The Day After the Elections of 2008

I would like to offer some thoughts concerning the election in the United States of America that took place yesterday. It is the morning after, and many people are thinking about important things today.

I would like to offer an apologist's view of what has taken place, and hopefully one that is biblical, one that is consistent with God's revelation. I'd like to begin by reading a psalm, if you don't mind.

I think it will help us to have the appropriate mindset as we consider these things. The second psalm says, Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree.

The Lord said to me, You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Now therefore, O kings, be wise. Be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.

Blessed are all who take refuge in him. These words were written long, long ago. Many kings have come and gone since they were first penned. And indeed, if the Lord tarries, many kings and rulers will come and go until he does come.

But these words remain the same. God is accomplishing his purposes, and the rulers of the earth are wise when they take note of what the Son would have them to do, and they are very unwise when they do otherwise.

Now, two things. I don't want to spend a lot of time because I want to try to communicate just a couple of points as quickly as I can. As many people are very busy today, life goes on, the ministry goes on, and so I want to try to be brief and as concise as possible.

First of all, I have seen online many people appropriately pointing out that we are commanded to pray for our leaders. That is something we do in our church all the time. We pray for our leaders. But I've been somewhat taken aback at the kinds of prayers that I have seen mentioned.

What are we to pray for our leaders? What are we to pray for President-elect Barack Obama? We are talking about a man here who comes from a church that is heretical. The church that he attended for 20 years is not a Christian church.

It may use the name, but in its theology, both in its denominational orientation as well as in the specific application to that particular church, is utterly heretical. A few months ago on The Dividing Line, I read sections from the kind of theology that is promoted in this church, and to me it is utterly disgusting because it's racist theology.

It's theology based upon race, and I don't care if you're black, white, green, or yellow. You base God's truth on your skin color, and you are a heretic. It is blasphemy. God made all men, and Christ by his sacrifice makes men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, a kingdom of priests unto his God.

Don't give me this racism stuff, and yet that is what this church is all about. And so we have a man who comes from a heretical church. He promotes infanticide, the murder of unborn children, not just in the early portions of pregnancy, but in the infanticide, a level of degradation that the Nazis didn't even think of, the murder of a child partially born through the forceful incision of scissors into the child's brain.

It is an inhuman act, and yet Barack Obama has supported keeping this act legal consistently. He likewise promotes the evil of homosexuality and the blasphemy of marriage, marriage an institution of God that God designs for the continuation of the human species and the foundation of human government.

He supports the blasphemy of that institution in extending it to homosexuals. So what should we be praying for for him? Isn't it obvious? First and foremost, our prayer for President Obama is for his conversion.

Certainly he's been given a false gospel. He's been given a false message, and so there needs to be some means, maybe someone in the government that he would now come to know in a better way would be able to explain to him that the gospel isn't about black and white.

It isn't about culture struggles. It's about the lordship of Christ. So we need to pray the man will be converted, that he will repent of his sins, and he will bow his knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the greatest prayer we can pray for any leader, is it not?

Now we recognize that sometimes it's not God's will to bring someone to repentance. We know that only God can grant the gift of repentance, can't grant the gift of faith. And so if he were to continue in his rebellion against God, then what becomes the next prayer?

That God would curb the evil, that God would protect us from evil men, that he would curb that evil and keep that evil from impacting our families, our children, our grandchildren, that that evil would not result in even more little children murdered or little children abused by being put into quote-unquote homosexual couples, marriages, and things like this.

We would pray that God would curb the evil. That is what we should be praying for. But I've already gone longer than I wanted to on the first point. Second point, what we saw yesterday. I get a an email that goes through various pro-life issues and almost everything having to do with the life of the unborn, human dignity, embryonic stem cell research, almost everything was shot down in flames yesterday by a culture that clearly wants to have nothing to do with its Christian roots.

We are living not just in a post-Christian culture, we are living in an anti-Christian culture. Almost every culture that goes post-Christian becomes anti-Christian in the process because our culture has embraced a religious worldview.

It refuses to call it that, but it is clearly a religious worldview that has expressed itself in this election. It's not that this was surprising to many of us, but it has expressed itself with great openness in this election.

To what do I refer? We live in the West. Now America is embracing very quickly the same kind of worldview that is leading to the utter destruction of Europe. It has been said that within a matter of decades we'll be looking at Europistan and that is true because the Darwinian humanism, the secularism of the West, of the EU that we see today, simply cannot stand up against Islam.

It can't do it. It will collapse to it unless God in his mercy brings revival to those lands, of course. It cannot stand up to it. Secular humanism, Darwinian humanism, which removes from mankind the restraint of the recognition that he is the creature of God.

That's not only a restraint upon man's evil, that is also what caused men to accomplish the great things that they accomplished. Once you convince men that they are nothing more than the random result of natural processes that may or may not have taken the form they do, it doesn't matter, they're just the result of the toss of the cosmic dice.

Once they believe that and it becomes ingrained in them to where, well that's what my parents believed, that's what my parents before them believed, and that's where we are. Then issues like life, embryonic stem cell research, the honor that comes with being a creature of God, all that is gone.

