If you have a few brain cells, and a pulse, it is quite possible that you have had a few worries about the upcoming presidential election. Not only that, but it is also possible that your wife is worried about it also, not to mention some of your older teens.
So I thought it might be helpful to folks in your position to outline a few principles and offer a few exhortations about the election. There is a way to stay anxiety free in such a time as ours, and to do so without adopting a stoic apathy, or a cynical “what difference does it make?” pose. How can we stay free of worry like Christians?
- As we look at the cavalcade of nonsense that is comprised of all our political monkeyshines, it is easy to forget the fact that God is sovereign. His sovereignty is exhaustive, and there is not one atom in this cosmos that operates outside the realm of that sovereignty. But if God is sovereign over all things, then He is certainly sovereign over this thing. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because God is altogether holy, His sovereignty only extends over the Serious Things—things like worship, or cancer diagnoses, or systematic theology. But although it is true that He is sovereign over tragedy, and thanksgiving, and the Rocky Mountains, He is also the sovereign king of farce, down to the oversized clown shoes. The God of 2024, clowns and all, is the Lord Jesus Christ.
- Certain things follow from His sovereignty. His sovereignty means that He has the authority to tell us to not be anxious, which He does in fact do. He does tell us that. The Scriptures plainly tell us that worry is out. Peter tells us to be anxious for nothing because God cares for us (1 Pet. 5:7). And the Lord told us that each day has enough troubles, and so we shouldn’t borrow additional difficulties from the future (Matt. 6:34). But many Christians assume that God’s sovereignty simply gave Him the authority to make worry a sin, and He has in fact exercised that option, making it a sin, and that’s all there is to it. But Scripture does not simply say that anxiety is a sin. Because God is sovereign, staying free of anxiety is not simply staying out of sin, but it is also staying free of irrationality. Anxiety is sinful for a reason. Worry is an irrational sin. It doesn’t help. Which of us, by becoming worry-experts, are now able to add or subtract from our height (Luke 12:25-26)?
- Too many Christians try to get free of worry because being anxious is no fun at all. That is true—it is no fun at all. But that is not a sufficient basis for any true liberation. God has told us not to be anxious, and He has given us a reason for the command. That reason is that He is in complete control, that we need to trust Him, and that whatever happens is for His glory and our good. All things do in fact work together for good to those who do in fact love God and who are in fact the called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28).
- We are instructed in Scripture to be always and for everything giving thanks (Eph. 5:20) As it says . . . “in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thess. 5:18). Take these two passages together, and we see that we are supposed to give thanks to God for all things, and we are also supposed to give thanks in all things. And what kind of sense does it make to thank God for something that you were worried sick He might give you? Or to grumble about it after He gives it to you? If you are tied up in anxiety knots over a present that someone might give you for your birthday, how hard will it be genuine in saying thank you when they do exactly that? So we must be disposed to be thankful before the fact.
- We should be praying in such a way as to know that whatever happens in the election, we can know that it was an answer to that prayer. This means that we must have the point absolutely surrendered beforehand. This is not surrender, and it is not quietism. God either wants us to slay this dragon now, or He wants us to slay a bigger dragon later. So having the point surrendered is not an exercise in masochism, or defeatism, and it does not change the fact that our enemies remain our enemies. It simply means that we are soldiers on a battlefield, and we are supposed to fight where, when and how our general instructs us to fight. We give our input through our prayers, but when it comes to the point, He is our strategic commander, and we are the foot soldiers. Like ancient Israel, we move when the cloud moves.
- If the election goes contrary to the way you voted, which might happen, it needs to not go clean contrary to the way you have prayed. Our fundamental desire for the United States should be for God to do whatever it takes to bring us as a people to the point of true repentance. We should therefore not want a premature deliverance. If it is going to take four more years under the Midianites—to give our Gideon time to graduate from some obscure Bible college—then that is what we should want. We should want for the United States what God wants for us, and what God wants for us will be identified by what He does to us. And remember, however hard or difficult it is, we deserve every bit of it.
