Joni Eareckson Tada, herself no stranger to chronic pain, writes of Anne Steele, “Hers was a ministry of suffering.”5. She goes on to say, “Do you serve God in your suffering? We serve him when we imitate Jesus’s endurance in our suffering. Or his patience in the face of disappointment or his perseverance while shouldering our cross. . . . And when we choose contentment over complaining, we imitate his glad willingness to submit to the Father’s terrible yet wonderful will. All of it comprises a fragrant, sacrificial service to God.”6 

When John Rippon published his influential hymnal A Selection of Hymns in 1787, 101 of the texts were by the short-lived but prolific Philip Doddridge (1702–1751). The second-most-represented author, with 47 texts in the hymnal, was Baptist poet Anne Steele. For many years, Steele’s poems figured prominently in evangelical hymnals, but by the early 20th century, her works nearly disappeared. By 1950, hymnologist Albert Bailey could write that “all but one of her 144 hymns are now forgotten.”1
However, Steele wrote hymns worth remembering and learning, hymns born out of a life of disappointment, grief, and suffering. When she was three years old, her mother died. A hip injury at age nineteen led to chronic physical pain for Anne. She also dealt with symptoms of malaria throughout her life. Many accounts of her life state that she was engaged to one Robert Elscourt, who drowned the day before or the day of their wedding. This may be a romanticized addition to her life, though she did remain unmarried her whole life.2 Her father remarried, but his second wife died when Anne was forty-three. A sister-in-law died two years later. Anne’s father developed poor health late in his life, and Anne cared for him until he died in 1769.
Despite the suffering and difficulty, Anne’s faith and hope were in God. Her father, a well-to-do merchant, also served as a deacon and eventually pastor of a Baptist church in Broughton, England. Anne joined the church at age 14 and from an early age exhibited a faith that expressed itself through poetry. She began to write primarily for her own devotional use, but her father saw the value of his daughter’s poetry and introduced these hymns to his church. Anne was initially reluctant to show her work to a wider audience, but through the encouragement of her father and step-mother, as well as a small group of pastors who championed her work,3 she submitted poetry for publication when she was in her early forties. The resulting book, Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional and published under the pen name Theodosia, introduced people to a significant new voice in hymnody. Baptist hymnologists Harry Eskew and Hugh McElrath state, “Miss Steele was the foremost of a group of Baptist hymnists . . . who, because their hymns possess a quality unsurpassed before or since, constitue a ‘Golden Age of Baptist Hymnody.’”4
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Rising enrollments in choice schools, particularly in private schools, not only provide evidence of a continuing school-choice wave sweeping the country, but also demonstrate how these learning environments will continue to be an important part of the United States’ educational fabric.

Public schools in the United States have lost over a million students in the past three years, according to the Wall Street Journal. Where these students went, and why they left, says a great deal about the future of American schooling.
Private Christian schools have absorbed many of these students. In the 2022–23 academic year, schools in the Association of Christian Schools International recorded 35 percent higher enrollment than at the start of the pandemic, according to a new ACSI study. Similar kinds of schools have also seen dramatic increases. For the 2021–22 school year, the National Catholic Educational Association reported a 3.8 percent nationwide enrollment increase, the largest in NCEA’s history. Charter-school enrollment increased by 7 percent during the first year of the pandemic and has held steady since, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. While homeschool “enrollment” doubled during the pandemic, no other form of education saw significant increases — especially not public schools.
Enrollment growth in Christian schools over the past three years reverses the trend in declining enrollment from the preceding years. And it was not just a pandemic-era trend. Attendance at private Christian schools continues to increase even as district public schools have reopened for in-person instruction, while the number of charter-school students and homeschooled students declined in 2022.
Why have private Christian schools benefited in this environment? One explanation is how they responded to students’ learning needs during the pandemic. Public schools that remained the most remote for the longest experienced the greatest enrollment losses, according to an American Enterprise Institute study. Meanwhile, 84 percent of Christian schools returned to in-person instruction “much sooner” than local district schools, according to the ACSI report. Christian schools that reopened earlier have added an average of around 80 students since the start of the pandemic.
Motivated by a desire to serve their families, Christian schools sought creative solutions for getting students back on campus. “Early on, it was clear from seeing our kids struggle emotionally, socially, and academically through distance learning that getting kids back on campus was critical,” said Brian Bell, head of school at Redlands Christian School in southern California. “It required us to be creative and brave with our solutions to get back in person.” Redlands Christian School now educates over 1,400 students, the highest level in its century-long existence.
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Jesus is the true messenger of God who spoke three explicit parables of judgment upon the Jews (Mt. 21:28-22:14). In the end, the Jews did not repent. They challenged Him. They embarrassed themselves. And instead of admitting their error they remained silent and awaited their cursing.

