Election 2020: Hype and Hope

By: Chris Johnson

 

Well, here we are in the wake of the presidential election, hanging suspended as we wait for final counts that we can be confident will not be accurate.

No matter where and when you are as you read this, you might be feeling helpless. There’s been a lot of hype regarding this election. Both sides, including ourselves, have called this the most important election of our lifetime. We’ve cast our votes and are hoping a majority of the nation agreed with us. Either way, that one moment of action that we look ahead to and plan and strategize and pray for is past or almost past and all we can do is speculate what the implications of that choice might be.

There has been much written, by us and many others, about the two parties, their candidates, and what they stand for. In this space, I want to provide insight, or a reminder of an insight – that is non-partisan. If your candidate of choice loses, I hope you can draw peace from it, and if he wins, I hope you can pass it on to a friend who disagrees with you.

In the past few years we have seen our society move in an unsustainable direction: everything is politicized, there is no source for unfiltered information, and virtually everyone has a strong opinion. In this context, the presidential election fills our lives as we watch the race progress. We follow the issues and wonder how anyone could see it differently than we do; it seems so clear.

The funny thing is that that is true on both sides of the election. Don’t take this as moral equivocation: one of those sides is wrong and I don’t think it’s mine; but we should be humbled by the fact that both sides are so utterly convinced they’re the good guys. Human beings can fall for anything under the right circumstances.

I think it’s worth examining ourselves in the context of this election. We’ve followed the news. We know each candidate’s proclivities and intentions. We know, or can assume, the affect their policy decisions will have in our own lives. We’ve made predictions on what it will mean for the future of the country and we are likely either filled with hope or dread at the prospect of the next four years.

What does that say about where our hope lies?

If anything has been made clear in the past year, it’s how much of life is utterly outside of the control of anyone who could ever run for president. We’ve spent months and mind-blowing amounts of money trying to contain a virus that just happened to pop up in an election year and then infect the president weeks before the election. In just the past month, the left’s favorite Supreme Court seat is left vacant to be filled with the right’s new favorite Supreme Court Justice. Who could have predicted these things?

Christians know that their timing was not accidental. God writes the best stories and He’s still writing this one. This is why, in part, God gave us His Word. It is filled with impossible situations where all human hope is lost until He saves His people – the Israelites pinched between the Egyptian armies and the Red Sea, the Jews condemned to be murdered by their neighbors by the treachery of Haman, Israel frozen in fear of a gigantic warrior from Gath, the list goes on and on and on.

Christians don’t need their candidate of choice in the White House to flourish; what we need is the Lord’s favor. We’ve worked so hard to get our guy into this possession of authority, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ.

Whoever resides in the White House for the next four years is there because God put him there. Either way, we have our duties to see to in our homes, our churches, our communities, and yes – our nation. We are not called to elect good presidents to change our culture, we are called to be the “salt and light” of the world ourselves.

As Dr. John Piper says, “Political life is for making much of Christ whether the world falls apart or holds together.”

Keep the faith. Put your hope in the King of Kings. What would He have you to do?

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