Come Down, Lord!

  The Church of God in Aylmer has been made ‘famous’ by Henry Hildebrant.  Because of their recent stand for freedom and for the right of churches to gather, Henry and his congregation have become well known and even admired.  It is no secret that they are actively pursuing a wider audience and seeking a greater influence in the churches and communities of the province.   My concern is that many in the Church look to them as something like noble freedom fighters.  Still others - who ordinarily wouldn’t - have begun attending their church; and even some faithful pastors are making common cause with them because they have defied the government’s interference with the churches.  Initially I was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt (as I wrote previously ). I wanted to treat them, at very least, as co-belligerents. I now believe this was a grave mistake.  A little research reveals that they are not another Christian church or denomination.  Rather, they are a wicked cult.  I w

  In a recent series of Facebook posts Gerhard Visscher (former professor at the Canadian Reformed seminary in Hamilton) offered a critique of James Coates’ recent sermon on Romans 13.  Visscher worries that Coates’ sermon is “causing confusion” in their church community.  I assume he means the Canadian Reformed churches.  He writes, “I am not posting the sermon itself here because I do not wish to promote its content, which I find wanting… please be careful how you share it.”   Those are strong words.  Not “be a Berean and search the Scriptures to see if these things are so” not “here’s how the passage should be understood” but “be careful how you share it” and don’t listen to it yourself.     I won’t attempt here to respond to all that Visscher wrote.   Instead, I would like to address a couple significant problems with Visccher’s position as he articulated it.   First , he claims that it is an exaggeration to say that “the government forbids worship.”  Visccher insists that actual

* For part one of this two part series go here . They had an argument I had initially thought my position vastly superior.  Wasn’t I giving seven whole days to God?[1]  Many of us have mistakenly assumed that in the Old Testament God’s people were required to worship Him just one day a week, whereas in the New every day is His.   Given these choices, it is easy to see why I thought my position was the superior one.  But these men were giving seven days to Him with a measure of commitment and dedication that shamed my own, and as I read their writings I learned that they were following the pattern of the Old Testament.  It was there that God first said, “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might (Deuteronomy 6.5).”  The New Testament cannot reach any higher than that.  There (in the New Testament), certainly, the administration of the covenant of grace is more full, more plain and marked by more plentiful effusions of the H