
Part 1: Personal | Part 2: Political | Part 3: Panic
I can’t discuss any life application—indeed, any topic at all—without basing my thinking on Scripture. I’ve studied the Scripture professionally all my adult life, and I am more convinced than ever that that was a good choice, informed even in my many ignorant times by the kind providence of God. I’ve written about my reasons for seeing the Scripture as more than an ancient book written by well-meaning but primitive people that has received outsized attention throughout cultural history, so I won’t repeat them here; but they inform all my thinking.
I have a couple of bases in biblical theology for the reticence I’ve been advocating. Maybe two posts can cover them.
The first theological basis is far broader than just politics or social upheaval; it covers literally everything in this world, and everywhere else, throughout all time and forever.
God is in charge.
I have social media connections, whom I care for, who disagree profoundly with that statement. But I’ve never seen them refute it.
Oh, they’ll complain about it—“If there’s a God, why did he …”—but logically that’s not a refutation; it’s just an assertion that they disagree with him.
I’m a lot older than most of them are, and with time I’ve come to recognize the foolish arrogance of a “lifted from the no of all nothing, human merely being” thinking that his disagreement with the Creator of heaven and earth, the covenant-keeping God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin, yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Ex 34.6-7)—whew—is in some way the basis for argument, application, or wisdom in life.
God is in charge.
Applying that principle to the current topic is fairly straightforward.
First, history makes sense; it’s not a random sequence of events, but the outworking of a plan that leads to a sensible, rational conclusion—and that plan is from the mind of a great and good God.
Now, that fact raises all kinds of questions. Why does God include in his plan things that make people miserable, that harm them in significant ways? I don’t know the answer to that, and neither does anybody else. But I do know God, and I have decades of experience, in both the lab and the field, that he is in fact great and good. And I expect that a great God, who is by definition infinite, will occasionally (!) go beyond the horizon of my understanding. When he does that, I trust him.
I’ve never been disappointed.
It should be said, of course, that we should do what we can to ease suffering. We ought to feed the hungry; we ought to clothe the needy; we ought to shelter the homeless. There are many ways to do that, including any number of organizations that have been doing those things long enough to have some expertise in the field, and whom we ought to support.
(I’ll note as an aside that human nature these days is to assume that the government should be that default organization—and it’s precisely that kind of thinking that has gotten us into the unsustainable economic crisis we’re in now. The current administration claims to have cut $150 billion in spending—whether they actually have or not, I don’t know—but the naked truth is that the spending cuts are going to have to be an order of magnitude larger than that if the nation is going to be on a sustainable footing.)
So. There is a God in heaven, who raises up kings and sets them down again, and who is so much greater than evil that he uses the greatest evil in all the world to accomplish his good plans (see “Crucifixion”). He knows infinitely better than I do, and I trust him.
There’s a second theological basis for my reticence. More on that next time.
Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash