Tag Archives: god

The Religious Nature of Politics


Another election year is upon us, and campaign ads pervade the airwaves like toxic fumes. I dread the stage of the political cycle when propaganda reaches peak levels of slander. I can’t even enjoy a football game in peace without being inundated with ads. No one looks forward to post-election tranquility more than I do. I can only hope peace prevails when the dust settles.

I want to point out a significant truth that I have come to over the years as a once politically disengaged Christian. My disdain for politics is longstanding and fervent. It is ugly, riddled with lies, half-truths, deception, power, and pride. I find it overwhelming to sift through all the double talk. I refused to sully myself in its muck and mire. But that position has turned out to be wrongheaded and harmful. When Christians collectively abdicate their civil duty to help determine the direction of community, state, and national discourse they, by default, are allowing other parties, influenced by humanistic philosophies and ideologies, to choose the way forward.

To put things bluntly, a nation built on Christian foundations and populated mostly by professing Christians cannot allow a pagan worldview to dominate our politics. A Christian worldview should shape our ethics, laws, and all civil affairs.

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Requiem


Kamber Shenae Doback-Lucas

Job’s friends had the best of intentions when they sat down with him in the ash pile remains of the life he had built for himself. Job mourned the loss of his vast wealth and personal health, but most of all he mourned the loss of his seven sons and three daughters. See, God permitted Satan to afflict Job and take away all that he cared about. Satan sought to turn his soul away from the God he adored. In the end, Satan’s challenge ended in failure. Job’s heart remained steadfast. But this does not mean Job did not suffer greatly – he did: He endured doubts and anguish. He had many burning questions, but no answers. He questioned his own integrity. He lost the will to live. His friends were no help at all. In fact, they blamed Job for his miseries, claiming God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. And since Job had experienced unprecedented disaster on every side, they could only conclude he had sinned greatly and should repent for his wicked heart. However, we are told in the opening verse of the book that Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Later in the story, another friend, younger in years, but more accomplished in wisdom joined the conversation. He rebuked Job’s three friends and explained how God sometimes uses human suffering to purify and teach us things in a way that no other means will suffice. He counseled that it is our duty to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God in those moments.

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Cultures Abhor a Spiritual Vacuum


Babylon had rejected God and his Word. A culture that rejects God on a large scale loses his divine protection against evil. It is like the principle of diffusion that everybody was taught in physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. We are spiritual beings, and we also cannot stand a vacuum. Cultures have a certain spirituality, be it a good one or a bad one. Cultures cannot stand a spiritual vacuum. When you have the Holy Spirit, he fills the vacuum and prevents a great deal of demonic activity and self-destructive actions among the people. Where the Holy Spirit is strong in a culture, even unbelievers are blessed. They are not saved, but they are kept from many forms of pollution. But when a culture turns its back on God, the Holy Spirit, to some degree, is withdrawn, leaving a vacuum. Guess who rushes in to fill it? The evil one and those fallen created beings, former angels, who now are demons. Thus, Babylon, an important, powerful culture that has rejected the God of the Bible, does not realize how far the demonic realm has taken charge of its activities.

Douglas F. Kelly, Revelation, A Mentor Expository Commentary (Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2012), 336.

When it comes to the recent controversial topic of Christian Nationalism and what type of government Christians should strive to establish, we read here Douglas Kelly’s conviction that no neutrality can exist when it comes to a philosophy of government. A culture must have convictions and those convictions will inform government policy. What kind of laws should a country full of Christians have? A secular one? Secularism is not neutral. It denies objective reality by rejecting the existence (or at least the involvement) of a divine being working in the affairs of this world. A nation whose God is the Lord will be blessed. A nation built upon Satan’s sand will decay and collapse in due time.

What is the Distinction between Fatalism and Predestination?


Predestination is the dirty fourteen-letter word of modern evangelicalism. It is the that-which-must-not-be-named doctrine of the majority who despise it. It is ever only breathed in whispers by those who are convinced of its biblical foundation, lest they roil the placid waters of Lake Kumbaya. It doesn’t need to be this way. We can have a lucid conversation on the matter without a donnybrook breaking out in the church parlor. Perhaps much of the consternation over the concept that God elects a people unto Himself prior even to creating the dust that the first person is formed from comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.

So often I hear a froth-mouthed opponent of the doctrine say (between spurts of saliva) something like this:

If God predestinates our salvation then nothing we do matters. We’re all just muppets churning out episode after episode of the only show on TV, written, produced, and directed by the Great Jim Henson in the Sky.

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