Conflating Christ with One's Preferred Politics
Breaking God's Heart
I hope my friends, Christian and non-Christian might find this interesting.
When the risen Jesus ascended to heaven, Revelation 13 tells us that Satan was finally, definitively cast from the heavenly counsels.
Confined to the earth, Satan decided to unleash two beasts on the earth in order to tempt and harry the human race. These beasts will continue to bedevil the Church and the world until Christ returns on the Last Day of this Creation as Jesus judges the living and the dead and ushers in the new heaven and the new earth.
The first beast is the "political" or "worldly" beast. This beast posits significance and life to this world and to earthly kings, political leaders, and human superstars.
God has mandated that there be governments in the world for two reasons: to curb us sinners intent on not loving God or loving others and to protect those who seek to follow Christ in humility.
When we give our ultimate allegiance to any human or any human institution--governments, parties, ideologies, possessions, power, political candidates—we turn from God. We lose the life, significance, and forgiveness that God alone can give. We violate the First Commandment, which is violated not only when we put something ahead of God, which is idolatry, but also when we put something on an equal plain with God, which is syncretism.
The latter is wrong even if the other thing is our family, our country, or our righteous cause. As C.S. Lewis noted, any time Christians follow "Jesus and...," Jesus is lost to us. They fall into apostasy, backsliding away from God.
To buttress the influence and power of the first beast for tearing human beings away from the God revealed in Jesus Christ, Satan unleashed a second beast, according to Revelation 13: the religious beast. The purpose of this beast is to legitimize the pretense of deity on the part of the political beast.
The mission of the Church is to spread the good news--the Gospel--that Jesus Christ, God the Son, died and rose for sinners like you and me so that all who, by the power of this Gospel Word, turn from sin and death (which is repentance) and believe in Jesus, will not be condemned to hell and eternal separation from God but live with God in His perfect Kingdom forever.
But the second beast wants to turn those inclined toward faith in Jesus away from faith and toward things like influencing the world to be moral, taking political power, taking economic power, and ensuring the election of "decent people."
Although Christians are free to serve state, the world will not be saved from sin and death by the possession of political power!
Christians and our witness for Christ are most influential when we, in humility and weakness, counting our neighbors as better than ourselves (Philippians 2:4-11), share God the Son Who saved us from sin and death.
That's when our witness as strong. As the apostle Paul, the Jewish evangelist to Gentiles, said, "I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong..." (2 Corinthians 12:9-11)
Christ's strength, glory, love, and grace can only be seen in humble Christians seeking to serve and love God and neighbor, not in religionists wearing Jesus veneers seeking power for their political agendas.
Today, a group of evangelical Christians gathered to pray for America's atonement and conflated that with electing a particular candidate for the presidency.
Friends, I don’t care what your politics are, this is syncretism and idolatry.
It’s heartbreaking to see Christians conflate worship of the God revealed in Jesus Christ with their political preferences, whether they're “progressive Christians” or “Christian nationalists.”
I'm sure it breaks God's heart too.
