No one remembers the furniture in the throne room. They remember the king on the throne. This is the end of all the enemies of God. They are destined to be a means for the exaltation of Jesus to the place of highest prominence. Do you want to know the purpose of human history? It is designed by the Father, as the master interior designer, to exalt his Son to the place of highest prominence (Eph. 1:9–10).

The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”Psalm 110:1
I always say that my biggest influences are three Johns and three Toms—John Owen, John Calvin, John Calvin, Thomas Watson, Thomas Brooks, and Thomas Boston. And even though I’d like to say of the six, my biggest influence is John Calvin, it is really John Owen. I wish I could say that I’ve read or planned to read the collected works of all six, but my forty-five years tell me that I must choose. And so I’ve begun the gradual and daily reading of one of them. I chose John Owen.
Out of all of them, Owen stands above the rest as a Christ-maximalist. But he arrived there being a thorough-going Trinitarian. And by that, I mean that he was no Christo-monist. He did not decide to focus on Jesus because it was cool, trendy, or hip. He didn’t hop on the Christo-centric bandwagon because he read about it in a popular book by a platformed1 author. Instead, Owen is thoroughly Trinitarian in his thought, as all good Christian theologians have and should be. But as he pondered the Trinity, he found that there is a Christ-centrality woven into the godhead. The Father is most enamored with his Son. And the Holy Spirit is heaven-bent on glorifying and extolling the person and work of the Son.2 And so, Owen is theologically bent on Christo-centrism, not because he is committed to Christ over the other members of the Trinity, but because he is thoroughly Trinitarian in all his theology.
For example, I have four sons. I have never thought that they should be just like me, though, inevitably, they will bear my likeness, for better and for worse (I’ve warned them about this). But I want them all to be the kind of men that I would be honored to call a friend. And that is all what they currently are—noble men who you and I would be honored to know, honored to call friends. And yet, if you were friends to my sons, you would only know them as they are. But if you knew them, and knew what I had to say about them, you would love them more than if you only knew them without knowing what I had to say about them.
To know a man is one thing; to hear what his father has to say about him is quite another. And this is because a father’s love for his sons, a father’s bestowal of fatherly honor, is an addition to a son’s glory, no matter how great that son’s glory may be. And in this, I think we arrive at some of the beauty behind our trinitarian theology. It is one thing to know the Son. It is an additional thing, an additive and greater thing, to hear the Father gush over his Son.
The Greatest Psalm
The book of Psalms is the most quoted Old Testament book in the Bible. Psalm 110 is the most quoted chapter of the Old Testament in the New Testament. Psalm 110:1 is the most quoted Old Testament verse quoted in the New Testament. Jesus, Paul, the author of Hebrews, and Peter all chose Psalm 110:1 to speak clearly and definitively about the person and work of Jesus, the Christ. And it is a psalm that has become even dearer to me over the past few years.
I’ve made it a personal practice to spend time daily in the psalms and learn to sing as many of them as possible from memory. Aside from the benefits of meditating on God’s Word and singing it back to him in praise, I noticed something consistent throughout Christian history, something begun from the earliest days recorded in Acts. Whenever we read of Christians imprisoned for their faith, we find them often spending their time of imprisonment in prayer and singing psalms. I thought to myself, “If I’m ever imprisoned for my faith (and I’d like to live my life in such a way as this might be possible), I don’t know any psalms to sing.” And so I decided I would learn some psalms by heart, in case I ever had to gladden the walls of a prison cell.
And that, of course, led me to decide where to start with 150 to choose from. And so I asked myself, “Which psalms did Jesus and apostles think were most important?” Clearly, the psalm at the top of the list is Psalm 110. So I started there. Not a week goes by that I don’t sing Psalm 110 a few times. And I say that because this devotion is not just born out of the academic fact of its prodigious use in the New Testament but also out of its frequent place in my life.
And to return to the emphasis of John Owen, few verses in the entire Bible tell us of what the Father thinks of the Son. And in meditating on Psalm 110:1, we have the opportunity to join our heavenly Father in his delight in his Son.
