My piece was on atheism and how Paul in Romans 1 views such things. But also, as I said, he presents some biblical truth with one hand while taking away some biblical truth with the other. Losing the biblical balance just gets us into more difficulty and error. Let me deal with each of these two matters.
As to the atheism issue, sadly this fellow missed the point of my article. Does the atheist and non-Christian want to be boss, to call the shots, and not have anyone rule over them? Of course they do. The only way they will get right with God is to lay down their arms and surrender.
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Christ’s promise to those who cry out to him is that “the one who seeks finds” (Matthew 7:8). So, when we are plagued by the perceived absence of God, rather than sink into despair, we cry out to God, we wait on him in prayer, we raise our eyes to him in worship, we run to the church — Christ’s body — for support, we look for him in his word, and we remind ourselves of his presence by taking the Lord’s Supper.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? (A Grief Observed, 6)
C.S. Lewis penned these words as he struggled to deal with the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis here expresses the experience of many who have struggled to deal with genuine evil in their lives and have turned to God only to find him seemingly absent. This experience has sometimes been called the problem of divine hiddenness.
So, what causes this “absence” of God, as periodically experienced by so many, myself included? And how might we reckon with his absence so that we might find him again?
Willing the Absence
We can come at the question of divine hiddenness from two directions: first, from the “lived-absence of God,” and second, from the reality that God is not immediately apparent to our senses. Let’s take them one at a time.
For many, the absence of God is felt so profoundly because they are actively living as if God were absent in their day-to-day life. As odd as it may sound, this type of lived-absence of God occurs in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Stephen Charnock describes this dynamic with the term practical atheism (The Existence and Attributes of God, 1:137–255). Many people, even self-professing Christians, live their lives as if there is no God.
Indeed, one cause of the deep impression of the absence of God may be the presence of unconfessed and unrepentant sin. Charnock suggests that to sin is to secretly desire the nonexistence of God. Thus, it should not be surprising that we experience a deep sense of the absence of God if we live in unconfessed sin. For this form of divine hiddenness, the appropriate remedy is the confession of sin and turning back to God.
Modern existentialism has turned this version of the lived-absence of God into a “philosophy.” In his work The Problem of God, John Courtney Murray describes how the modern existentialist affirms the absence of God: “He says that God must be absent. He asserts his fundamental will that God should be absent. The reason is obvious. . . . If God is present, man is being made by God, and he is being made a man . . . [with] a destiny which he himself did not choose” (117).
The modern existentialist affirms the absence of God, not because he has looked for him and failed to find him, but because, if God is present, then man is accountable to him. “Therefore God must be declared dead, missing, absent. The declaration is an act of the will, a basic will to the absence of God” (The Problem of God, 117). Here we find not existential dread in not finding God, but man actively willing the absence of God, so that he can live his life without divine constraints.
Abandoned and Alone
Another way we might sink into a lived-absence of God is related not to personal sin, but to a sense of having been abandoned in evil circumstances. Again, this absence is common to believers and unbelievers alike. We may become aware of divine hiddenness when evil suddenly looms large and, turning to God, we are shocked by his apparent absence.
This feeling is what Lewis describes in A Grief Observed, and what Elijah seems to have experienced when he fled from Jezebel to a cave in the desert (1 Kings 19). Joseph Minich captures this appearance of absence perfectly:
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O15 was one of three overtures presbyteries considered in 2022-23 on the topic of sexuality. Overture 29 (O29) and Overture 31 (O31) passed in a supermajority of presbyteries and will come to the floor of GA this summer, where a simple majority vote of commissioners will amend the BCO with their language. Two sexuality overtures—Overture 23 (O23) and Overture 37 (O37)—failed to reach the two-thirds threshold in 2021-22.

With the Presbyterian Church in America’s 2023 General Assembly quickly approaching, I thought I’d take one final look at the presbytery votes on Overture 15 (O15). In total, 81 presbyteries have recorded votes on O15, with the overture receiving a majority vote in 48 presbyteries, 11 shy of the two-thirds threshold needed to bring O15 to the floor of GA this June.
Comparing O15 votes to last year’s sexuality overtures
O15 was one of three overtures presbyteries considered in 2022-23 on the topic of sexuality. Overture 29 (O29) and Overture 31 (O31) passed in a supermajority of presbyteries and will come to the floor of GA this summer, where a simple majority vote of commissioners will amend the BCO with their language. Two sexuality overtures—Overture 23 (O23) and Overture 37 (O37)—failed to reach the two-thirds threshold in 2021-22.
A scatter plot is a helpful graph for quickly considering how a vote on one overture compared to a vote on another overture. The figure below plots six scatterplots, with each dot representing a presbytery. Presbytery votes on the 2021-22 overtures are plotted on the horizontal y-axis: O23 in the first column and O37 in the second column. Presbytery votes on the 2022-23 overtures are plotted on the vertical y-axis: O31 in the first row, O29 in the second row, and O15 in the third row. The red diagonal line indicates parity; presbyteries falling on this line voted exactly the same on one of last year’s overtures as they did on one of this year’s. Presbyteries above this line had a greater percentage of officers supporting one of this year’s overtures relative to either of last year’s overtures.

