Pondering our Times

When politics are your main bedfellows, you will be irrationally exuberant or depressed every four years. God has given us a better path, one that is less traveled, but all the more comfortable in its narrowness. We all hope for a better world and vote our consciences every four years for that world, but some of us place too much hope in one side or the other. 

This election is peculiar to me, for I have met people who I would categorize as being too much on both sides. Let me remind you that we are to look to the Lord for our salvation, and that he himself has told us that “neither is there salvation in any other”. 

We forget so easily that He is the one in control of this world, and that all is unfolding just as it should. It does not mean that everything in this world is working for the best—it definitely does mean that God is in overall control, and that we need to trust Him even when our favorites are not elected.

We see so little of what is going on, and we often make mistakes when we look at that “little” and try to make bigger decisions. I am convinced that we would, if God allowed, vote ourselves into the Hell of our choice. We have no idea of how things are going to work out—except that we are supposed to trust in Him to work all things out.

If Christ were here today, living among us, would he be a liberal or a conservative? The answer should be so obvious to you as to cause scoffing, but surprisingly we often forget. He will one day rule correctly, and we will have an enduring peace on earth along with a new heaven and earth to look forward to.

In that day, there will be no conservatives, and no liberals. There will only be followers of Christ. I daresay my two friends, caught up in both ends of the political spectrum, will be united in Christ. Let us then follow the admonition, “forgetting those things which are behind, and pressing onward to those things which are before”.

If the words of our Lord are at all to be believed who won or lost will not matter much in eternity, but how you and I act toward each other will matter much. That is what we will appear before Christ to show. Let us therefore be found busy, loving one another. Perhaps today?

The Dominos Continue (Part Two)

 Wise wags have long observed that when we live together, there is no such thing as a private action. When someone decides something small like not brushing his teeth, the impact can be disparate and ring throughout the day. What I am thinking about can certainly be tied in with that idea- that nothing we do as individuals only affects individuals. I suspect many Americans are like me—and want fiercely their own independence, regardless of how it affects others. It is a hard lesson of life that indeed no man is an island unto himself.

Being older has changed my perspective; I would say has enlarged my perspective. I am able to look back over the decades and see connections to things that are not usually observed. In part one of the dominos, I was able to link the dirty rotten hippies, and the revival that happened as many found Christ, to the election of a president, who also won the cold war against Russia. All dominos in a row, if you learn to observe. And part of growing older is learning to observe. 

I would like to try to develop the string of dominos a bit further. Reagan brought in a breath of fresh air to our culture. He proclaimed it was morning in America all over again, something most of us were willing to suspend our skepticism about. But after Reagan, we had no more fresh air, and a new string of dominos has started to fall, not leading to good things.

Look at the string of presidents since Reagan and begin to get a feel for how the dominos are falling today.  From Bush to Trump, it has been quite a fall. Clinton taught us that personal behavior of a president has nothing whatsoever to do with his leadership, and Americans bought that false philosophy. Americans themselves, perhaps because they have that fierce spirit of independence that I wrote about myself experiencing in the opening paragraph, began denying others the right to correct their aberrant behavior, and morals began to suffer. 

Looking at the last three presidents and comparing them to our Founding Fathers should be a sobering exercise. In my mind, that is how they earned their appellation: the Three Stooges. I dubbed them Barry, Bump, and Not-so-Curly Joe.  Barry, our first black president was heralded to bring peace between Blacks and Whites. Not so much. Instead, his time in office stirred up racial animosities to new heights, and the dominos are now continuing to fall in new directions, boding ill effects for decades. Bump is a good nickname for Trump as we ride through history. I imagine that he is indeed a “bump” that we hit as we are careening down the highway of life. Biden presided over a country which no longer knew the difference between a man and a woman but proclaimed strongly that no one else could either.

I could go on and on, but the trail left is clear, if you will just look at it. In no way, in no particular, can you find a row of dominos leading to listening to God and following him. That apparently was over after Reagan, and we see hardly a whisper of it since then. Perhaps 9/11 brought back brief memories of who we were, but the memories did not linger. So where do the domino rows go?

And remember, it is not just the presidents. Rather, since we have a democratic republic, we choose our leaders. And in choosing, we also choose our direction. I can clearly see a direction, and that direction is only away from God.

What a mess that makes for Christians! Christians see the need for loving, but confuse the loving part with acceptance of sin. The acceptance, like a rank camcer grows until it totally poisons the Christian’s testimony that he so nobly tried to give. We have many groups of unfortunate Christian souls living in disobedience today, suppressing the very word of God in their effort to live an “enlightened” life. Yet, they discern not that the row of dominos they have put themselves in only falls away from the very God they love.

What is the outcome of dominos only falling in rows going away from God? In history, the lesson is sharp. Nations forgetting God are disciplined, and sometimes even extinguished. In times like these, we would do well to fall on our knees in abject repentance. Too often, I see people snarling their disobedience to God, pretending that he is not even there.

Today, we are rapidly moving toward a society which is rejecting Israel, neglecting the promise of God made so many years ago to Abraham. “I will bless those who bless thee, and I will curse those who curse thee.” Any student of history would quickly see mistreatment of Israel has caused this cursing over and again. Today, one party is nearly paralyzed in being able to give support to Israel. If the hatred continues to grow, the opposition to Isreal will increase, and with it will come the judgment of God.

There remains but one remedy, repentance. But it looks unlikely that the nation will go there, and so the domino rows will continue to fall further and further away from the very God who blessed us in the first place. So democracy dies? So dies the biggest Christian witness in the world?