Is it Wrong for a Christian to Be Involved in Politics

 

A preacher friend and relative, counseled all of us to not involve ourselves in politics in his Sabbath morning homily today. It was at that point that I realized he'd done stopped preaching and done started meddling!

Seriously though, as a professional journalist/blogger/author whose specialty is politics, humor (two branches of the same field), religion (make that 3 branches), vegetarian cookery and how-to articles, I find it difficult to give up my political writing. This is especially so since I firmly believe that modern progressive politics are working very hard to create the world we were warned about in Revelation. I personally have come to believe from my study of current events, political discourse and the Bible that there is one political group that will get our nation down the road to hell far faster than the other. Revelation talks about a three-fold union between the Dragon (Satan/Pagan Rome), the Beast (the inheritor of the power of pagan Rome - see Emperor Constantine) and the False Prophet. Sounds suspiciously like some sort of global new world order to me.

As a result of my studies, my political blogs tend to be as much about religious matters like the Second Coming and the 7 last plagues as they are about who should win the next election, since at this point in history, politics and religion have become so intertwined. And anti-religion is every bit as much a religion as any denomination. They have shared rituals like burning down electronics stores after looting them, setting forest fires, shooting people with MAGA hats, and screaming Marxist claptrap in the faces of people smaller than they are (not to mention knocking down little old people). They have shared beliefs like collectivism, and shared values like perversion and anarchy. Also as a citizen of a nation whose constitution clearly states this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that makes each of us leaders of the government. The state, our founding fathers decided, belongs to us, not we to it as the collectivists would have us believe.

The advice this morning's speaker quoted came from one of our church founders, whose advice to avoid politics was, I believe, aimed at Gospel Workers (that being the name of the book the quotation was drawn from). The counselor in question also once publicly called out the president of the United States for not making the Civil War about slavery - she said God wouldn't bless the North if he didn't. She was an abolitionist at the time which was a very prominent and trouble-making 19th century political movement. It can be argued that the abolition movement was a direct cause of the Civil WAr. It seems that even back then politics and religion had some shared values. Turns out she was prophetic about making it about slavery once it got started. The North struggled in the early years of the war, until Lincoln stopped talking about a settlement that left slavery intact and went right for the Emancipation Proclamation solution. Immediately after that, the tide of the war turned in favor of the Union.

I feel like there is still a role for watchmen on the wall whose responsibility is to tell the truth to kings.  A lot of God's servants have gotten in trouble for doing just that. The kings didn't appreciate their meddling in politics and some prophets paid with their lives in singularly unpleasant manners.  So like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Elijah, John the Baptist, Elisha, Joel, Samuel and other minor and not so minor prophets, all of whom got in trouble for challenging the centrist governments of their day (they called the politburo presidents kings back then), I feel called to challenge the centrist oppressive government of today and support those who fight against those who would take our freedoms, shut down our churches and persecute those who disagree with them. Even more so as the end of time approaches.

"Watchmen on the wall" Isaiah called them (Isaiah 62: 6). He said we shouldn't rest from watching for the approach of the enemy, nor should we be silent about it..

Just one man's opinion.....

© 2020 by Tom King

Water - One Reason I Gave Up on Atheism

Water in all 3 of its miraculous forms - liquid, solid and gas

As a young man, as young men will do, I toyed with the idea of atheism. With my limited youthful logic I thought the idea of evolution and survival of the fittest a pretty smart idea as we often do in the midst of our youth and arrogance, when like Eve, we buy into the lie that we are, by nature, immortal and that, with a bit of knowledge, we can be our own gods.

Once I learned how to reason, however, some problems soon arose with the whole idea that there is nothing out there beyond our own, horrifically flawed selves. If, in fact, we are the result of a very long series of cosmic accidents, I came to realize, that then how could we trust that our minds are even capable of real rational thought. We could be thinking we have reasoned things out by cold logic, but the fact is, our accidentally constructed "minds" could well be incapable of anything other than a crippled kind of thinking influenced more by our lack of some missing kind of perceptive ability than by reason as we think of it, if we can think rationally at all. 

So, the truth is that the "logic" by which the atheist rejects the notion of God may only be the product of a limited ability to think. We could be limited in our ability to think truly rational thoughts about anything beyond what our five senses seem to perceive. In fact, there may be an entire reality beyond the limits of our perception. Perhaps God is a pan-dimensional being we can neither see nor hear nor touch nor taste nor feel because we lack the sense organs to perceive such a being. God told Moses it was impossible for him with his limited sensor equipment to see more than his "back parts".

If could be that we are only able to perceive the results of a creature outside the strictures of 3 dimensional space when He interacts with the universe and with us lower creatures. Consider, for instance, water. Without water, life could not exist. Water is a compound made of two of the simplest of elements - hydrogen and oxygen.Water has the following unique properties.