Two quadrants are of greatest interest. The top left quadrant (with green dots) plot presbyteries that voted against an overture last year, but flipped to support it this year. The bottom right quadrant (with red dots) plots presbyteries that voted in favor of an overture last year, but flipped to oppose it this year.
By the number of green dots, it is clear that O29 and O31 were highly regarded, even by presbyteries voting against sexuality overtures last year. With only one exception (Platte Valley, which passed O37 last year but did not pass O31 this year), presbyteries either had the same outcome or flipped to support this year’s overtures.
O15 did not follow the same pattern as O29 and O31. Presbyteries landed much closer to the parity line, indicating that many voted on O15 similarly to how they voted last year. The plot also features a mix of green and red dots, revealing that there were many presbyteries that changed their vote from last year’s overtures to O15.
A Sankey plot is useful for visualizing trends for how presbyteries may have shifted votes. It shows the proportion of presbyteries passing sexuality overtures in each year, as well as the paths presbyteries took from year to year. The plot below shows that votes on O15 were largely predictable. Presbyteries that supported both O23 and O37 last year tended to pass O15, while those that opposed both O23 and O37 tended not to pass O15.

Minority Report signers and recorded negative votes
Previously for The Aquila Report, I examined O15’s progress based on commissioners who recorded negative votes against O15 at PCA GA 2022, as well as commissioners on the Overtures Committee who signed the Minority Report that brought O15 to the floor of GA. The bar graph below replicates my previous analysis, but with final data.

Over four-fifths of presbyteries with Minority Report signers (in favor of O15) passed O15, while just less than half of presbyteries without a Minority Report signer passed O15. In contrast, just less than half of presbyteries with a recorded negative vote (against O15) passed O15, while four-fifths of presbyteries without a recorded negative vote passed O15. The data, in my opinion, reveals two competing opinions within the PCA on whether the sexuality issue among ordained officers has been resolved.
Looking ahead to GA 2023
This summer, the Overtures Committee will consider five overtures that take up the issue of sexuality.

Overture 9 from Arizona Presbytery would amend the BCO by adding the following paragraph to Chapter 7: “Men who deviate–whether by declared conviction, self-description, lifestyle decisions, or overt practice–from God’s creational intention for human sexuality are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.”
Overture 16 from Catawba Valley Presbytery would amend the BCO by adding the following paragraph to Chapter 7: “Men who describe themselves by any biblical sin (such as listed in 1 Cor. 6:9-10, ‘Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.’) are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America. Instead, they describe themselves by 1 Cor. 6:11, ‘And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.’”
Overture 17 from the Session of Meadowview Reformed Presbyterian Church would amend the BCO by adding the following paragraph to Chapter 7: “Men who refer to a particular sin struggle as descriptive of their personhood, being, or identity are disqualified from holding office in the PCA.”
Overture 23 from Mississippi Valley Presbytery would amend the BCO by adding the following line to 8-2: “He should conform to the biblical requirement of chastity and sexual purity in his descriptions of himself, his convictions, character, and conduct”; and the following line to 9-3: “conforming to the biblical requirement of chastity and sexual purity in their descriptions of themselves, their convictions, character, and conduct.”
And finally, Overture 24 from Chesapeake Presbytery would amend the BCO by adding the following line to 8-3: “As those who are to be examples to God’s flock that is under their care, and who are to watch their life and doctrine closely, elders are to understand, describe, and define themselves in light of their union with Christ as justified and holy children of God. They are to guard against setting a damaging or confusing example to the flock by describing or defining themselves by their sinful desires (e.g., from 1 Corinthians 6:9,10 (ESV)… ‘the sexually immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers,…’ etc.), but rather are to endeavor by the grace of God to confess, repent of, and mortify sin and sinful desires, and to present themselves and those entrusted to their care as instruments of righteousness to God.”

Overtures 9, 16, and 17 follow the pattern of O15 this past year by seeking to add a paragraph to BCO 7. Pray for the men of the Overtures Committee (as well as the PCA!) as they take up these matters in June.
Matthew Lee is a ruling elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Fayetteville, AR.
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