Introduction
In an atomic weapon, a handful of neutrons cause a chain reaction ending with the vaporization of entire cities and the deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people. The chain of events happens sort of like this. A free neutron is released in the presence of Uranium atoms. Once it collides with one of those atoms, it enters Uranium’s nucleus causing it to become so unstable that the atom will split. When this happens, 3 additional neutrons are set free that end up colliding with three additional atoms of Uranium. The process occurs again netting 9 free neutrons, and before long (roughly six hundred billionths of a second) an uncountable amount of nuclear reactions will have occurred unleashing unimaginable havoc in all directions. No matter how quickly the chain reaction occurs, it would not be possible without specific sequential events that magnify in intensity.
Similarly, God unleashed a chain reaction upon unstable Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago. Based on specific sequential events that increase in intensity (detailed in Matthew 21-23), Jesus collided with the leadership of the city and the result was a city reduced to ash and rubble. Today, we jump right into the middle of that reaction and notice four specific events that occur from the end of Matthew 21 to the end of Matthew 22 that set the stage for this implosion.
The Ones Reduced to Rubble
While a deeper treatment of the issues is well in order, I must briefly summarize how this escalation is unfolding. Matthew 21 ends with an incredibly provocative statement by Jesus that has massive implications for how the events transpire in Jerusalem. He says:

Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders rejected, This became the chief corner stone; This came about from the Lord, And it is marvelous in our eyes? 43 Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it. 44 And he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust.

Jesus is not only accusing them of being ignorant of the Scriptures, such as Psalm 118 where this quote comes from, but He is also demonstrating how they will be the ones to reject Him, and that He will be the stone upon which God’s Kingdom will be built. This is why Jesus can look at the Pharisees and Scribes and say that the Kingdom will be taken away from them and given to another people because they will be crushed under the weight of the rock of ages and scattered like chaff to the four winds in Judgment.
This kind of judgment language goes well beyond the typical evangelical interpretation, where the Jews simply made a poor choice. That line of thinking might view the Jews in the same league as every other unbeliever who weighed the evidence, was not convinced, and chose wrongly. Or, if you are Calvinist, they were not elect and acted like every other reprobate who ever lived. But this is not what is happening here. These are people who had the kingdom and were losing the kingdom, which is not true for unbelievers in general.
Jesus uses verses 43 and 44 to remind the Jews of promises made in Daniel 2, where God will cut our an eternal rock (Da 2:34), who will strike a brittle kingdom (Da 2:43), that will topple and crush the empires of antiquity to dust (Da 2:35a), that will scatter them like chaff to the ends of the earth (Da 2:35b) and will be the inauguration of God’s true kingdom (Da 2:44) that will end up capturing the entire world and bringing it under the dominion of God (2:35, 44-45).
Jesus is telling them that He is that rock sent by God. He is showing them that He is the one who will not only bring God’s Kingdom to all the nations but will do so by striking them, crushing them, and scattering them to the ends of the earth. This is exactly what happened when God used Rome to end the nation of Judah and we are living in that eternal Kingdom that Christ Himself created. We see again that His coming is for the salvation of some and the judgment of others.
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