What's God got to do with it?

Opposing the fruit but ignoring the root

Every time there’s a major storm, or political cataclysm, there are always preachers ready to say it’s God’s judgement on our nation. They cast all kinds of blame on whatever sinners happen to be around committing their pet sins.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

Today, I’m going to talk about the Bible, and preachers, and politics. If that’s not your bag (and I know our readers at The Racket News), I won’t be offended if you move on. I’ll be back to obscure Star Trek references and political lamentations in due time. But if you stay, I hope to shed some light on a common error made by evangelicals.

Pastor John MacArthur, of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles, is one of the most influential evangelicals in the nation. MacArthur appeared on Breitbart News Daily last week. Yes, that Breitbart, the one whose executive chairman is in prison for contempt of Congress.

MacArthur said:

“There’s a sense in which God takes His hand of blessing off that society. When He gives them up, it means he gives them up to the consequences of their choices. If you follow that pattern, what you get is Joe Biden, who is the epitome of all those things that I just talked about,” he said, highlighting the fact that immorality is running “rampant in his [Biden’s] own family at an epic level” and in Biden’s own life.

I fully agree with the first sentence. God has given the race of humans the gift of free will. He has also given us the Law, as well as the Son and the Holy Spirit to forgive and guide us in life. But what we do, that’s on us. And collectively, what we do as a society can invite God’s blessing, or incite God’s anger.

MacArthur boils down “the epitome of all those things” to a few issues: “sexual immorality, homosexual immorality, and a reprobate mind,” which means “God gives them up.”

This is the kind of error I see a lot lately, over the past decade or more. And it is indeed error.

He’s talking about Romans 1:26-27: “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

The rabbis, when discussing the Torah, always go backwards. The Talmud is full of word-parsing, pedantic arguments of the meanings of words that go on for pages, so this kind of argument seems to be natural for people steeped in Jewish culture. About half the New Testament was written by a rabbi, Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul), so it’s worth our time to give Paul, who wrote the epistle to the Romans, the same treatment. Paul wrote in the scripture above, “because of this.” So, we begin, what’s “this”?

To find out, we have to go backwards. Let’s read verses 24-25: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

This scripture plainly says God gave them over to shameful lusts because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and broke the first two commandments by serving created things (idols) rather than the Creator. But look: Paul began verse 24 with “therefore”. My Bible teacher friend tells me when you see “therefore” in scripture, you need to go back to “find out what it’s there for” (haw haw). So let’s go back further.

Verses 21-23: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

Now we’re making some progress. “They” sinned by putting their trust in things other than God. “They” did not glorify God or thank him. “They” became fools. “They” worshipped idols. And therefore, God gave them over…but who are “they”?

Now we’re all the way back to verses 18-19. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.”

“They” are people who should know better, because they “are without excuse” as Paul wrote. But clearly “they knew God.” Paul was not writing about ignorant people who never heard the Gospel. He was writing about those who had heard and known the truth, but preferred not to do what God commanded.

And there’s the “sinful desires of their hearts” that many preachers focus on because it refers to “sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” So naturally, they think, it must be all the homosexual and deviant lusts that’s the source of God’s wrath.

Let me ask a question here. Did God put the desires in their hearts? Of course not. But then, where did the desires come from? The answer is that the desires were always there. Let’s go forward from our starting point.

Verses 28-32:

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Remember who “they” are. Not homosexuals. Not liberals. “They” includes potentially all of us, especially Christians who believe that going to church and associating with all the trappings of religion exempt us from being one of “them” that Paul wrote about.

Preachers like MacArthur, and many others, are focusing on the fruit, not the root, of sin. Now of course, there will always be God-mockers, those who laugh and spit in the face of the faithful. There will always be evil-hearted people in the world. And like there were in Paul’s day, there will always be people who prefer their own gender for intimate relations. But there will also always be people who are tempted—and fall to—greed, strife, gossip, slander, insolence, arrogance, unkindness and a lack of mercy.

