(Lookout Mountain, GA) – Today [3/31/23], the Covenant College Board of Trustees announced that they have appointed Dr. Brad Voyles as interim president beginning July 1st, 2023. He will serve as interim president until President Halvorson’s successor has been selected to assume office, which is expected to occur on or before July 1, 2024.
Having served for 18 years at Covenant as vice president for student development and dean of students, Dr. Voyles brings a deep understanding of the operations of the college and a clear view with regard to Covenant’s distinctive mission in the landscape of higher education.
Dean Voyles received his B.A. from DePauw University where he majored in Biological Sciences and minored in Psychology.  After earning an MS Ed. in Higher Education Administration from Southern Illinois University, Voyles completed his Master of Divinity degree from Reformed Theological Seminary while working as Dean of Students at Belhaven University.  In 2014, he earned his doctorate in Education Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University.
While serving as vice president of student development, Voyles has also played key roles in strategic planning, leading crisis response efforts including the college’s COVID-19 response, supervising key areas during times of transition, and building strong teams in his areas of oversight. He has served on the cabinet of two of the college’s presidents and is excited to continue serving with the support of a gifted and experienced cabinet.
In an announcement to the community, Chair of the Board of Trustees R. Craig Wood stated, “I am delighted with this decision. Brad’s contributions and service to the college over the past 18 years have prepared him well to bridge the gap as interim president, and to begin immediate work on the college’s short-term and longer term strategic planning with the gifted cabinet that is already in place and approved by the Board.”
Dean Voyles shared in the announcement to the community that he is “grateful for the trust extended to me by the Board and for the gifted colleagues I have the privilege of serving with across campus.  The faculty and staff who serve at Covenant are our greatest resource and through whom the Lord accomplishes our mission of maturing students in the areas of identity in Christ, biblical frame of reference, and service that is Christ-like.”
The Board of Trustees has launched the presidential search committee, made up of trustees, trustee advisers, faculty, and staff.
Source

This is the source of communion with God—Someone hears the truths of the gospel, God supernaturally shines light into his heart so that he recognizes the beauty and value of the gospel of the glory of Christ. And when that happens to a person, he will give up everything for Christ; He will value Christ above all else. That is true Christianity. 

The king raged with fury.
How dare they say I have no right to be here? he steamed. I have done right in the sight of God. He has blessed me. He thought of all the rich spoils of battle adorning his chambers. I have grown strong. My fame has spread far. I deserve to be here.
“My lord, you must leave!”
What is his problem? How dare he say I must leave? The king picked up the censor to burn incense on the altar. I am trying to honor the Lord with this.
The priest persisted. “It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense.”
The king turned. A crowd of strong priests stood behind Azariah in the doorway.
The priest moved a step closer. “Go out of the sanctuary,” he pleaded, “for you have done wrong, and it will bring you no honor from the Lord God.”
How dare he challenge the Lord’s blessed servant? He lowered the censor toward the altar.
He trembled, the censor dropping from his hand. What is that? White scales appeared all over his outstretched hand. His left leg collapsed beneath him. A sharp pain spread across his forehead.

King Uzziah was a leper until the day of his death.He dwelt in an isolated house, because he was a leper;for he was cut off from the house of the LORD.(2 Chron 26:21)