Psalm 110:1 was a mystery to the Jewish scholars who studied it before the incarnation. How could there be a “lord” who sat at the right hand of “the LORD” who was also a greater king than King David, a king that even David would call Lord? The general consensus was that this was a reference to the coming Messiah. And they were right. Jesus (as well as Peter, Paul, and the author of Hebrews after him) unequivocally teaches that he is the mysterious Lord that David wrote about in Psalm 110:1. So, to use New Testament divine familial nouns to describe what is going on in Psalm 110:1 is to say, “The Father said to the Son, “sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” In this brief and profound verse, we see two things that God the Father says about God the Son.
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The answer for the church is not to allow its property to be used to celebrate and encourage such a destructive social phenomenon but to persist in telling the truth that God has ordained a definite order for human life, and that all things which run counter to that ensnare people in destructive falsehood and reduce their victims to earthly and eternal misery of body, mind, and spirit. It was no more loving for Memorial to allow its property to be used to promote such things than it was for Israel’s kings to allow the high places to be used for the worship of idols.

Tim Lecroy would have us put on mourning because of the recent departure of Memorial Presbyterian (St. Louis) from the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). And to be sure, it is a sad affair when any individual or church leaves our communion. Yet there are different reasons for being sad, and it is one of the tragedies of the moment that the same event has saddened different people for different reasons. Lecroy is displeased because he believes that what he regards as a faithful church and ministers “have been bullied out of the denomination.” There are others, including the present author, who are saddened because a body of professing believers has fallen into error and willfully separated itself from the church rather than heed rebuke and repent of its waywardness. Let me state this plainly: I take no pleasure in Memorial’s departure and am grieved that affairs came to such a point. The scriptural witness (Prov. 24:17; comp. Obad. 12) compels me to regard this as a grim occasion for sobriety and self-appraisal (1 Cor. 10:12; Gal. 6:1; Phil. 3:18). But the tragedy of the moment would be increased if we were to misunderstand the true nature of the situation.
One, it is reported that 42 churches left our communion between 2012 and 2020. The casual observer might think it rather amiss that we are to lament Memorial’s departure when we have not been urged to lament the departure of these other 42 churches. Were such churches less worthy of our lament than Memorial? No indeed, and yet unless there is something of which I am unaware, there has been rather little public expression of sorrow at these things.
It so happens that I am not a casual observer in this matter. I have a fair bit of correspondence from people who have left the PCA, or whose churches have done so, and it portrays a situation in which the departed felt compelled to do so because they believed the PCA had serious issues and was not interested in resolving them. Lecroy asserts that we handled the Memorial matter poorly by allowing its leaders to be subjected to largely unjustified opposition and is saddened on that account; my more numerous correspondents assert the opposite, and believe that the PCA was feckless in opposing grievous wrong and that we should be ashamed and repent accordingly.  Such absolute difference in opinion raises an important question: whose understanding of the matter – and by extension, whose reasons for grief – is just and in accord with the truth? Whose sadness is what Paul calls a “godly grief” that “produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret” (2 Cor. 7:10), and whose is a merely earthly grief that things have not gone as we wished?
In answer consider a few facts. Memorial allowed its property to be used for a series of plays celebrating transsexuality (“Transluminate”). Lecroy regards this as “unwise and unhelpful, but not worthy of censure or excommunication.” Scripture has a different view. When God’s people use their property that he has given them to worship him in order to promote debauchery that is heinous in his sight, he, being a jealous God, does not gloss over the matter. He testifies to the wrong by his Word, and then in due time punishes the faithless with temporal punishments that are meant to bring them to repentance and that are meant to serve as a testimony to others as to the depravity of the offense (e.g., Ezekiel 5:1-11:13, esp. 5:11, 7:2-4, 8:16-18). When people who should call the wayward and confused to repentance instead give them practical support in committing their sin, thus making repentance less likely, God says that those who have done so have done a great evil by their dereliction (Lk. 17:2; Eze. 3:18; 33:6,8; comp. Lk. 17:2).
