A few years ago in the USA on the National Day of Prayer, Nikki and I attended a prayer rally in a small town in Oregon surrounded by farmers, foresters and other rural folks. In our prayer group, I remember a young cowgirl nearby prayed fervently that God would help stop the efforts of politicians to take away people’s guns.
Then the very next Sunday Nikki and I prayed together with Christians from a very different demographic: urban dwellers from inner-city Seattle who were overwhelmingly African-American. They, in turn, prayed with equal sincerity that God would defeat the plans of the National Rifle Association lobby. In other words, two groups of Christians were praying for God to intervene on two different sides of a hotly contested debate. The debate is so hotly contested, in fact, that I hesitated to write this blog post even though I am not taking sides in this one! But the question here is whether or not God takes sides in this – or any other debate in which godly, sincere people have incompatibly different opinions.
Many Christians clearly do believe that God takes sides in these debates – after all, they pray specifically for His help on their side of the issue! Many other Christians (particularly younger Christians who often have a more post-modern worldview) would argue that these people praying to God about guns and the NRA are wasting their time – they can’t possibly know what God’s opinion on this is, and besides faith and politics don’t mix to begin with.
I would humbly suggest that both views are mistaken to some degree. God does not take sides. Thinking in terms of God taking our side is like thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, that God revolves around us. Nothing could be bigger distortion of reality! Instead, we must work out where God is, and seek to align ourselves with God and with His Truth. And at least to some degree, we CAN discover God’s truth. God wants to reveal himself to us, that is why we have His written word and His incarnate Word, who then left us the Holy Spirit!
But it is precisely around this notion of knowing God’s will “to some degree” that things get interesting. Christians with more “modern” and/or western worldviews tend to be more confident that they can know to a greater degree about God and His plans and purposes. Christians from more “post modern” and/or non-western worldviews tend to be more skeptical that they can know God’s plans and purposes with great precision.
It is easy to rule out the extremes on each side – on the one hand, the over-confidence in knowing God’ s will that characterized many of the abuses of the Crusades. On the other extreme, we can rule out the agnostic who says that we cannot even know if there is a god much less what that god approves or disapproves. But ruling out extremes still leaves a lot of room in the middle to disagree. So maybe what is most important is that we disagree in such a way that God is honored through the disagreement – by treating each other as Christian brothers and sisters who are together struggling to follow our common Lord.
Firstly, that means we need to be commitment to each other in Christ and secondly it means that we need to be commitment to seeking after God’s truth. If we are committed to each other in Christ, than we will seek out and respectfully listen to the voice, experience and biblical understanding of Christians who are not like us. If we are committed to seeking God’s truth, then we are less susceptible to the exaggerations and distortions that discolor so much of our political discourse. Our Christian sister was praying against politicians wanting to take guns away, but there are no politicians pushing bills in congress that would impound guns. Our Christian brother in Seattle spoke and prayed against an NRA that was determined to re-enslave African-Americans, but the NRA has no such plank in their political platform.
Let’s commit ourselves to seeking out Christians who are different from us and then together, as iron sharpens iron, to seek the God of all truth and humbly align ourselves with His purposes. While our disagreements will not simply disappear, they will no longer form a wall of ignorance or fear. After all, the apostle John reminds us, perfect love drives out fear. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:10-11).