1. It is liquid in its normal state allowing us to drink it, sail on it, water crops with it, bathe with it and cook with it.
2. Water turns to gas in response not only to boiling, but to lowered humidity levels in the air at relatively low temperatures through evaporation. 
3. Were it not for evaporation, clouds would not form, nor would precipitation redistribute fresh filtered water over the land areas of the Earth where animals and plants take it in as a necessity of survival. 
4. Also, water changes to a solid (freezes) at a temperature at which animals and plants can survive. Just before it freezes and turns into a solid, unlike every other substance on the planet.
5. Just before freezing water expands rather than contracts causing its solid form to float on it's liquid form. 
6. Were water like all other substances, it would continue to contract as it cools and sink to the bottom of the body of water exposed to freezing temperatures.
7. If ice sank rather than floated, instead of protecting life below the surface of the water from freezing temperatures above, it would fill up lakes, rivers and oceans from the bottom up.
8. Ice that sinks would eventually force the fish our onto the surface of what had become a solid block of ice instead of a body of water. Sea life would die gasping. Virtually all animal life in the water would be killed after a single hard winter. 
9. Water, by all appearances, seems unlikely to be a happy accident of physics, but rather the product of some intelligent design scheme. And, where you have a design scheme, you pretty much have to have a designer. 
10. Were you to change those two very odd properties of water, life would be unable to exist. 

It turns out that it takes an incredible amount of faith in accidents or a remarkable lack of curiosity to attribute all that to chance. Over the past century or so, as science digs deeper and deeper into the nature of the universe around us it keeps discovering that life exists by a singularly complex web of factors which increasingly like they could only have occurred on their own by a string of not just improbable, but statistically impossible complex circumstances.

CS Lewis compared it to smashing a jug of milk on the floor and hoping it gives you a map of London. As unlikely as that would be to happen, no matter how many jugs you smashed to the floor, your family cat, attracted by the crashing, could hardly guess with the brain it has, whether the delightfully tasty patterns spread across the kitchen floor accidentally appeared there as a result of the crash or if this odd superior creature sitting on the drain board taking notes might have created the mess for some unfathomable reason known only to itself. The cat, with cat--like logic might assume the milk spread itself over the floor of its own accord for the cat's enjoyment.

Not having seen you smash several jugs of milk on the floor, the cat would likely accept the miracle of the milk and commence to licking it up without further thought. Me? Because I have a human's ability to reason, could look at the milk, even if someone else at broken the jugs, not me, and detect the action of some actor who was behind it. I could probably even guess which one of my kids was responsible for the milky map of London on the kitchen floor.

So given that I would require an extremely deep sort of faith to accept that this glorious world is the accidental product of volcanoes and asteroids, I have look deeper, with an open mind and found unmistakable imprint of Him, the great designer, in even simple things like water.

Is God Giving the Churches a Nudge?

In the midst of the CoVid-19 pandemic, SDA churches all over the world have stopped having services on Sabbath. A lot of our churches have given their members weblinks and reading materials and the address to which to mail their tithes and offerings and said "See you later." However, many of our churches have, at this time and for this crisis, chosen to invested the rather modest funds needed to purchase cameras, computer and sound gear needed to livestream church services rather than simply shoving their flock over to Amazing Facts, 3ABN and the Hope Channel. While these are worthy sources for religious instruction and comfort in this difficult time, they lack the personal impact of remaining connected to your brothers and sisters.

When this emergency is over, the churches will still have the equipment to livestream services and should be able to do so economically. I wonder if perhaps God will use this crisis to nudge His churches into using this technology to reach out and provide a link to others beside those who show up each Sabbath. I'm thinking of the elderly and disabled shut-in members and those who have for one reason or another drifted away from our fellowship. Perhaps this is an opportunity for our churches to provide a more subtle way for lost and isolated Christians to rejoin the life of their churches.

In my town in Texas, they did a survey of church membership in the city by denomination. We discovered to our shock that though we have 3 churches in the city, the number of people who listed themselves as belonging to our denomination was over twice the number of people on the books and who were coming to church.

We have sadly neglected our shut-ins and strayed lambs. I've been made acutely aware of this in the past few years as my wife and I have found ourselves becoming shut-ins due to her disability. Amazing Facts has been a blessing, but it is no substitute for being able to connect with our church family. There is a huge field out there to be harvested. So many people have drifted from the church over the years simply because they missed a few weeks and nobody noticed.

With social media, live-streaming, email and telephones, a whole field of mission has opened up that we are really not reaching. Maybe you aren't confident enough to do Bible Studies or you don't have the stamina or courage to "pass out literature" to perfect strangers. But how hard is it to work with your church's website or social media page to answer messages from people who saw services on the Internet? What a great way to follow up with isolated, lonely, elderly, disabled and ill church members. How hard could it be to follow up a comment on a post on the church Facebook page with a phone call and a simple "How are you doing?"

Jesus told the story of the ninety and nine in which the shepherd turned and headed back out into the night to find a single sheep who had strayed. My God, why have we forsaken the vast flock out there who have gotten lost from our fellowship?  Perhaps God is giving us a high-tech flashlight and a shepherd's crook in all this scary pandemic in order to encourage us to gently seek out our lost sheep and bring them home - or at least to offer them a little comfort and a sense of belonging to their home church again. What a nice mission that would be and so easy to set up.

