Painting a Car with a Hammer

“This is the most important election of our lifetime”

Probably not, but maybe. 

But even if it is, its likely not as important as you think and definitely not important in the way you think. 

Nero’s early empire ruling in Rome was a pretty great time for most everybody. The theater was opened up again. Games returned. Christians were largely left alone and the Jews could start returning to Rome. Everything seemed to be headed in a mostly decent direction. Nero’s “second term” was a different thing altogether (a good reminder is that killing your mother has significant consequences for ones’ leadership). Pretty soon impaled Christians  are being used as torches for garden parties, Nero is forcing renovation projects to significant parts of the city by starting large, devastating fires, and well the whole political machine had went a bit mad. We get some of the best bits of the New Testament as Paul, John and Peter tried to prepare the church for navigating the fiery end of Nero’s “Make Rome Great Again” projects. 

I’m not offering any prophetic insight into what’s coming through either an extended Trump presidency or a Biden one, but I do want to ask everybody (myself included) to take a nice, deep breath and chuckle at ourselves a bit. It can be easy to get enraged or laugh at the other side of this coming election. But I think we need some good universal Christian laughter, the kind of laughter grounded in a healthy view of God as the author of history.  If you find yourself wound up at the latest outrage posted on Facebook by that girl you never really trusted after middle school, I would argue that you’re forgetting a few key things about politics and God. What happens next week in the election (let alone on your facebook feed) matters far less than you probably think it does. And it matters differently than you think it does. Don’t misunderstand me, the election certainly matters. Our elected officials fulfilling their rightly ordained vocations is important for the peace of society. But I think we generally forget some things and over sell some things when we think about who is going to be elected President or who’s running for any other government (be it local, state, or federal) office. 

Firstly - a thing we forget.

God draws straight with crooked lines. The Bible is absolutely clear, God is going to get us where He wants to get us. But he doesn’t usually take the route you’d have taken if you were in charge of the roadtrip map. As the drivers in our family have doubled in the last year, so have the opinions about which route is the best/safest/fastest/prettiest to most everywhere. God loves curveballs, knuckleballs, and taking “wrong” turns (I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but that’s part of what God likes to do as well.) He is generally doing a million things in a situation where we are primarily concerned about only 1 or 2. We’re really hoping for an A on our Physics test, while God is moving the universe around and hoping we see the sun peaking through the clouds in that slim little window that looks out over the park from our classroom. We’re often playing baseball when God is doing something far more interesting - like nuclear physics brain surgery. 

God was acting through the good and the terrible parts of Nero’s reign. It wasn’t his work the first few years and then something out of control the last part. God was strategically acting in all of it. Now it is important to note, that there is such a thing as a norm by which we can assess the good parts and the terrible parts as being good or terrible. But God wasn’t bound in his work by Nero. Nero was a means for God’s good purposes whatever his particular actions and policies. 

At whatever point the election is finalized next week (hopefully!), what we can be sure of is that God has given us what we have. This isn’t to short change anyone’s responsibilities to vote thoughtfully and Christianly, but it is  to say that God is doing something on purpose whomever ends up waking up in the White House this Spring. 

Secondly - Remember what the Magistrate is for. 

In the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom McKenzie asks Jeff Daniels’ character a question loaded with a common and problematic assumption in our day.  She asks, “Is government a force for good or is it every man for himself?” She’s in the middle of a great little monologue that exposes where and how our hope lay for a better world. Both the Right and Left are tempted terribly by the idea that government and politics are tools for the building of their vision of what the world should be. We start with very different visions of the good, the beautiful and true for society, and then we expect a government who will give us that. We subtly begin to believe that the magistrate is the fundamental tool for achieving human flourishing. This is a poisonous religious belief. And it leads directly to the kinds of incoherent and screeching discourse that we find in our politics today. 

The government - whatever its particular design, is incapable of creating human virtue.  It is not made for cultivating love. It will never be very effective at sustaining faith and its attendant obedience to God - necessary conditions for the long-term thriving of humanity as a whole. Economic flourishing can not be created by a government. Neither can social flourishing or real, positive goodness. The sort of generosity where people give of their very lives to one another and where business owners give of their very profits for the further thriving of their employees - neither of these can be created or sustained by governments. Joy-filled, faithful and healthy families cannot be built by the government, even though you cannot have a sound economy or healthy human beings without them. We can try to use government to prop up a society that lacks these things, but very soon such an arrangement will lead to increasingly serious problems. 

There is a subtle belief on the Right, that I witnessed living in various places throughout the U.S. that somehow we can create a good and noble society. We can make families strong. We can end the pervasiveness of pornography and its attendant lusts. We can improve hunting season and make Christmas better. All of this if we can only get the right people into office. This isn’t (obviously) universal, but it is a real temptation and it is founded on a belief that the government can do things that it was never designed by God to do. 

There is a belief on the Left, that I encounter daily living here in Colorado. It is the belief that we can build a good and equitable society by political means. We can end poverty. We can make it so no one feels excluded and everybody is safe - from viruses, from narrow people, and from any future apocalyptic environmental catastrophes. And all of this can be so if we can simply get the right people and policies into the right governmental spot. This isn’t universal, but I will say it is a temptation and a prevalent one on the left. A vision for an activist government virtually requires a belief that government can give us the society that we think we want. 

But this is like painting a car with a hammer. You might smear some paint on there, but your doing the wrong thing. God gave us the magistrate for some fairly specific purposes (to punish evil, protect the innocent, and to protect space wherein liberty and righteousness might flourish) and it was never designed to do the job that the church and the family was made to do. Sorkin’s dichotomy was a false one. In the world that God has made, it is never every man for himself, but neither should we look to the government as our source for the growth of good. 

For far too long we have demanded of our politicians (and they have been eager to oblige) that they promise to create the great society. We demand that they give us hope. We ask them to transform the tattered fabric of our cities, to overcome what amounts to collective sin.  Look at the two campaign slogans on offer from our current candidates: “Battle for the soul of the nation” and “Make America Great Again!” - these are both breathtaking claims. When the magistrate takes up such projects, it never goes well. They cannot do this and we should stop asking them to, in fact we should be far more suspect when they start making those kinds of claims. 

This isn’t to say that Tuesday’s election doesn’t matter for the promotion of a just and good society. Its just to say that it doesn’t matter that way. We should elect magistrates who will do the job that’s been entrusted to them by God, and outlined quite satisfactorily in the Constitution. We should expect of them that they will do the job they’ve been given faithfully. And then we should get busy doing the rather mundane work of raising families, hard work with our minds and hands in the places where God has given us work to do, and learning to live as Christian men and women who love their neighbors and who worship and obey the triune God.  And we should keep doing those things regardless of who wins the presidential election on Tuesday. We should keep pursuing those things no matter what policies or laws or newfangled attempts at transforming society into some utopian and disease-free dream come down the pike. God is on his throne, the president and everybody else answer to him. May we get on with the great work of seeing the world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.