- All of this means that we must learn to distinguish two different “wills” of God. Theologians distinguish God’s decretive will from God’s preceptive will. The decretive will is what He determined would happen before all ages, and His preceptive will is what He has commanded for us to observe and do. These two wills generate two very different answers to the question “can God’s will be thwarted?” The decretive will? Of course not. The preceptive will? Yes, every day, in every person—in thought, word, and deed. For example, if a born again Christian votes for Harris, that would be what should be called “a sin,” a violation of God’s preceptive will. And if an ordained man does it, it would be a disqualifying sin, and he should step down from the ministry. Voting for someone like Harris is a clear defiance of the preceptive will of God. But if enough people sin in that way, and Harris is installed as president, it will nevertheless be a fulfillment of the decretive will of God. As Christians rest in the inscrutable wisdom of God in the aftermath of such a detestable victory, they are resting in God’s ability to draw straight with crooked lines. Learning this distinction, and hanging on to it, is what keeps us from falling into the merciless maw of fatalism. We do serve a sovereign God, but our Lord taught us to pray to Him as our Father. We adore our sovereign Father, and we are not being ground to powder by machinery of Fate.
- Someone will object at this point, and exclaim, “You’re just trying to comfort us with your . . . your Calvinism!” Yes, exactly so. The poet Coleridge once said, quite aptly, that Calvinism was a sheep in wolves’ clothing. At first glance, it seems really scary, but once understood, it is nothing but balm. The doctrines of sovereign grace are an infinite ocean of comfort, and God really does use absurd things to bring people to their senses. The prodigal son was not won by all the marvelous banquets he had grown up with at home, or by the riotous dining with floozies in the taverns, but rather by staring at the pig food he couldn’t have. And so maybe the good thing that God will bring out of this looming disaster of a potential Harris presidency is that this will finally humble our pride, such that many Christians will finally admit that God is God, and that we are not. Our prayer should be that God will do what it takes to make us solid Calvinists.
- If it is God’s good pleasure to have raised America up, like Pharaoh, in order to exalt His name through the way He takes us down (Rom. 9:17), then we can rest in the fact that, whatever happens, God is glorified. As we look at our spiritual landscape, the words of William Gurnall come to mind. Speaking of the quality of Bible teachers, he said: “If the good go, and those which are left continue bad, yea, become worse and worse, we have reason to fear that God is clearing the ground, and making way for a judgment.” God is glorified by empires in their prime and He is also glorified by Ozymandian ruins. He is glorified by such ruins as have had sand blowing over them for centuries, and He is glorified if all the scattered rocks are still hot and smoking. And His glory would not be any the less if the smoking rocks were American rocks.
- He is also glorified by the way He delivers His people in the midst of His judgments—Noah in the ark, Lot from godless Sodom, the Israelites in Goshen, and Jehoshaphat with that glorious choir episode. Some might object and say that there have been times of persecution where many of the saints of God have needed to seal their testimony with their blood. They had prayed that “no weapon formed against them would prosper” (Is. 54:17), but then they were killed anyhow. They were not delivered, were they? This is a place where far too many Christians are trying to measure God’s faithfulness with a Darwinian yard stick. Survival is not the summum bonum. And when and if such persecutions break out, we need to understand—we are Christians, are we not?—that to be ushered into the presence of God through the hands of persecutors is absolutely the greatest deliverance that can be imagined. Our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us (Rom. 8:18). Wesley wrote about the first born seraph trying to make sense of it all, and just imagine that scene. The seraph is only ten minutes old, and surrounded by glory, singing a hymn he doesn’t remember learning, and wondering what is going on exactly. A martyr arriving in glory out of the wrack and ruin of this shambolic world is going to be in a similar position. So much pain and confusion, and then so much glory and grace. This is why the Lord gave us some very strict instructions on this point. Do not fear those who can kill the body (Matt. 10:28). That is all they can do, and what it amounts to is giving you the greatest promotion you ever had. And if they kill you right away, when you are still young, that is just an early promotion.
- And so to summarize all of the above, to cite the great Puritan Thomas Watson, we too often focus on on the one who brings our troubles to us, rather than on the one who sent our troubles to us. The sovereign hand of God lies behind absolutely all of this, and He is altogether good. He is not just a sovereign Force, but rather a sovereign Father. Gurnall again: “Sincerity enables the Christian to do two things in affliction which the hypocrite cannot—to speak good of God, and to expect good from God.”