“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”
1 Timothy 2:1-2 ESV
In these verses Paul is commending the reader to pray for governing leaders to honor the Lord with their lives and in their governance to maintain freedom for living an earnest Christian life. As Christians we must live godly, dignified lives, working hard, and living at peace with all people as far as it is within our power. Wicked and corrupt leaders can make this difficult or impossible. Ungodly leaders elevate themselves to the place of God, create their own morality, and are threatened by the reality of a living creator God. Ungodly leaders make and enforce ungodly laws that protect and foster sexual sin, violence, death, shackling the Christian church, and promoting unlimited government. This is not a new phenomenon but has been happening since the time of Jesus and before.
It is important to remember a few big issues in each election cycle. First, in the history of the world, it is exceptionally rare that citizens have had the opportunity to directly participate in government through voting. As tiresome as never-ending political media can be, I believe we are missing out on a great privilege to not vote as Christians for Christian moral issues when we have the opportunity. We want to see the will of God done on earth as it is in heaven. This will never be accomplished perfectly, but progress can be made, and Scripture tells us clearly about many aspects of God’s moral will. Moral imperatives clearly expressed in Scripture become hot button political issues because they hem in the actions of rebellious people that hate God and reject His ways.
There are at least five central issues of Christian morality at stake in our time. First, the perennial issue that human life begins at conception. There is no other place to logically begin speaking about human life. All other arguments relating to various weeks of development are arbitrary and related to justifications for why it may be morally permissible to kill an unborn child. From conception to birth is the gestation period of a human baby to reach viability outside the womb. This period of gestation is ever decreasing with modern NICU medicine. The idea of human life beginning at conception means that we must mourn the sadness of miscarriage. We must see abortion pills as just that – abortion. Just because the baby is small, does not mean it is not a baby. In various medical fertility procedures, it is wrong to fertilize many eggs, producing many human lives, only to choose the ones you want and destroy the rest. If artificial means of fertility are used, all fertilized eggs must have an opportunity to live. It is wrong to consider killing a child that could clearly live if placed in a NICU. Taking the elective choice of death into the hand of the parent is a form of eugenics and is wrong. As Christians we must be solidly pro-life.
Second, as Christians we must live sexually pure lives and have a clear definition of unchanging gender. These issues are clearly and plainly defined in the Bible. The issue is not that they are unclear from Scripture, but unpopular with culture. Our culture is trying with all its might to redefine sexuality as a non-moral issue and to declare gender a fluid matter determined by the individual. The Bible declares the exact opposite – that sexual actions are one of the most powerfully moral actions and that gender is determined by God with fixed roles. It’s not hard to gather from the countless admonitions in the Bible that sexuality was designed by God to be good but only expressed within the committed bounds of one biological man and one biological woman marriage. All else is sin. Concerning gender, the Bible is also clear that from the beginning, God created people as male or female. We must submit to God’s purpose for our lives and live within the gender God has assigned us. All attempts at gender transformation are delusional and result in self-harm.
Third, as Christians we must value children from conception and raise them as best we can in the context of the Christian home. God has ordained that children be raised by parents. Parenting is hard work and always done imperfectly, but no one can love, discipline, and care for a child better than that child’s parent – the state cannot, and paid workers cannot. The state does not have the right to displace parents from making parental decisions in the life of their child, unless the parent is in some way harming the child. However, harm must be defined as it has been classically: physical abuse, verbal abuse, or neglect of basic needs. The rights of a parent should not be cut short because they live at odds with non-Christian culture.
Fourth, as Christians we must have firmly fixed in our hearts that God-Almighty is the final authority in this world. Those who reject God will place government in the role of final authority, and God will be portrayed as a convenient fiction. As Christians we do not look to government to meet our needs or as the great hope of solving our life struggles. As Christians we look to God our Father to give us our “daily bread” and we pray to Him as our hope in time of struggle and anxiety. Two very important issues arise here for Christians. The first is religious liberty. This means in the end that government has no right to shape or restrain our worship to God. What God has required of us, we must do no matter what prohibitions are put on us by government. This then relates directly to the final matter that Christians must always strive for, which is limited government. As government grows, it does not get better.
When we vote for candidates, we are voting for people. People are imperfect and governments made of people are imperfect, but government has direction. It is either moving toward the biblical moral ground I stated above or away from it. As Christians we should hold an “all or something” instead of an “all or nothing” stance. We are seeking progress in the right moral direction, not perfection before reaching heaven. We are seeking the freedom to live a peaceful, quiet, godly, and dignified life.
May God bless America,
Pastor Vic