Burning Ones

[Edit] - To be clear, I wrote this in response to Dutch Sheets’s recent open letter responding to the elections published on 6-11-08. I would recommend reading that, as I feel it is a good example of what I think might be the wrong paradigmn towards God’s sovereignity.

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us… [Behind Bilbo finding the Ring] there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by it’s maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’ - The Fellowship of the Ring: The Shadow of the Past.

I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of God’s sovereignty in the context of these elections.

Some background: For a long time I was what I will refer to as ‘pure predestination’. This means that, for lack of a better way to describe it, we are all essentially puppets under the hand of God and he is playing out a play with us, even though the puppet is not directly consciously aware of the puppeteer’s actions. This attributes absolute sovereignty to God and zero free will to us. Of course, the problem with that is that it flies in the face of experience completely and it also doesn’t seem to jive with several passages of scripture. That being said, I definitely believe that it does jive with several other passages and it is a very comforting thought. After all, the idea that ultimately you don’t have any real responsibility for anything that’s happening around you and in you (including your sin) is comforting if you attribute perfect goodness to the one who is controlling you. Ultimately, even if he were to send you to Hell, it would be OK, because the one who had made that decision is perfectly good. That’s ‘pure predestination’. Verses in support of this would be Romans 9-11, or Ephesians 1:3-10, etc.

Then, I listened to a few things and met a few people that shook that belief (and ultimately gave the Bible more of a right to speak to me about who God is and how he works) and I became what I’ll refer to as a deterministic free will (that’s an awful word). This means that, if I take into account all of the scripture that I know of, I have to account for the fact that God clearly predestines people to either be in his family (saved and having their end to be with God for eternity, ascribing him glory and majesty and beauty and power, and dwelling in his everlasting love) or out of his family (unsaved and having their end in Hell and everlasting torment and separation from God, the end we all deserve but do not all receive because of the free gift of mercy). Another way to put this would be that some people are sheep and others are goats. A sheep cannot be made into a goat, and a goat cannot be made into a sheep. It’s just a non-issue. I can’t become a monkey. I can want to be a monkey, I could in theory probably even take some weird hormones developed by our intrepid scientific community and make some inroads towards becoming one. But ultimately I am a human, and that’s really all I’ll ever be.

However, then on our side of things and from God’s perspective, things are somewhat up in the air. God has a plan, which is perfect and meant to bring about the greatest vision of his glory and the greatest good for the greatest number of people through the least amount of pain and judgement possible. How he accomplishes this is by partnering with us, who he has elevated to a level of dignity in our relationship with him that is really beyond comprehension. If we do not partner with him, his plans are delayed until he can find a person to partner with him to accomplish his purposes on the earth. Verses such as Ephesians 4:1 and Hebrews 12:1-3 and Romans 12:1-2 all seem to point to this willing in our lives to do what God has called us to do and partner with him. Of course, one of the most famous verses that proves this theory is Ezekiel 22:23-31, where God seems to lament the fact that he could find no man to stand in the gap between him and his people which caused him to have to pour out his wrath on them. Also, James 5:13-18 where we learn that Elijah was the cause (in partnership with God) of the drought and the ending of the drought that occurred during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel.

Thus, deterministic free will.

Lately, I would say that I’ve begun to swing back towards pure predestination. The reason is that I find it to be a fairly weak argument that is constantly thrown around that the reason a promise from the Lord didn’t come true is because ‘our faith failed’. In the prosperity movement, this concept rears its head in a particularly ugly way. The faith healer will pray and tell people that they’re seeing cancer, or osteoporosis, or blood clots, or heart conditions, and then they’ll tell the people that healing is available for those conditions and that if the person will only have faith, they will be healed. If it doesn’t happen, they don’t tell the person to go grapple with the fact that a sovereign god does not have to heal them nor does he promise in all circumstances to heal them nor is it the fault of Satan that they are sick in the first place but in fact the will of God nor that it may be that God wills for them to suffer that they might learn righteousness (as Jesus did) but instead that God wanted to but they were unwilling.

It’s the convenience of it that bothers me. Instead of grappling with a God who for his own reasons and glory is willing to choose to send people to hell (I find no theological route around this, no matter what God has chosen to send people to hell. He made the rules in the beginning, he didn’t have to create a hell, so even if we chose in the end to violate laws that would ‘force’ God to put is in hell, it was still him in the beginning who gave us the ability to make that choice, so it’s still his choice ultimately that has us there) and yet is still perfectly good, we feel guilty and confused that our God who really wants us to be happy and healthy and all the rest has to partner with weak little us to get anything done. The blame and power are shifted to us irreversibly. We don’t deal with a God who, like Romans 9 says, created some vessels for honorable use and some for dishonorable; instead we implore those around us to ‘let God use them for honorable use instead of ‘forcing’ his hand to use us for dishonorable use’. That is a much harder challenge to wrap our hearts around.

So, back to the elections. The issue I see is that I believe God is shouting to this nation that Abortion must come down. As his heart was set against slavery before the civil war, so now his heart is set against abortion. This is not to say that we couldn’t theorize that there are many other evils in the world. The way we (the church) treats the poor and needy in our world is appalling, and there will be judgement and answering for that behaviour. However, as God is sovereign, he has the right to focus on any given issue at any given time (as he could just as well choose to focus on all issues).

