Erick-Woods Erickson
The world is heading into Holy Week, the holiest of times for the world’s more than two billion Christians. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth entered Jerusalem as a king on Palm Sunday, was tortured, crucified, killed, and buried on Good Friday, and rose again on Easter Sunday. It is one of the defining weeks in human history. Even many secular atheists who deny the resurrection will concede the execution of Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago is the most important event in human history. As we head into Holy Week, it is appropriate to pause the politics and dwell on this.
The resurrection either happened or it did not. There is ample circumstantial evidence it was a real event. Christians believe “by faith,” but their “hope,” as referenced in the New Testament, is better phrased as their “profound certainty” in a physical resurrection of Jesus backed by evidence. A Christian’s faith is not blind.
Many Christians in the United States are fretful of the nation’s current state. A growing number have fixed their eyes not on a cross or empty tomb but on a ballot box. They are convinced that if they give enough, cheer enough, and vote enough, they can save their nation. What they forget is that this is not their home. In elevating politics above the gospel, they have harmed their witness. Going so far into the world of politics, they reflect the world to the world instead of reflecting Christ.
God is sovereign. He needs no man to do. The Spirit does. The Spirit moves through men, and men might act. But many have decided there is no reason to wait on the Spirit, or they become deluded, thinking God told them to act in ways and with behaviors that do not reflect a love of their neighbor. The books of the Old Testament are filled with false prophets who claimed to speak for God but were only speaking for themselves, often out of a sense of nationalist fervor.
In my forty-eight years, many of which were as a conservative activist convinced of my own righteousness and driven by a zeal more for a win in politics than for the gospel, I have learned a very simple lesson. God’s got this.
There is nothing you or I can do to alter the end of the story. God’s got this. He is sovereign and on his throne. For reasons Christians cannot offer a full answer — another proof of the authenticity of the faith, because cults have answers for everything and Christians do not — before the world itself began, God set in motion events that would ultimately lead to Him coming into the world, dying a terrible death, and conquering death that we might have an eternity with God after all things are made new.
The worries and fears of the present age and what might come if we do not act will pass away. The country will continue for some time, but not for long with a group of Christians, to quote C.S. Lewis, “hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break [God]’s commands in the present if by so doing [he] think[s] he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.”
God’s got this. There is no reason to ruin relationships over an election. There is no reason to break God’s commands in the present, including hating your neighbor, to save a temporary world. There is no reason to be so invested in politics that you alienate yourselves from others or fail to glorify God. Your vote for a lesser of two evils does not advance God’s Kingdom. God advances God’s Kingdom.
As we head into the general election season, we pass through Palm Sunday, where crowds cheered the arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem. By Friday, many of the same people who had cheered Jesus were calling for His execution and the liberation of Barrabas, a political prisoner who, I kid you not, had participated in an insurrection.
Pilate, who could not recognize the truth, let the murderous insurrectionist go and handed the innocent Christ over to be executed. But even this was all part of the plan. You do not have to cling to the world. You can cling to Christ.
After all, God’s got this.