And when men who purport to be ministers of a God whose eyes are too pure to behold evil (Hab. 1:13) yet talk about the “human propensity to [expletive] things up,” and in so doing use an obvious heretic’s alternative to the orthodox doctrine of sin, Scripture condemns their speech: “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (Jas 1:26). “But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you’” (Jude. 1:9). Also, “let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths” (Eph. 4:29); “now you must put . . . away . . . obscene talk from your mouth” (Col. 3:8); and “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34; comp. 7:15-20); as well as sundry other passages that teach foul language is unholy (Isa. 6:5; Jas. 3:9-10; Ps. 10:7; 59:12).
Now one might fancy from my vehemence that I am a fundamentalist prude with little experience of how many people speak. Actually, I work in a field in which foul language is the norm – many of my coworkers struggle to express frustration without cursing – and it is a sin with which I am constantly tempted and to which, alas, I rather frequently succumb. It is a sin of which I am guilty, yes, but also one which I am trying to overcome. Now consider: am I more likely to mortify this sin in a church in which it is censured, or in one whose ministers believe it an example of culturally-sensitive, ‘nuanced’ ministry? One in which it is recognized as evil and forbidden; for this thing is common where it is acceptable, whereas it is rare or unheard where it is disapproved. My grandmother would promptly rebuke me on the spot for saying something like ‘darn’ – and I feel no inclination to curse in her presence. I have had coworkers who used certain four letter words as naturally and frequently as if they were conjunctions – and behold, I felt a strong urge to do the same. Funny how that works.
And yet that understanding of the nature of human speech and its morality – one which all of my school teachers and most of my other employers understood – is apparently not known by one of Memorial’s pastors. Imagine that: a thing which would have gotten soap in the mouth at home, detention in school, and a pink slip in many jobs, and yet it is put forth as Christian ministry to comfort the tempted! It seems to be forgotten that one cannot urge to holiness with unclean vulgarity, nor motivate resistance to temptation with actual sin.[1]
It is my own failures regarding cursing, and my own efforts to overcome it which motivate my opposition to it here, for I recognize that a church in which such evil is allowed to pass unrebuked is a church in which I will never be sanctified on this point. And the tendency of the leaven of sin being to further leaven everything it touches, I doubt that such a church will be free of failure on many other points.
As for sadness here, it is a grief that ministers would ever get to a point where they thought it acceptable to write in such a manner; and it is a further sadness that such a slip was either unnoticed or unrestrained. That is the proper ground of sadness here. It is not that the one who published such things left our denomination formally, but that long before his morals in speech had already done so, and that the fault was not meaningfully corrected.
And so it is with the other matter to which I alluded. Where it is unthinkable to publicly present oneself as having a sex that differs from one’s actual anatomy (sans surgical alteration), the phenomenon of sexual confusion is extremely rare. There are still very few who suffer it, and they deserve our pity and aid, for such an experience must surely be miserable. But they deserve our aid, not our indulgence; and the habit of affirming those with such afflictions has caused the frequency of that phenomenon to explode, particularly among the young and impressionable. When saying ‘I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body’ receives society’s disapproval, almost no one does it. When it is met with approval and all manner of practical, medical, legal, and political favor, it suddenly becomes in vogue.
The answer for the church is not to allow its property to be used to celebrate and encourage such a destructive social phenomenon but to persist in telling the truth that God has ordained a definite order for human life, and that all things which run counter to that ensnare people in destructive falsehood and reduce their victims to earthly and eternal misery of body, mind, and spirit. It was no more loving for Memorial to allow its property to be used to promote such things than it was for Israel’s kings to allow the high places to be used for the worship of idols. It was not reaching the lost; it was giving practical aid for them to commit a type of sin which is especially ensnaring and destructive of its victims. The sadness is not that Memorial has left, but that they ever got to a point of being so confused about what is right and wrong, as well as that they did not heed rebuke but attempted to justify their sin. There is still time for them to repent, and everyone in the PCA ought to pray that they do so, but our grief ought to be felt for the right reason.
And in conclusion let me state that there is one other point on which we all ought to be engaged in frequent, tearful prayer. Memorial is gone, yes, but there are many in our midst who still feel it was guiltless of serious wrongdoing and that its deeds were only “unwise” (as Lecroy put it). And the fact stands against the PCA that it failed to punish wrongdoing effectively. There is a great difference between a wrongdoer being named as a sinner and cast by the church from her offices and such a person leaving of his own volition. In the first case the church exercises its spiritual power to declare to the sinner and others his true nature and need to repent. In the latter he leaves unrebuked because he believes he has been wronged.
