Beloved,
My parents’ pastor, Dane Ortlund, taught a Sunday school class last week titled “Biblical Wisdom in a Volatile Election Cycle.” The whole of the lesson was excellent, but I wanted to share with you the various applications of biblical texts he provided (following the order of the canon) for your prayerful meditation in these crazy days. I encourage you to look up each of these texts and to consider the points Pastor Dane draws out in light of them (you could easily do it in ten minutes).
Psalm 1:1-3
The point: God’s Word does not say “his delight is in [insert your go-to news outlet/political talking head/cultural podcast], and on this [news outlet/talking head/podcast] he meditates day and night.” We Christians want to be informed as to what is happening in the civil and political sphere, and that is right and good. But if we are hooking up at __________ media outlet for an hour or two each evening while our Bible largely collects dust, we will not be “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit.” We will be shallow, agitated, and increasingly planting our functional hopes in this world rather than the next. If our primary voice is that media outlet rather than Scripture–to us the language of Romans 12–we will “be conformed to the pattern of this world” rather than being “transformed by the renewing or our minds.”
Psalm 2:1-6
The point: God is running the world. Every political leader is infinitely puny next to him. Jesus is King of kings–and of presidents and prime ministers. Calm down.
Proverbs 14:34
The point: the downward moral slide of America in recent decades is a tragedy and a reproach. We lament it. And we pray and work against it.
Proverbs 16:32
The point: we are immersed in a sea of anger. And the world wants us to join them in their rage. The wise man will not allow themselves to be drawn into slavery to anger.
Matthew 5:9
The point: the making of peace, the calming of ire, the easing of strife, envelops us in divine blessing and reflects our statues as sons of God, the divine peace-maker.
John 16:33
The point: the world will always be prickly, futility-drenched, troublesome. This is nothing new. And Jesus is bigger than all this tired world’s troubles. He has already conquered it. The chaos of this world is the final death throes of a mortally wounded dying dragon.
Acts 5:29
The point: our basic loyalty is to God and His Word. That overrides everything. We will seek to obey our civil authorities, but not when they encourage immorality.
Romans 13:1
The point: while we obey God above men, we do obey men. God has instituted every civil authority. God is not the God only of Christian leaders and Christian spheres. He is ruling this entire world. As the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not one square inch in this world over which Jesus does not say, ‘Mine!'”
Romans 14:19
The point: when we disagree within the church over matters that are not “of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3), we self-consciously do all we can to pursue peace and the edification of the other.
Philippians 3:20
The point: we belong to another land. Heaven is not only our future place, but our present identity. We breathe accordingly. We live with a posture of looking up.
1 Timothy 2:1-2
The point: our primary task as citizens of the state is to pray for all our civil authorities with the goal of the citizenry living an undisturbed and peaceful life, pursuing godliness.
1 Peter 2:11
The point: this strife-factory of a world, so acutely painful to each one of us, is a foreign land. We therefore hold it with a certain looseness, almost a certain levity. We don’t belong here. Nothing in this world can finally hurt us or lessen us.
1 Peter 2:13-17
The point: honor and respect your civil authorities, and live an exemplary life that reflects your more basic loyalty to Jesus Christ.
Revelation 22:12
The point: one day soon, a Galilean carpenter with scars on his wrists and fire in his eyes is going to step down from heaven and judge the world, rescue the saints, risen this sick world clean, and establish heaven upon earth. It may be tomorrow.
There are, of course, so many other texts we could add to this list (one thinks of many of the passages we saw in Daniel at the beginning of the year). But I leave these texts with you as a help in keeping your spiritual sanity in these politically polarizing and sincerely crazy days.
Here are Dane’s final words: “The calling of a local church is not to advise its members whom to vote for in a presidential election, unique a privilege as this is across human history. The calling of a local church is to disciple its members into being the kind of men and women who are wise saints and therefore wise civil citizens–yes, in how they vote, but more basically in how they live and the kind of person they are before a watching world.”
May it be so of us. Happy Reformation Day!
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Nick