ELECTION FERVOR MOUNTING? AVOID THE CONSTANTINIAN HOPE!
ELECTION FERVOR MOUNTING? AVOID THE CONSTANTINIAN HOPE!
This coming mid-term election seems to be one of the most important in the history of this nation. I have lived through fifteen national and thirty mid-term elections, and have never known one whose outcome portends such dramatic results, depending upon which party wins big. If the Democrats win big, the progressive world view may take over the nations institutions irreversibly. If the Republicans win, this “brave new world” drift might just be halted, perhaps even reversed.
I cannot imagine that there are very many voters who are passionate about the Scriptures who will vote for the Democratic party. Which means that the Republican candidates will have the most passionate prayers being offered for them. We want God to use His muscle to defend the party that takes the American Constitution most seriously and champions “traditional values,” right? That is certainly a valid wish and I have the right to ask God to choose the movement that is clearly the most friendly to Biblical values, no?
The trouble with this line of reasoning is that the Creator and Master and Judge of the universe and its inhabitants does not think that way. He does not bend to the will of the groups that are relatively less offensive to Him when compared to the more offensive groups. We are supposed to yield to HIS standards, not Him to ours.
HE sets the behavioral terms, the moral values, along with the number and quality of choices that distinguish “His people” from ALL the other people (i.e., what He calls “the world”). His term for those “terms” is “covenant.” His sent His Son to restore and establish His authority as the uncontested benevolent dictatorial Owner of the entire universe: “ALL authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). He is SO much more than an individual’s savior. And it is those who surrender their loyalty, affection and obedience to the authority of Jesus who are admitted into His “chosen generation, royal priesthood, holy nation, His own special people” (1 Peter 2:9). He does not accept any other people or nation to be His “people,” to listen to or defend. To accept half, some, or most of His authority (a.k.a., teachings, commands or promises) does not change your status in His eyes. Whether as an individual or as a nation, you must enter into His covenanted friendship like the Germans and Japanese were required to do in order to quit being the “enemies” of the Allies in 1945: “UNCONDITIONAL surrender.” Even though you cannot immediately live in that unconditionally surrendered way, He knows whether you heart is determined to attain that seemingly impossible goal: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). No matter what adulterated Christianity may lead you to believe – about just HOW overjoyed your Creator has always been to count you as His friend, and loving you just as you ALREADY are – what He has actually REVEALED is that until you FUNCTIONALLY surrender your autonomy to His Son and accept His uncontested authority over you, you were and are His ENEMY (Romans 5:10, 11:28). Until the German or Japanese soldier laid down his rifle, he was an enemy! CONSIDERING yourself to be “born again” does not get you off that hook either!
The only individual or nation or culture that the fear-inspiring Father of Jesus counts as a non-enemy is the one that His holy apostle Peter described above. A nation supposedly established upon “Judeo-Christian” values still is, and always was, just another version of “this world” and was therefore always under the persuasive authority of the “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
GOD’S nation, as described by Peter, is the same society that Jesus called “My CHURCH” (Matthew 16:18). That is the ONLY “nation” which can expect to receive the same supernatural treatment that He gave to His own Son and apostles: great strengthening, great protection and great suffering, as and when HE chooses to be appropriate. Covenanted followers of Jesus will not get seduced into friendship with anything that fits into God’s category of “this world”: “Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore WANTS to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, ‘The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously’?” (James 4:4-5).
I am convinced that America has actually been an unwitting example of the most cunning of DECEPTIONS foisted upon the naïve and half-hearted citizens of Christendom’s Christianity. The kind of wonderful dreams that the United States inspires among supposedly Bible-believing Christians is in fact a repetition of what happened way back in the fourth century. After a series of brutal and bloody attacks by ungodly people who were under Satan’s inspiration, along came the only man who represented the ULTIMATE form of authority: the Roman emperor, Constantine. What Satan had not been able to obtain by outright hostility He acquired by the offer of friendship: the trust, admiration, and loyalty of God’s covenanted people. How could you say “No!” to someone who made you legally free from suffering, restored your property, paid your clergy salaries, gave you your own Christian court system to overrule any sentence imposed by the secular court, and poured millions of dollars into your “church building funds?!” In our current political battle, most conservative, “Bible-believing,” ‘born-again” people have largely been dragged back seventeen centuries for a repetition of that famous proverb of the philosopher Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I don’t think Constantine was at fault in offering his friendship: I believe he just thought the way a friendly pagan thinks, “I think I need the help of you Christians, so I will give you my help.” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were simply another version of Constantine: well-meaning unbelievers who might well have IMAGINED that they were Christians.
So, do not expect God to use His muscle to defeat those godless and defiant Democrats in order that He may restore a new version of that Davidic “man of my own heart,” to wit, Donald Trump [I trust you realize that WAS “tongue-in-cheek”]. I personally plan to vote Republican, and hope Trump will fight vigorously against what God considers a perversion of His commands. But what Trump might restore will not be something that prevents Satan from accomplishing his goals, nor will it be required for God to accomplish HIS. For all I know, the movement that Trump would energize might precipitate the emergence of the prophesied Antichrist! American is getting today what the American people – conservative and progressive alike – have enabled Satan to create.
But I have read the last chapter of God’s History Book, and I know Whose will gets eternally established! AMEN?
