Top 50 Stories on The Aquila Report for 2023: 41-50
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50.
In 2023 The Aquila Report (TAR) posted over 3,000 stories. At the end of each year we feature the top 50 stories that were read.
TAR posts 8 new stories each day, on a variety of subjects – all of which we trust are of interest to our readers. As a web magazine TAR is an aggregator of news and information that we believe will provide articles that will inform the church of current trends and movements within the church and culture.
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50:
In my opinion, the BCO is not the main issue. The issue is not simply women in the pulpit, nor the sexual mutilation of children, nor even the legitimacy of homosexuality (in some form or another). The issue is transgenderism. The issue is men and women giving in to sinful impulses that cross the lines that God drew in creation when he created male and female and assigned them their roles in the world he created.
Sin is sin, on the right or the left. Kinism is just as evil as critical race theory. So Kinists are not our allies. They’re just as opposed to Biblical views on race as critical race theorists.
For Southern Baptists, adopting a revised and expanded version of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith was not an act of division but a means of ensuring unity. As Mullins explained, he believed it would “clarify the atmosphere and remove the causes of misunderstanding, friction, and apprehension.” The differences between Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions over the past 100 years can be explained many ways—but they cannot be explained apart from the question of confessionalism and the need for doctrinal fidelity.
Gretchen Harrington, 8-years-old, disappeared on Aug. 15, 1975, while on a walk from her Marple Township home to a Bible school less than a mile away. Stollsteimer said that, at that time, Zandstra served as a reverend at Trinity Christian Reformed Church, one of two churches that Harrington regularly attended. As she walked to Bible camp alone, Zandstra pulled alongside her in a vehicle and offered her a ride, Stollsteimer said.
Young seminarians are being steeped—in seminary—in an expressive individualism that is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ and that will, if it’s not nipped right in the bud, lead actual people into hell.
Fast forward to 2020; there’s no need to recap everything but you’ve got Covid, BLM, mask and vaccine mandates, etc – you remember, you were there. Anyway, here we have a key moment in time when the practical instructions of the Bible, God’s laws, become absolutely essential to how the church should respond. Startled and harassed bodies of believers across the world, under pressure to conform on all sides, actually needed to know what to do. They needed to know this in detail, with clarity and with conviction. And because of the lack of attention paid to God’s law, this gospel-centered movement didn’t have a great answer.
It is a most remarkable providence; if one reads the protest against Presbytery’s action to preserve the church plant, the signers represent the elders from Covenant Presbytery’s wealthiest and most influential churches and committees. Yet the speech of a largely unknown, retired former Arkansas church planter was powerfully used by God to change the course of the debate, save the little church plant from dissolution, and preserve a witness for Himself in Jonesboro.
It’s been commonly said that we don’t choose the people who sit next to us in the pew, but God does. Love requires, in response to the gospel, that we invest in the lives of those who are often most difficult and unattractive to us. It’s one of the saddest things to witness someone throw away their entire local church family for selfish reasons. Is our love sincere and absent of hypocrisy? This is an important question when it comes to church membership.
If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.
Another critical issue was related to the use of the term “pastor” as being reserved for ordained teaching elders. It seems that the modern evangelical church tends to label everyone contributing service to the Lord’s work as pastor. From nonordained youth “pastors” to nonordained music “pastors,” it has become a very generic term. This has contributed to much confusion in the wider church.
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A Pure Church
Worship in this life that is shaped by our covenant relationship with God through the gospel, the spiritual realities of heavenly worship, sanctifies us into a pure church who live in light of that relationship as we wait for our blessed hope. By reenacting what we are in Christ, Christian worshipers become what we are.
Though during this present age kingdom and cultus (God’s worshiping community) are separated, God intends one day to join them together under the rule of his Anointed One. The question for us is, of course, where we currently fit in this plan of God for a holy theocracy, a perfect union of kingdom and cultus under the kingly rule and priestly ministry of the Second Adam.
The book of Hebrews addresses both kingdom and cultus in this present age. First, the author quotes God’s declaration in Psalm 8 that he intends for man to exercise regal dominion over all the earth; however, “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb 2:8). The First Adam failed, and still all things are not yet in subjection to the son of man. But, “because of the suffering of death,” Jesus is “crowned with glory and honor” (Heb 2:9)—he has earned the right to rule; Christ is, as Psalm 110 states, presently seated at the Father’s right hand until the Father makes his enemies his footstool. The perfect eternal kingdom has been promised and already ensured, but it is not yet a consummated reality. Christ sovereignly rules over all creation as the Son of God, and Christ presently rules over his redeemed people, but the consummation of his rule over all things on earth as the Son of Man will happen when he comes again, when “the kingdom of this world”—that is, the common grace kingdom—“will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev 11:15).
In other words, if we want to look to the Old Testament for an analogy to our present situation as Christians in this age, we are more like the sojourning patriarchs and the exiled Hebrews than either the Edenic or Mosaic holy theocracies. And, of course, this is exactly how the New Testament portrays us. Peter specifically calls us “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet 2:11). “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul tells us (Phil 3:20); we are “citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19). Like Abraham on his pilgrimage or Daniel in Babylon, Christians participate in the common grace aspects of the earthly kingdoms in which we dwell, but we “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb 11:16); we long for the heavenly Jerusalem above our highest joy (Ps 137:6). And that heavenly Jerusalem will one day descend to the earth, uniting kingdom and cultus as was God’s intention from the beginning.
