A country’s leaders will reflect the country, and a country will reflect their leaders. Even more so a church which is unconcerned with personal holiness in itself will no doubt not seek leaders which reflect the type of life Christ expects of all men. Putting up with sin has a leprous effect on the body politic as much as the body of the church. 

Here we sit two weeks out from the most important election of our lifetimes, at least until the next one. There is a certain blessing which comes from living in an elected republic where we take a minute once every two-to-four years to cast a ballot (or not) for who will receive the next set of cash transactions from a lobbyist. I didn’t mean to make it sound that cynical, but lived experience is what it is. In today’s prayer and worship help as we continue to think through the Christian’s relationship to politics we keep running into this question of moral culpability and what we should expect from those in power over us. Are we voting for a minister or not? That’s the question we are going to consider and meditate on today as we redeem the time.

According to Romans 13, everyone’s go-to passage for what the New Testament has to say about these issues the answer is, yes, yes we are placing a man into a position where he is God’s “. . . minister to you for good.”, with the kicker, “. . . For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”  We know from Judas that just because someone is placed in a certain position by the Lord that does not mean He necessarily therefore approves of the actions that individual takes. Nero was appointed by God as much as Jefferson Davis. John F. Kennedy as much as King Henry VIII. We’d all agree that there are degrees of obedience to the Lord in that set of men. One of the judgments promised to sinful Israel was that if they chose to follow their wicked hearts God would give them women and children as their rulers. (Isaiah 3:4, 12). However, if they obeyed His word the reward of a godly leader would match (Prov. 29:2). The point here is that morally upright presidents, mayors, and governors are born, not made. In other words the culture creates the sovereigns it wants.

As with most times the problem with pointing the finger at someone else, as your grandma probably told you, is that you have three fingers pointing back at you. There is an entire cottage industry of churchmen who spend all their day making sure everyone knows how bad a certain set of politicians are. They send out voluminous amounts of content decrying evil in every nook and cranny of Washington. To be fair, they are not necessarily wrong. The District of Columbia is a hive of scum and villany. Yet, the issues as you might imagine are far deeper than that.

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