Dear Church –
Sorry, I can’t stew with you. All I got for you on this fraught-with-anxiety election day is encouragement. And encouragement from a surprising source, since it comes out of the worst voting fiasco in the history of the world.
Worst, are you sure?
Yes, and whatever’s second place isn’t even close. I’m talking about the day when the voters chose this man: “Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas.” Luke 23:18
Three encouraging lines of thinking from that dreadful election day:
ONE: Here we have another piece of evidence that God knows exactly who He’s dealing with when He comes after humans (us). Smack in the middle of the Biblical uber-story, God has us on record choosing a murderer over Him. Read that sentence again. More than anyone He has firsthand knowledge that we errant image-bearers are capable of staggering errors of judgment when deciding what’s best for us.
Now… do you really suppose God thinks that in the time between Barabbas and Nov 5, 2024 humans have grown out of our anti-life thinking, so now He could safely leave us to vote our way into Paradise? He knows our frame/ he is mindful that we are dust. Psalm 103:14
The old confessional prayer goes: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.
Add this today: O Lord, have mercy upon us, we’re still miserable voters.
TWO: It’s also strangely encouraging to remember that our voting choices have real-life consequences. Luke 19: 41ff – And when [Jesus] drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side, and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
In casting their vote for Barabbas, Jesus perceived that Jerusalem was unleashing a series of events that would end in their absolute calamity. Great tribulation was now on its way, trouble “such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now” (Matthew 24: 21).
In other words, Jesus is saying: your vote matters!
Ok, but why is that encouraging? Sometimes we Christians, eager to assure ourselves that God is sovereign and most certainly will have His final victory, imagine that every stage until that victory will be generally positive. Which means (we continue to imagine), God will of course protect us against our own bad judgment. He’ll enfold our decisions into his sovereign goodness so that even our worst decisions won’t cause any harm. Our vote ultimately doesn’t matter.
But no…we forget that God has invested image-bearers with the great dignity of causality: what we decide (or who we vote for today!) will make an actual difference for great good, or for kinda good, or for better than it coulda been…or even for terror.
God put man in a garden and gave him the power of choice in caring for it. In choosing, we could tend our garden such that more than we could possibly imagine are benefitted; we can also unleash scary consequences into our lives, our families, our nation, our globe.
That humans in the 21st century still have the kind of sway to trigger blessing or calamity means the pillars of the earth that God established the first week of the world hold fast. So…odd to say, but still: thanks be to God for taking us deadly seriously, for granting and retaining our agency to effect good and evil.
Vote wisely.
THREE: Finally, and you probably already have sensed the finally. What was the ultimate result of the worst voting catastrophe in the history of the world? The world was saved. The cosmos is kept from chaos. The image bearers are forgiven and restored to God’s right hand, even now being trained to rule the cosmos in His name.
Without taking anything away from the reality of immediate and intervening consequences of our choices (see point 2), through the Barabbas vote God glorified himself as Lord Almighty over history and evil and consequences. What the voters meant for evil, God intended for good. Where sin rose up, grace rose up even higher.
Brothers and sisters, ultimately what is decided today in elections throughout the USA will become in the Almighty’s hands another positive step forward in the great adventure of God’s glorious victory in saving the Creation from sin, anti-creation and Satan.
Jesus is Lord!
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