By now all those who have been following the Federal Vision situation in the PCA will have heard that the General Assembly of the PCA approved the report by the study committee. That was not what we were praying for, and so I thought I needed to make just a couple of brief comments here.
First, I would encourage everyone associated with the FV to take care that they not speak publicly about this out of frustration, exasperation, fear or anger. The situation will still be here in a couple days, and calm heads will be better at figuring out what to do then than hot heads will be now. As I sometimes tell people in counseling situations, there is no situation so bad but that you can’t make it worse.
Second, I think it would be spiritually healthy for us on our side of the line to ask for God’s particular blessing to fall on some of the men who were instrumental in getting this report accepted — R.C. Sproul, Lig Duncan, et al. As my father has taught me, God requires us to love our neighbors, our wives, all men, and our enemies. The chances are excellent that anyone we can think of is covered by at least one of those categories. If Christ can tell us to bless those who despitefully use us, then how much more should we be able to see our way to bless brothers in Christ who thought they were doing nothing more than affirming sola fide?
And last, Jesus the Lord is not only sovereign over the details of each of our individual lives, He is also sovereign over the course of all history. He is the Head of the Church, and so this includes church history, which in its turn includes denominational histories. If we are His servants, and we are, then we can trust Him with what He is doing here. Someone once said that the advancement of the kingdom of God is a long series of spectacular victories cleverly disguised as disasters. In our local church, here at Christ Church, when I became a paedobaptist in the early nineties, some of the things that happened in that mess were among the most difficult events of my life. But looking back at them, I can see now that I did not have the eyes to see exactly how much God was blessing our congregation. In other words, the greatest trials were the greatest blessings. Gold is heavy, and hard to carry. This is God’s way, and He loves to do it this way. We do not know what the future holds, as the hymn says, but we know who holds the future.