Election Week Musings (7)

 John Piper writes in his article, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin:

 

“Is it not baffling, then, that so many Christians seem to be sure that they are saving human lives and freedoms by treating as minimal the destructive effects of the spreading gangrene of high-profile, high-handed, culture-shaping sin?”

 

“Freedom and life are precious. We all want to live and be free to pursue happiness. But if our freedoms, and even our lives, are threatened or taken, the essence of our identity in Christ, the certainty of our everlasting joy with Christ, and the holiness and love for which we have been saved by Christ — none of these is lost with the loss of life and freedom.

 

“Therefore, Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

 

“The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

 

“I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).

 

“How do they know this? Seriously! Where do they get the sure knowledge that judges, laws, and policies are less destructive than boastful factiousness in high places?” John Piper.

 

While I agree with John Piper on what he has written above, I think he missed an important point, being pro-birth is not the same as being prolife, and therefore we need to weigh the total legislative agenda of a person or party when considering the sanctity of life. Of course, Piper’s thrust is elsewhere and no one can cover all the bases in an article, but I do want to point this out. If we are prolife, then healthcare matters, housing matters, employment matters, education matters, equitable economic policy matters. If we are prolife, then the arbiter for our decision making is not the dollar, it is truth and justice and righteousness and equity – and love for God and our neighbor…all of our neighbors. Regardless of the economic policies of the world, 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9 ought to be the economic policy of the Church.

 

We have made an idol of “freedom,” especially our personal freedom. Freedom has become license for unbridled sin and the rejection of God and our neighbor. As John Newton pointed out, the idol freedom has become our goddess Diana.

 

One attack on John Piper suggested that he wants us all to be martyrs. When we consider Mark 8:34 – 38, and the entire ethos of the Gospel, we are all called to be martyrs in the sense that our lives do not belong to us, our possessions do not belong to us, whatever political or economic “freedoms” we may have do not belong to us – for we have been bought with a price and we belong to Jesus Christ. We are not members of a club, we are the slaves of Jesus Christ, the property of Jesus Christ. Every day we are to live in the freedom that Christ gives us, not the freedom that the world gives us, and the freedom we have in Christ is the freedom to be obedient to Him, by His grace, and that means the imperative that we worship God and serve others…not serve ourselves.

 

One of the more heart – wrenching and troubling aspects of the identification of many Christians with the president, and sadly his party, over the past few years has been the promotion and fostering of racial divide and the belittling of minorities. This sickens me. The disciple of Jesus Christ is called to always stand by the least of Christ’s brethren – the least economically, the least educationally, the least racially, the least politically, the least with disabilities, the least regarding citizenship; wherever the least  is, that is where the follower of Jesus Christ ought to be.

 

This means, among other things, that if I am going to vote with the sanctity of life in mind, that I am going to vote to protect the least of those among us – whether they are in an inner city, Appalachia, living on a reservation, in an immigrant detention camp separated from parents or children, in a nursing home, or unemployed or homeless. If I love the least of those who are among us, then I will vote to protect them…and I will live in such a way, and teach and preach in such a way, as to protect them.

 

The least globally will also influence my vote and my life – if we can have Doctors Without Borders, certainly we must have Christians Without Borders…for we are called to serve the world…not our national interests. The interests of Jesus Christ are not the same as our national interests…occasionally they may coincide, but make no mistake, that it is occasional – and make no mistake, our national history testifies to this. To serve our nation is to call our nation to Christ, to live differently than our society in witness to Christ, and to live as strangers in a strange land while we seek the good of the land and its people. A sick physician is impaired in his healing ministry; so is a sick church.

 

I need not understand nor agree with the perspectives of my neighbors who come from different backgrounds, but something is deeply amiss if I do not stand with them when they are attacked and marginalized by the highest authority in our nation with the acquiescence of a significant element of the professing church. Perhaps we think we are exempt from Matthew 25:31 – 46, not to mention the Law and the Prophets. There ought to be a deep shame enveloping much of the “white” professing church, instead we revel in our deception.

 

John Piper is baffled, when he wrote his article he was clearly frustrated. I thank our Lord Jesus that there are some men and women who have a platform who are not afraid to say that the emperor is stark naked, that elements of the church are miserable and blind (Rev. 3:17). I have never sensed that Piper has wanted to make himself his message, that he has sought the centers of worldly power. I am sure that John Piper is not perfect and that he would be the first to say so – but I am also certain that God has something to say to us through John Piper.

 

It is, after all, a simple question, whose mark and image will we bear? That of the Lamb or that of the beastly system? (Revelation 13:16 – 14:5)

 

What is your answer? What is the answer of your congregation?