There's no basis for that anymore. And we see the results in the defamation of marriage, the murder of unborn children, the greatest good simply becomes what's good for me? I want to keep my 401k healthy and I want to have my iPods and my gadgets and take my vacations and me, me, me, me, me, because there's nothing more than me.

I'm just what I am. There's no purpose in all of this. There's no transcendent meaning. Oh, the impact of this is great all through our culture. I was looking at the fact that in my own state here in Arizona, we passed an amendment to our constitution that simply says marriage is between one man and one woman.

And some of them might say, oh great, that's, that's, that's great. There's a victory right there. Really? I didn't see the final numbers, but last night it was about 45 percent of my fellow citizens said no.

45 percent. And it seems to me that our culture has, has, has reached a tipping point where it's been moving this way, it's moving this way, and then there's a point where it speeds up in its, in its decline.

And I think that's what we just saw, an acceleration. And that means that two years from now, as long as people have enough money and enough signatures, put the initiative back on the ballot and repeal that.

The very fact that almost half the people in my state are willing to overthrow God's definition of marriage, and they know in their heart of hearts, they have consciences, they're, they're created in the image of God, they know this is evil.

And yet they are willing to stand as a citizen and say, nah, I, I don't think we should define marriage that way. What all of this is demonstrating to us? Something I've said many times before, theology matters and theology determines our way of preaching the gospel and our defending the gospel.

We now live in a culture that is presuppositionally opposed, openly and without question to the very concept of God's existence, his creatorship, therefore his ability to give law, and therefore his ability to give meaning to words.

That's why the Constitution is in such danger now, because no one cares what it actually originally meant. Think of the people that Barack Obama will appoint to the Supreme Court and to high places of judgeship in our land.

Unrighteous judges are part of God's wrath upon a people, and words have no meaning any longer. There is no transcendent value, there's no transcendent God that has given meaning to words, and therefore things like the Constitution are, well, they're irrelevant now, are they not?

They can just simply be interpreted to mean whatever we want them to mean in our current situation. What all this means is that we need to approach not just the task of apologetics, but since we now live in such an anti-Christian context, and this hasn't happened last night, this has been happening very rapidly.

I think a lot of Christians are still stuck back in the 1980s, it's not 1980 anymore folks, it's 2008. Much has changed over the past 20 years, much has changed, and we now live in a culture that we must approach presuppositionally, not just in apologetics, but we must approach presuppositionally in the proclamation of the Gospel.

Because see, the Gospel assumes, the Gospel assumes certain things, and our culture has moved so far away from a biblical orientation that it doesn't assume those things anymore. There's no creator God, there's no God who's given his law, there's no law that's been violated, there's no sin, there's no wrath.

If we don't recognize the necessity of seeing that presuppositionally our society lives with its central dogmatic assertion being the suppression of the knowledge of God, our society is building entire structures into itself to assist it in the suppression of the knowledge of God.

Romans chapter 1, what does man do in rebellion against God? He holds down, he suppresses the knowledge of God. That knowledge is still there, but it's being suppressed. And so we, if we do not approach even the proclamation of the Gospel presuppositionally on the basis of the transcendent necessity of the existence of God, for all of human thought to even make any sense, if we don't approach it that way, then what's going to be the result?

Well, we've already seen it. It's called the emergent church. It's called that form of Christianity that adapts itself to the anti-God post-modernism of our society. And the result, of course, is no church at all, no Gospel at all, no repentance, no holiness, just a religious form of our modern culture.

We need to get serious about our faith. We're going to have to count the cost. We all are. If we boldly speak out the truth, we will be accused of hate. And now it seems to me that almost all the restraints are off at keeping us from adopting the very same kind of draconian mind control methodologies that we see taking place in Europe and Canada, where you can have pastors who are fined thousands of dollars for daring to say that we should not expose little children to homosexual propaganda.

Those days, as I've, a lot of people thought, oh, you're just a scaremonger, right? Well, maybe there's a few folks that are going, sounds like it's a little more probable than I thought it was. We as believers must soak ourselves in the Word of God.

We must immerse ourselves in the Word of God so that we are willing to speak as the Word of God speaks. There are so many Christians today who are not willing to call evil evil. Promotion of homosexuality is evil.

It is not some type of morally neutral thing. You cannot show respect toward those who promote evil. Why? I respect your opinion. No, I don't. That opinion is evil. You may have the freedom under our Constitution to express it, but I have the freedom still yet, maybe not for long, to say that it's evil and demonstrate historically that God's people have always said that.

We have to identify what's evil is evil, and we have to remember there is a greater judge than any judge who will be appointed to the Supreme Court. Every judge on the Supreme Court, every leader of this country, every senator, every president will someday stand before a holy God, and we must warn them that they will be judged on the basis of what God has revealed.

God has revealed that we are to protect the innocent, that we are to save life, that we are to stand for justice, and those who promote ungodliness will be judged. Are we better than they? The only reason that we recognize the importance of these things, that we bow to the need of Jesus Christ, is because he's taken out that heart of stone.

He's given us a heart of flesh. We as believers not only must immerse ourselves in the Word of God, but we must live lives that are commensurate with the profession that we're making. Serious times, serious issues.

The Word of God does address all these things. I just pray that we as believers will be strong enough, brave enough, by his Spirit to speak the truth, even when it costs us. Thanks for watching.