Our Sovereign God, II

In the face of such sweeping defeats for conservatives, let us not forget that our God is sovereign. God willed that the Democrats should take control over the House, that the very strong pro-life bill in South Dakota should fail, that Arizona should fail to ban homosexual "marriage", and that Missouri should decide to fund the highly immoral embryonic stem cell research. As of this writing, it looks as though Jim Webb will defeat George Allen for senator in Virginia (quite the voter turn-out, it seems; you can't claim that Virginia was half-hearted about this election!). Montana's senator race is still too close to call.

That God is sovereign doesn't prevent me from poking fun at Americans whose memory is rather seive-like. Have we forgotten that the House voted to go to war with a vote of 296-133, and the Senate with a vote of 77-23? That's an overwhelming majority. To then turn right around and claim that the deaths in Iraq (faithfully reported by the extremely biased liberal news media) are the President's fault is much too simplistic. Bush could not have gone to war without the Senate backing him up. Furthermore, to claim that Bush withheld information prior to the war in order to expedite a decision to go to war is ludicrous. The reasoning goes like this: Bush purposely hid information about Iraq so that he could go to war (almost never popular after Vietnam) in order to make his approval rating... plummet. That makes sense. Or did Bush think the war in Iraq would be easy? An easy win, like his father, and therefore the approval ratings would go up. Alas, the Iraqi insurgents learned all too well the lessons of the 1991 war. It would not be so easy this time. I somehow seriously doubt that Bush thought this war would be easy. That he hoped it would be easy is certain: who would not? Bush is smart, so I think he knew it would be difficult. And he did it anyway. And the Senate did it anyway. And now, when the going gets tough, everyone backs out and claims they were never for the war in the first place, or that they were misled by the Bush administration.

Surely even they can see that backing out of Iraq is not the way to go. That will make things much worse. The correct strategy here is carefully to train the Iraqi police and military so that they may defend themselves and their new government. If we back out now, we will have another Vietnam, along with loads of security issues cropping up regularly. That reminds me of a story about Nixon, who got us out of the Vietnam war: a pastor in Vietnam wrote Nixon a letter after the pull-out, telling him that evangelism was now nearly impossible in a nation which resented this incorrect move. He told Nixon that he was praying Nixon would be removed from office, an imprecatory prayer. Then along came Watergate. Interesting, isn't it?

While I wouldn't wish any terrorist attacks on anyone, I will say that Al Qaida is no doubt rejoicing that their staunch allies, the Democrats, have taken the House. If the Dems get the Senate, we can expect Al Qaida to rejoice at that as well. They will be emboldened, and I predict attacks on American soil. I hope that doesn't happen; but if it does, I rather think the Dems will get egg on their face. The Democrats simply have no clue how to fight a war! They do not understand security (as evidenced by Clinton and his treasonous actions with the Chinese), and think that the terrorists will just go away if we don't bother them.

The terrorists are motivated by envy. Most terrorists these days are Muslim, despite what the liberal media would have you believe. Muslims, naturally, believe that their religion is correct and that Christianity is wrong. Ergo, Muslim nations should prosper and Christian nations should not. Muslims believe America is a Christian nation. *snorts* They're wrong, but that's how they view us. America is the most spectacularly successful nation in terms of economics that the world has ever seen. Therefore, Muslim terrorists (I refuse to call them extremists. In terms (solely) of how they interpret the Koran, Muslim terrorists are to Islam what fundamentalists are to Christianity) will attack the United States to show the world that Christianity is wrong, and Islam is correct.

In the final analysis, however, even though I'm mightily disappointed with this election and could wish the American people had been a bit more far-sighted, our God is sovereign. I cannot despair when I think of that. We are in the palm of His hand, and nothing can harm us without His say-so. Since He works everything out for our good (that good being to become more and more like Christ), we can rest easy.

Furthermore, another reason not to get all angry and despairing is that politics is simply insufficient to solve the problems of the United States. Politics could help: we could eliminate the thieving welfare state, we could outlaw abortion and homosexual "marriages", we could get the government out of education and such. But even those things will not change men's hearts. For that you must have the gospel. Praise be to God, even the Democrats right now cannot prevent the spread of the gospel. So I call to you Christians: just keep doing your thing. Evangelize and disciple the people around you. Think through what it means to be a Christian and how that affects everything you do. Rest on God's grace to sanctify you more and more. And pray that God will turn this nation around from its decidedly Roman path downhill.

In Christ.