Barriers
“Let us draw near” (Heb 10:19).
The Son of God himself invites you to draw near to the presence of God and enter into the eternal communion enjoyed by the three persons of the triune godhead.
But any reader of the invitation in Hebrews to draw near would have immediately recognized its inherent problem—this God to whom we are supposed to draw near is holy; he cannot tolerate sin. Yet we are sinful.
The fall of mankind into sin destroyed the possibility of drawing near to God. After Adam and Even sinned they no longer enjoyed the privilege of walking with God in the garden; instead they hid from him in fear and desperately tried to cover their guilt with leaves. And ever since that time, any attempt to draw near to God results in a profound recognition of guilt and unworthiness.
The Israelites experienced this when they drew near to Mt. Sinai; when they witnessed the majesty and greatness and white-hot holiness of God, they trembled in fear and begged Moses to go in their behalf. This is the reason that although God inhabited the holy place in the tabernacle and later the temple, no person could enter his presence except the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement. This is what Isaiah experienced when he saw the Lord high and lifted up in all of his glory and holiness and cried out with, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5).
Second Corinthians 4:3 says that every person is born in the condition of perishing, and thus the beauty of a relationship with God is veiled to us: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” Even worse, Paul says that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (v 4). All people are perishing and blind; all people are depraved. The Bible says that no one seeks after God (Rom 3:11); the natural mind cannot understand the things of God (1 Cor 2:14). And because of this, perishing, blind people do not even recognize the wonder and beauty of communion with God.
The problem with the command in Hebrews 10 is that we have neither the right nor even the desire to draw near to God; we do not have access to him because of our sin. The only way God enabled people to partially draw near to him is through temporary sacrifices, and even then there are barriers keeping us from the very presences of God himself; there is a veil hiding the holy place, only the high priest can enter there and only once a year, and we know what happens if you even touch the symbol of God’s presence, the ark—Remember Uzzah? Even Psalm 100 calls people to come only into the outer courts of the temple, not into the actual presence of God. The people had no direct access.
The point is that we cannot obey this command. God commands us to draw near, but this entering into the presence of God to worship him is not possible.
Or is it?
Through Christ
Hebrews 10 explains the solution to the problem through two “since” clauses. The first is found in verse 19: “Since we have confidence to enter the holy places . . . draw near.” Now the term translated “confidence” in most English translations has the idea of free and open “access” to someone or something. “Since we have access to enter the holy places . . . draw near.” So this verse is specifically addressing our problem. God commands us to draw near to him, but because of our sin we do not have access to him. Yet this verse tells us that such access is possible; it is possible to have access to the holy place of God’s presence.
Here is the first term in our text that is meant to conjure up images of Old Testament worship. The holy place was that most sacred of places in the tabernacle and temple, and several boundaries prevented access to God in this place. The first was the wall that enclosed the outer court of the temple, then was the wall of the temple itself, and finally the veil that hid the holy place where the Ark of God dwelt. In each successive stage, fewer and fewer people had access. No Jew would ever even consider entering the Holy Place; they knew what happened when Uzziah did that.
In fact, if you go to Jerusalem today, you’ll find out that there’s a certain area of the temple ground where it is forbidden to Jews to ever walk, because it may be the area where the Holy of Holies once stood, and no Jew would ever put his foot on the Holy of Holies. So that’s why there are big signs outside the gates of the temple area that say, “Orthodox Jews have been forbidden by the rabbi to enter in this place lest they step on the Holy of Holies.” Orthodox Jews have a fear still today of ever going into the presence of God.
Jesus our Substitute
But Hebrews 10:19 tells us that we have access, not just to the outer court, not just into the entrance of the temple, but beyond the veil into the very presence of God. How can this be? Keep reading: “by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.”
Access to God is possible through a sacrifice, and this is no ordinary sacrifice; this is the vicarious, substitutionary atonement of the Son of God. At the beginning of Hebrews 10, the author revealed the insufficiency of animal sacrifices to purify those who come to God in worship: “For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.”
But this sacrifice can perfect those who draw near. This Jesus is fully man, and thus he can stand as our substitute, and he is fully God, and thus he can pay an eternal punishment to an eternal, holy God that no normal man could. And because of the perfection and eternality of this sacrifice, it need not be offered day after day after day to atone for sin; it is offered one time and the complete wrath of God is fully appeased.
This is what God pictured when he slew the animal in the garden and covered Adam and Eve’s guilt. This is what was pictured when Moses offered a sacrifice at the foot of Mt. Sinai so that the elders of the people could approach God. This is what was pictured each year in Israel on the Day of Atonement when an animal was sacrificed and the high priest entered the holy place to sprinkle blood on the mercy seat. This is what was pictured when the seraph took a burning coal from the altar and placed it on Isaiah’s lips, saying, “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
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 Mormons believe Jesus died for sins and rose again from the dead. The atonement is the central event in history and essential to their theology. And yet, Mormons do not have a precise doctrine of the atonement. They do not emphasize Christ as a wrath-bearing substitute, but emphasize simply that Christ somehow mysteriously remits our sins through his suffering.