We should not allow wrongdoers to depart imagining themselves as victims rather than perpetrators. The whole point of discipline is to appraise and declare someone’s true nature on the basis of his deeds. We did not do that in any meaningful sense of the term, and the accused even seized that as an opportunity to publicly present himself as “exonerated” of wrong and thus imply his opponents are slanderers. Those responsible for this failure to administer discipline are still in office among us, and there is reason to think they persist in their original thinking. For the failure to do our duty and the probability that we will continue to fail in future there is much occasion for sadness, dear reader, and it is on that account that you should be grieved. Pray for discernment and mercy, for God observes our deeds and it may be that it is with us now as it was with Peter’s audience, and that it “is time for judgment to begin at the household of God” (1 Pet. 4:17).
Tom Hervey is a member, Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Simpsonville, SC. The statements made in this article are the personal opinions of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of his church or its leadership or other members.
[1] To be sure, Scripture uses some vivid terms, yet they are not unclean. There is a popular notion that the Gk. skubala in Phil. 3:8 is really a curse word for dung. Without getting into a detailed discussion, suffice it to say that such a claim betrays the eagerness of many for a pretext to justify their carnal speech, but that such evidence as is claimed for it is far from convincing and is rather heavy on assumptions and mere appeals to authority.
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Eccher offers the reader five theses that he hopes “will guide you in your own remembrances of a vilified and lauded Reformer” (p. 201). To be sure, when one reads of a figure like Zwingli, there are times of both inspiration and horror. In a day when diligent study can sometimes be taken less seriously, one can be inspired by Zwingli’s strident work in studying the Scriptures in the original languages. Zwingli, as a Renaissance humanist, embodied the often-coined mantra ad fontes — an ongoing call to consistently return to the sources, to return to the Scriptures and to faithfully study, read, and preach them. Yet on the other hand, one also reads of the lengths Zwingli went to bring the reform he envisioned. Such a vision led him to stand idly by as his former friend —Felix Manz —was drowned for his Anabaptist beliefs. Zwingli wanted reform, but he wanted it on his terms.

It may be tempting to think that the year 1517 — when Luther famously wrote his Ninety-five Thesis — brought about the Reformation and hence clearly demarcated a unified Protestantism from Roman Catholicism. It may be tempting to think this way, but it is not accurate.
The Reformation was far more complicated. For one, the first Reformers were not actually looking to break away from the Catholic Church, but to reform it. It would only be many years later that such reform was unrealized, and a subsequent break ensued. Secondly, the Reformation was bigger than Luther and Wittenberg, Germany — others across Europe were looking to bring reform independent from Luther’s leadership and theology. The Reformers did not always see eye to eye, and this led to different movements and hostility between these movements. One contemporary of Luther who had his own vision of reform was Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and he wanted to see this vision take shape in Zurich, Switzerland.
In Stephen Brett Eccher’s recent book, Zwingli the Pastor: A Life in Conflict, Eccher looks to add to the scholarship on Zwingli studies, an influential and important first-generation Reformer. Eccher is clear to state that this book “is not a traditional biography” but a study of Zwingli’s ministry as a pastor in Zurich, with attention given to “how conflict shaped and informed his pastorate, while also providing the context for his developing theology” (p. 4).
Following a biographical sketch in the introduction, the book is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is on Zwingli the preacher. Eccher highlights the central place of the Scriptures in Zwingli’s reform work and his commitment to preach lectio continua (through books of the Bible) rather than according to the liturgical calendar. This continual, faithful preaching of Scripture was central to Zwingli’s ministry. As Eccher succinctly put it, “Gospel seeds sown produced Reformation fruit” (p. 36).
Chapter two is on the changes Zwingli made to the worship practices more generally. Here one reads of Zwingli slowly and progressively looking to bring reform as he moved the church away from Catholicism and toward the Reformed faith. This change was not something that happened overnight. One significant shift came about through Zwingli’s iconoclasm. Zwingli worked with the Council as the “shared commitment to remove images was to be carried out in an orderly manner” (p. 67). Another thing of note is that, by 1525, Zwingli stopped using public singing.
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