Bible Girl, aka Julie Lyons, is a white Pentecostal who keeps a blog at the Dallas Observer (Dallas' weekly Alt-mag). From what I can gather she worshipes at a black church. And as you will see, she apparently has a history of being fearlessly honest in her writing.
She's got a column about why, even though she remembers a Nigerian pastor prophesying in 2001 that after the Bush years, God would give America a black president, and even though she's a pro-life D will not consider voting Republican until the GOP gets serious about what she regards as racial justice, she will not vote for Barack Obama. The reason? Abortion. Excerpt:
It is interesting how Scripture virtually ignores a king’s political or military accomplishments. Jeroboam II, for example, presided over a time of great prosperity and influence for Israel. Yet the Bible dismisses these things in a few brusque sentences. Jeroboam II ultimately failed in keeping God’s commands, and he was judged to be evil. Because he called evil good, he caused the people to do evil as well. End of story; over and out.
Which brings me to abortion again. I’m one of those people who was never passionate about this issue until I had a child of my own -- kind of like the folks who don’t care about famine in faraway places until they see the pictures of starving children. God touched my conscience one day concerning abortion; today I passionately oppose it and call myself a pro-life Democrat.
I see it as an elemental thing: the value of life. You couldn’t identify an issue that cuts to the core more than that.
I won’t say I’m the deepest thinker on this subject. It’s just simple to me. I will put no other god before me, neither will I play God and make decisions reserved solely for him. Every time man has been given the power to decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, hideous things have resulted.
The Middle Passage. The Holocaust. The Nazis’ extermination of the mentally retarded and gypsies. Genocide in Armenia, Rwanda, Darfur. The executions of innocents in Texas and other states. Abortion.
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Yet I can’t escape the words of Kings. God will judge a leader by one thing: his faithfulness to God’s Word on matters for which the Christian position is clear.
No, that’s not a fashionable concept these days. It won’t win me many friends in the circles I travel. I do understand that we don’t live in a theocracy; our nation is governed by a constitution. As voters, we deal in a continuum of hope and reality. We don’t get everything we want.
Well, whoever said the world would understand or approve of followers of Jesus Christ?
I believe that Barack Obama will be our next president; the hand of God is upon him. If you read Kings, though, that can cut many ways.
But I will not give him my vote.
So, does God still judge nations?
I mean her explanation is unusual. She based her conclusion in large part on her reading of the Bible, and its clear testimony that God intervenes in history to judge nations that fall away from His will. She is withholding her vote from Obama because of her very real conviction that God's judgment will fall on this nation if it fully embraces the legalized extermination of unborn lives (nearly 50 million of whom have died at the hands of abortionists since Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973).
For non-believers, it is obviously foolishness to make a political decision based on fear of God's judgment. But do believers really have the option not to consider it? Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. His Second Inaugural Address framed the Civil War as God's judgment on America for the sin of slavery. Excerpt (again):
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
I don't think Lincoln was speaking figuratively. He really believed the Civil War was an act of divine judgment. Anyone who takes the Bible seriously as a record of God's dealing with His people in history cannot escape the testimony in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) of God withdrawing his protection from Israel in response to its stiff-necked behavior. God sent the Prophets to call Israel back to holiness. And when that didn't work, He allowed chastisement to humble his Chosen Nation.
If we believe that God dealt with Israel that way, why wouldn't he deal with us, and with any other nation, that way?
2 comments:
This is a test as I don't want to type a message for the third time and then find I can't send it!
A tricky but intriguing topic! In the OT the people of God were defined basically by ethnicity/nationhood. God judged nations by (a) their attitude to Israel (b) their morality.
In the NT the people of God explicitly cut across all ethnic, national and other divides. So is God really still in the business of dealing at the national level? Does He arrange salvation one way, but judgment a completely different way?
Some Christians speak as if individual countries have their own special covenant with God, or have had in the past. Isn't this rather naive/arrogant? We need a lot of care in carrying stuff across from the OT into today and frequently assumptions seem to be made without any good theological basis.
I haven't read Keillor yet but intend to. Any other bright ideas or references?
Greetings from Cornwall (UK) and well done the US electors.
Pete
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