Thy Will Be Done In This Election Season

Pre-Election Sermon

In the beginning of human history, or pre-history, to be precise, God created a man and a woman, and, like He did with all other animate creatures, He ordered them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But God gave us humans one more command, to subdue the earth and have dominion over all the living. That is, He put order into the earth and made humanity steward over it.

Adam and Eve fell to the devil’s temptation and the perfect world they received from God became hostile territory. Division marred human affairs, as it still does. Man had conflict with woman. Both man and woman find their passions in conflict with their reason. Conflict between humans leads to theft, abuse, power struggles, war, injury and death. So God gave another gift—His divine law written in our hearts and codified in the Ten Commandments. Each of these commandments, when obeyed, restores part of the order given to us in the beginning. When disobeyed, the natural consequences of that disobedience punish us, and often that leads to grave consequences.

Thus, we see in Deuteronomy that in Moses’ last address to the Hebrew people, this leader repeated the words of the covenant law and laid on them a combination blessing and curse: “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land which you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.”

In other words, blessings on them if they keep the covenant; horrible curses if they disobey.

The moral cycle of the Hebrew people, paralleled by most of the peoples of the world, then played out over the better part of a millennium, and continues to this day. Choosing life, the people find prosperity and happiness follow as the God-ordained order that accompanies civilizations that obey His law make progress. Choosing death by disobedience inevitably leads to disaster.

There’s a commandment to all the people in Leviticus that is worth reading in its entirety: “you shall not lie carnally with your neighbor’s wife and defile yourself with her. You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it: it is perversion. Do not defile yourselves by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves; and the land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”

Molech was, of course, a pagan god. Remnants of shrines to this abomination have been found all over the ancient middle east. Little children were given to the pagan priests, who would cast them into a great furnace made to look like the idol of one or the other gods. They thought that was necessary for the rains to come and make their fields and pastures fertile. But the pagan practices listed in this Scripture were abominations to God, because they represented a human choice for death, not life. For that reason, God took away the pagans’ lands and gave them to the people of Israel.

But the practices of the pagans had an attraction to them, and so the Israelites began to imitate those rites, and fall away from right worship of the True God. The prophets spoke for God and railed against this choice of adultery, death, murder and perversion. But time after time their words were ignored, and the prophets exiled or killed. Eventually, God brought conquerors to Israel and He cast His people into exile. Even the Temple and walls of Jerusalem fell.

Any historian can tell the tale of other civilizations that chose death and fell, either from internal rot or external pressure, or in most cases, both. Perhaps Rome is the most famous. The Romans chose death and their civilization died. Robust family formation leading to a growing population fueled the expansion of their empire. Then their individual choices against life led to fewer children and they were unable to keep control as the barbarian tribes took over their lands and property.