The aim of this article is to provide a brief overview of Mormon history and theology. My purpose is not to debunk Mormonism or to prove Christianity. But I hope this quick survey will demonstrate that the two are not the same.
A quick note on secondary sources: Christian materials do not always treat Mormonism fairly or go the extra mile to present Mormon ideas as a Mormon would recognize them. One book that does is Andrew Jackson’s Mormonism Explained: What Latter-day Saints Teach and Practice. I also recommend A Different Jesus? The Christ of the Latter-Day Saints by BYU professor Robert Millet. Richard Mouw concedes too much in his Foreword and Afterword, but it is still helpful to get Mormon Christology from a Mormon himself.
Mormon History
Joseph Smith was born in rural Vermont in 1805, the fourth of nine children. With little success farming in Vermont, the Smith family moved west to Palmyra, New York. There Joseph Smith was exposed to different revival movements, and most of his family became Presbyterians, though Smith later said he leaned toward Methodism.
The presence of so many variations of Christianity bothered Smith. Which one was right? How could he choose? At one revival meeting, a preacher quoted from James 1:5 “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (KJV). Smith, 14 years old at the time, went home, reflected on these words, and went into the woods to pray.
According to Mormon tradition, this is when Joseph Smith had his first vision. In this vision, which is foundational to the Mormon faith, Smith claimed to see two “personages.” The one—God the Father—pointed to the other and said, “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”  Smith asked them what sect he should join. They answered that he should join none of them. They were all wrong. All their creeds were an abomination, and all their believers were corrupt.
Three years later, Mormons believe Smith received another vision. In this vision the angel Moroni told Smith of golden plates buried under a hill near Palmyra. The plates were revealed in 1827 when Smith was provided with two reading crystals—Urim and Thummim—by which he could translate the writing (Smith claimed the plates were written in hieroglyphics). In 1830 Smith published The Book of Mormon, which contains the story of the lost Israelites who migrated to America in the sixth century BC but were killed in battle in AD 428. Smith later received another vision from John the Baptist giving him the Aaronic Priesthood.
That same year (1830) Smith founded the “Church of Christ.” In 1838 he changed the name to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
Smith continued to receive revelations telling him to move from New York to Ohio to Missouri and eventually to Illinois where he and his followers built a town called Nauvoo. There Smith and his followers tried to live out a utopian vision of society. They also instituted polygyny as early Mormon leaders argued that Jesus had had many wives. Smith and his brother were arrested in 1844. Later a mob stormed the jail and killed them both. Mormons consider Smith a martyr. Others say he died in a violent shoot-out.
Following Smith’s death there was a schism. A small group called the Josephites became the Reorganized Church with headquarters in Missouri. Most followed Brigham Young, who became their First President and prophet. In 1847, Young took the followers to Utah and built Salt Lake City.
Today, according to LDS figures, there are nearly 17 million Mormons worldwide—with about 7 million living in the United States. Mormonism is the largest new religious movement from the West since Christianity (which can be said, more accurately, to have come from the Near East). Mormonism is also the first homegrown American religion. Mormonism continues to grow (though at a slower rate) because of its missionary impulse, its relatively high birthrate, and its commitment to doctrinal and ethical distinctives.
Mormon Theology
Let me highlight seven areas of Mormon doctrine. I won’t try to refute the Mormon position, but I hope you will see the explicit (and often intentional) deviation from historic Christianity.

View of history. In Mormon thinking, the rise of Mormonism was not merely a reformation or renewal of the church. It was a complete restoration. Following the death of Christ’s apostles, the church fell into complete apostasy. The church lost divine authority and true doctrine. There is no unbroken continuity from the early church to the present. Christianity, for almost all of its history, was false and without the truth—until Joseph Smith and his revelation. Mormonism not only rejects historic orthodox Christianity, the entire religion is based on the need for such repudiation.

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