Yet Hebrews also reveals to us the nature of our worship in this age as well. The author proclaims at the end of chapter 12,
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 12:22–24)
This is the heavenly palace/temple Isaiah and John envisioned, the place where God himself sits enthroned, surrounded by heavenly beings.” To this higher kingdom where God reigns Christian worshipers come to the reality, to the true worship of heaven itself. Paul describes this reality for Christians in Ephesians 2:6 when he states that God has “raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Christ is seated in heaven as the king/priest, and since we are in him by faith, we are with him there. And he tells us how just a few verses later in Ephesians 2:18: “For through [Christ] we . . . have access in one Spirit to the Father.” We have access to the Father because in one Spirit through Christ, we are actually there, in the presence of God in heaven.
Pure Worship
This biblical understanding situates us in this present age as dual citizens. As members of the human race we are citizens of common grace earthly kingdoms, and so we participate as such. But ultimately we are a called out cultic community with “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for [us], who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet 1:4–5). Consequently, as Peter goes on to say, “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct. . . . Conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet 1:15, 17–18).
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Secularism Be Damned
In a culture that is currently engaged in a futile effort to push God to the periphery of public consciousness, it’s important for Christians to recover a sense of biblical reality. Despite what our unbelieving world would tell us, neutrality is a myth. Every human action — from making love to drawing up the building specs of an oatmeal factory — is done in service to something. Either it is done for the glory of God or for the glory of self.
I keep your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before you. (Psalm 119:168)
One of the noteworthy characteristics of the wicked in Scripture is that they regard the living God as a distant and negligible reality. If the grand stage of human life is a play, God, for them, is a mere background character. A silhouette. A barely discernible figure tucked away on stage right, who, if He has any part to play in this theatre of existence, probably only exists to highlight the main actors. That God could be anything more — like, say…the transcendent Creator-King to whom all worship, obedience, love, and devotion is owed — never comes into their minds. They are too preoccupied with themselves: plotting trouble on their beds and enjoying the hollow pleasures of self-flattery (Ps. 36:1–4).
The righteous, by contrast, take an entirely different approach to reality. For them, the old hymn “This is My Father’s World” plays on repeat. And as they use those remarkable beauty receptacles otherwise known as “eyes” to look out upon “rocks and trees and skies and seas,” the righteous don’t simply see an endless landscape to be manipulated for their pleasure. Rather, they see the manifold wonders their Father’s hands have wrought and are moved to love and obedience: “I keep your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before you” (Ps. 119:168).
This, then, is the crucial distinction between the righteous and the wicked.
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On Ending Well: An Open Letter to a Pastor
To my pastors, and pastors everywhere: Thank you. Thank you for continually encouraging us to keep running this race, pressing us to run better and faster. Thank you for reminding us that we’re almost there- that we can end well. What you do really does make a difference.
It was desperation that made me do it.
My ears perked up when your weekly message ended with the familiar reminder that the pastors are available to meet with people experiencing various issues in their spiritual walk.
A troubled relationship with one person had created ripples of conflict in other areas of my life and I had found myself in what I thought was an inescapable and intolerable situation. I was certain I was right, but that provided no resolution to the conflict in which I was engulfed.
The multiple facets to my situation were like hundreds of strands in a knot with which I wrestled inwardly day and night. I could not see another way and I was emotionally distraught. I don’t like to ask for help, but I had come to the end of my own resources. I emailed you for a recommendation to meet with someone in our church counseling ministry, but you and your wife offered to meet with me instead.
I’m not sure what I was expecting but I know I did not expect that what I learned in our meetings would eventually alter the curve of my Christian walk forever. I know I did not expect the level of compassion that you both showed me. So often we avoid asking for help because we don’t want to dispel the church myth that we have it all worked out, and appear weekly with shiny, happy smiles. I’m utterly grateful for that compassion. When you began to slowly unravel my knot in the light of scripture, and I saw that my problem was deeper than the other person, your compassion made the hard admission of my failings so much easier.
When it would have been possible to get involved in the details of my conflict, you kept the focus on God’s Word, the Bible. It was with skill that you applied those ancient Words to my wound. I remember you telling me that no matter how wrong I thought someone else was or how badly I felt I had been treated, I was still answerable to God for my own behavior. Well of course I knew it at some superficial level, but that day it got my attention and I realized that my failure to live by that very concept was probably keeping me from growing spiritually. Although I hadn’t realized it before, I think I (and many others) believed that some poor behavior is justifiable. Some wrong reactions are admissible. But Jesus didn’t add an “except when” to the charge to love one’s enemies. It became clear that if I was going to go on saying that I believe in God, I was going to have to humble myself and do what He said. Even the hard things. The cost of which, of course, was my own pride and comfort.
As a result of our meetings, the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps Jesus’ most famous words, took on new life. And I have to tell you, I felt a fair amount of dismay when I measured my behavior against those hard words. “Love your enemy.” “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” “Pray for those who persecute you.” “Forgive us… as we have forgiven others.” “Lay up treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” “Judge not, that you be not judged.” “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” “The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
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