© 2020 by Tom King

Upsetting the Sanhedrin

It's been a while since I've written anything on this weblog. There's a reason for that. I haven't trusted myself to comment on the sorts of controversies rattling around in the upper rooms of church governance and in the lower chambers of the active and often outspoken laity. I got my copy of Adventist World today, opened it and there it was - Executive Committee Members Debate Proposed Compliance Action. I thought, "Well here we go again."  As I read, I quite frankly found myself in sympathy with the unions and pastors who were being threatened.


I use the word "threatened" because you can't read the article and sense anything less than a clear threat for unions and union conference presidents.  I found it odd that nothing was said about conference presidents and individual conferences that are out of compliance with the sketchy vote-down of women's ordination at the San Antonio General Conference.There have been two reactions to that decision by those unconvinced by that vote. Both reactions were discussed in the article.

One response was to ignore the edict which didn't exactly forbid women's ordination, but took power from the Union Conferences to make that decision for themselves. The vote moved the authority for deciding about ordination back to the General Conference where it was prior to the 1903 General Conference. In that conference, the unions were created. Ellen White was at that conference and said angels walked the aisle and influenced the decision to divest the GC of some of its power. Individual union conference presidents in the West Coast Unions seem destined to be publicly reprimanded as their unions have continued to ordain women as though they still had the authority to do so.

The second response has been that of the Scandinavian and German unions in Europe. There, the men turned in their ordination credentials and both men and women are commissioned. To me that seems like a reasonable compromise on the part of the unions. It complies with the prohibition against ordaining women while achieving the conference's goal of treating women equally in terms of pay and responsibility as pastors.

Apparently not. Elder Wilson intimated in his comments that, although he hasn't used the compliance committees, he still has them holstered and ready if needs be. It was clearly a not so veiled threat and it's backed by many of the more patriarchal unions that find the ordination of women to be a threat as well.

My wife and I were watching one of the Jesus movies and something kind of jumped out at me. All was not harmonious in the time of Christ. There were factions ranging from the zealots on the right to the looser Jews like Zacchaeus, Matthew and their crowd. And in the midst was the political class of the Sanhedrin - Pharisees and Sadducees, the Democrats and Republicans of Jesus' first advent.

Many of our brethren express concern over the state of the Adventist Church at this time. The divisions within are at once spiritual, political and cultural. Could we expect anything less in the day of Jesus' second advent? The fragmented Jewish faith at the time of his first advent was unable to find unity within its diversity save through the emerging Christian faith. Jesus drew followers from tax-collectors, revolutionaries, fishermen, the rich and poor, small and great, young and old, Scribe, Pharisee and Sadducee. Rather than stuffing his children all into one ideological box, he met them where they were and set them on the road to heaven.

Perhaps after 2000 years my church should remember that we are called to save the lost. We are not called to accumulate people who perfectly reflect our own beliefs and ideas and stuff them all into a big organized box o' holy folk. We are called to love one another, not obey human authority in a hierarchy growing as complex and authoritarian as that of the Roman Catholic Church. This troubles me too.

I'm a rock-ribbed conservative, in both spiritual and political matters, yet I find myself siding on ordination with fellow Adventists who are down-right socialists. Perhaps my small government, individualistic, and respectfulness of foundation law and principles colors my thinking. In watching recent events, I find myself worried about the direction in which our leadership is taking us. We've always done Bible Conferences over issues of Bible doctrine. In this case also, we spent a good deal of church money doing a conference at Glacier View in Colorado over women's ordination. The Theology of Ordination Committee (TOC) found by a solid majority that ordination was a human construct rather than a Biblical command and that there is no evidence that women could not be ordained as pastors and ministers if the church chooses to do so. And with TOC report firmly in hand, the GC proceeded to effectively ignore the advice of the TOC, burying its findings in procedural maneuvering at the San Antonio GC in order to push toward the desired vote. The vote effectively divested the union conferences of authority to decide policy regarding ordination for the individual unions. While the union conferences that have been accused of noncompliance have yet to be summoned before the committees, the GC and Wilson in particular seemed determined to bully the unions into compliance without having to invoke the compliance committees and disband unions, especially unions that provide a significant chunk of the world budget. Compliance committees have been called the Adventist FBI and large numbers of Adventist members find this ominous.

The church is made up of individuals making their way to heaven. It's not a bus or a cruise ship. It's not a form of transport where everyone must have a ticket and sit where the conductors tell us to. The church is a gathering place where we all flock to be blessed with God's presence. Why are we worried that remembering the way the Lord has led us in the past will lead to trickle-down non-compliance? And since when is it the church's duty to enforce "compliance". Since when do we place human authority between Christians and their God that men be granted the power to make us all comply with human decisions? Yet in the end, I can say with the president of the Pacific Union Conference, "I am a Seventh-day Adventist today and I will be a Seventh-day Adventist tomorrow regardless of what this vote does."

Based on my experience with the children of God, I expect they will continue their journey toward home, whatever the Sanhedrin does. I love my church and pray for its leadership that they look beyond their fears and trust in Christ. Based on what I see on the evening news and what I read in Scripture, Jesus will soon come and once again He will take his children with Him beyond mere compliance to righteousness and eternal life.

© 2020 by Tom King