As an aside, I believe the reason God focuses on an issue at a time is his mercy. If God were to confront me with all of the darkness in my life right now in one fell swoop, I would be killed. I simply cannot know how dark I really am. Instead, he deals with me in little steps on the progressive road to sanctification and unity with Christ. I believe the same holds true for a nation. If God were to come to America or Mexico or Russia or Africa and say, ‘This is everything I have against you’, the nation would be destroyed. OK, aside over.

So, God is choosing right now to focus on the moral and social issue of the sanctity of pre-natal life. We condemn murder (the killing of a human being) in every circumstance (although even that has begun to be questioned in the case of euthanasia, which I have found a surprising amount of support for, and many people support capital punishment, and I believe to the conservatives everlasting shame many people who are ‘pro-life’ in the case of abortion are also pro-war, which couldn’t be much more pro-death) except the life that is still mostly in the womb (OK, maybe that’s a bit of barb against people who are OK with partial birth, but whatever. It’s a heinous act so I don’t mind vilifying it). We approach the definition of a human in all sorts of wonky ways so that we can justify aborting a ‘fetus’ while still not feeling foolish when we congratulate and expecting mother on her ‘new baby’ and ‘little life’. Who among us would look at a mother, flushed with joy at the prospect of her little baby coming, and straight faced tell her, ‘well you don’t actually have a baby yet, it’s just animated tissue without any real substance. Don’t get excited till it’s all the way out of you because, you know, then it’s an actual baby.’ That is the issue on God’s heart. 50 million babies, killed in the name of convenience, health, and freedom.

Now, we had two candidates for this election, as you all know. Barack Obama is pro-choice to an extreme. He has been very candid about this (a fact for which I thank him. If politicians could just be honest about their beliefs and stop with the theatre of neutrality I think our country would be in a vastly healthier state.) and his voting record backs up his claims. John McCain couldn’t really be classified as pro-life, but he certainly would not have done anything to strengthen the pro-choice agenda. On most other issues, I think I actually agree with Obama. I am for reform in the government, I am probably more socialist leaning than is actually good for me, and I like the idea of the rich giving back to the country that made them rich in a meaningful way. Of course, I understand that this is a gross simplification of his policies and probably a gross misunderstanding of what his ideas would do to our country, but honestly, after Wall Street, irresponsible and unsustainable lifestyles on the part of the American people, and the Economic Crisis that has hit our nation, I’m for a shaking up of our systems, no matter how painful it might be. I hate most of John McCain’s policies, he’s pro-war, he’s pro-big government (well, same goes for Obama, I suppose, and probably in a greater way, but he’s pro-big government that the rich will pay for), and honestly he ran his campaign in such a sleazy way that I no longer believe (as I did in 2000), that he is a principled man.

But what do you do when you believe God is dealing with the nation on one issue? Well, for me and my house that was voting based on the one issue. I wanted a pro-life candidate in office, especially given the fact that they are projected to install 3 new justices on the Supreme Court (allowing it be stacked obscenely in either direction). I believed that having a pro-choice president in office would mean that those seats would be filled in the wrong direction. But there-in lies the rub.

Daniel 2:21 (ESV):

He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding;

Well, what the heck? I mean, if God was so dependent on who sits in the Oval Office in a little over 70 days, then what does that state about his sovereignty? I read an article this morning published by Dutch Sheets (probably the single greatest influence in my life regarding the shifting of my understanding from pure predestination to deterministic free will) in which he basically states that the reason Barack Obama is president is because the Church failed to pray enough and that this indicates that we are headed towards judgement. But, wait a second. I thought that God removes and sets up kings? Doesn’t that mean that it was God’s will that Obama be president? Doesn’t that mean that, even if this is a signal that judgement is coming, that the judgement was in God’s plan all along? But more importantly, doesn’t the idea that just because Obama is president we will have pro-choice judges in the Supreme Court which will call down unwilling judgement on our nation fly in the face of God’s sovereignty. I just can’t accept that God is ever forced, against his will, to do something he would rather not do. Yes, this flies in the face of the free will verses, especially Ezekiel 22, and at the same time, I don’t know, I just can’t believe that God could allow himself to be thwarted like that simply because we didn’t reach some sort of critical mass of prayer.

It’s the system that seems so wonky to me. I picture God on his thrown looking at a one of those applause meters going, ‘OK, I put the bulletin out to my people that they are to pray for this issue. Oh, darn it! The prayer meters only 30% full. Come on, pray more and louder people! 50%… Almost there! Shoot, only 15 more days till times up. 75%! Come on! No!! Times up. Shoot!.’ The picture is almost pathetic. I can’t reconcile it with the verses that ascribe sovereignty to God. And I can’t reconcile the image that God does not need us at all and simply allows to play in a theatre of partnership with the verses that ascribe free will and co-ruler-ship to us.

Anyway, I have no conclusion here, except for the fact that I still believe we should be trembling as a nation about the issue of abortion and praying that God would end it sovereignly. It’s the sovereignly that is important. Obama doesn’t pick Judges, I don’t think. God does. I guess that is actually a conclusion of sorts, just not a concluded one. I still can’t imagine how this all actually works, nor do I have any real confidence that I’ll ever get to that point.