When elections unsettle (know this)
Ask any Israelite if it mattered which king was put in. Ask them how they suffered under bad kings and prospered under good ones. Ask them about life under Ahab versus life under David. I think they’d say that it mattered.
Fast forward to 2012 and the just-concluded election. There’s a heap that I don’t know. But there’s a lot that I do, and it’s way bigger and more important than what I don’t. Here, in no particular order, are my scattered thoughts on God, politics and what just happened.
1. God is on the throne. This is an actual, literal truth. He hasn’t moved. He’s not asleep. He still controls.
2. Jesus wasn’t a Republican. He wasn’t a Democrat. Or independent or moderate or liberal or conservative. He was the Son of God, the Word, the Way, the Truth and the Life. He still is. My life, my choices, my thoughts, and decisions are guided by His.
3. No man (or woman) can rise to power but what He allows. “He removes kings and sets up kings,” Daniel 2:21. Though I cannot see with human eyes what God is up to, I know this–He knows what He’s doing, and He has a plan.
4. It is always dangerous–always–to put your trust in human flesh. In fact, Jeremiah said it bold, “Cursed (he didn’t hold back) is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord.” Therefore, I will trust in the Lord, and my heart will not turn away.
5. For those who tend to doomsday scenarios involving apocalyptic events with widespread persecution and suffering, who cry “end times” and who think that that day is now, there’s this: no one knows. It could be. But it may not. God’s Word says that these things will come. Christians will suffer. Life will get hard. People will die. For now, I choose to live. To live, to fight, to praise, to trust, to occupy, for one day He will return. Until then, I will live.
6. No matter how many freedoms are taken away. No matter what regulations are put in place, there are some things I may always do. “Blessed is the man (and woman) who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in Him. He (or she) will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought, and it never fails to bear fruit.”
That, my friends, is what I can still do. It’s what I can still be, and it’s how I can still live, no matter who is (or isn’t) elected.
Amen.