It is that wickedness, by people who should know better—people who have the structure and opportunity to confess and repent—that causes God to remove His hand of blessing. And the absence of God’s hand of blessing doesn’t necessarily lead to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. God, being omnipotent and sovereign, can do those signs and wonders anytime he wishes. But He would not use them unless it was to glorify His name.

Jesus provided the perfect example of how to deal with both believers we don’t know, and the use of God’s power to destroy. In Luke 9, Jesus was heading for Jerusalem where he was to be crucified (verses 52-56):

And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them. Then he and his disciples went to another village.

If God wanted to wipe out America, we’d be wiped out. But God has better plans.

Yet, instead of the big influential names in the American church repenting (some, notably, have), most have doubled down on the error of blessing the sinful tree and condemning the fruit that it yields.

We end up with preachers like MacArthur saying that electing Donald Trump is a “huge move in the right direction,” while acknowledging he is not “the solution.”

“And, you know, I think if God allows that to happen, that Trump becomes president, you can say that the Lord has kind of put the brakes on a little bit, but the train is moving so fast down the direction of having been abandoned by God that unless there’s a huge spiritual turnaround, there’s no way to stop this,” he said, emphasizing that it falls to Christians to step it up.

This is like bringing a tank of gasoline to a forest fire with a hose because it’s not going to douse the fire but it might “kind of put the brakes on a little bit” since, you know, gasoline is a liquid, like water.

One thing I know, with all the certainty I can muster, outside of God’s sovereign will to make a fool of me, is that the Donald Trump we know today is not the man to lead, follow, or join in a spiritual turnaround of the United States. To say that God allowing Trump to become president is somehow a sign of his countenance upon our nation, is missing the point so badly that I cannot imagine worse aim if you tried to miss.

Among evangelical preachers, they all seem to be trying really hard to compete with MacArthur’s can’t-hit-the-side-of-a-barn aiming skill. Jentezen Franklin is a wonderful preacher, with a megachurch about an hour from here (and a video campus in my city). Franklin was one of Trump’s spiritual advisers.

And there’s Dallas First Baptist’s Robert Jeffress, who TexasMonthly in 2019 called “Trump’s Apostle.” Paula White-Cain is another Trump preacher, along with social media Christian darlings who have issues with President Biden’s lackluster Catholicism.

Sure, I have issues with Biden’s policies and his own political cynicism. There’s a reason Biden lost every previous presidential race he was in, and only beat Donald Trump because—well because he was the only person in the race who was not Donald Trump.

But if Trump wins, it will not be because of God. It will totally be because of us. God’s got nothing to do with it, because the sign he has removed His hand of blessing from our country is not that liberals have so much say in the public square, or that the executive editor of the New York Times said “we don’t get religion.”

The sign that God has removed His hand of blessing from our nation is that Christians voted, of our own accord, to hand the reins of power over to a man who values “envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.” A man who clubs around with “gossips, slanderers,” and admires leaders who are “insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

There is no way to change the minds of people we consider our sworn enemies, yet try to lure them to Christ by the fear of eternal punishment (which is real) while we ourselves ignore the signs of hellfire. The only way to the mind of one who rejects Christ is through the heart. And when Christian hearts are closed, cauterized, and our minds focused on the levers of power in this world, we cannot reflect the love of God and His glory.

If there is judgement coming (or if it has come), it’s not because of the Joe Bidens in this nation, it’s because of the Christians who plant the seeds of perdition, water the tree that grows from it, then cast hate at the fruit that falls from the tree. Those big-name Christian leaders who value their ministry more than their own souls: they sin for years and cover it up, then count on their friends to continue the coverup. They forgive each other in a never-ending circle of self-justification, only looking over their shoulder in case God might peer through their professional piousness.

No, friends, in this election, God has nothing to do with it. I’m afraid he long ago turned his countenance to those who better glorify His name. We “became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles”—and politicians. And so God gave us over “to a depraved mind, so that” we do what ought not to be done.

He has left this thing we did to us.

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