Someone e-mailed me one of those viral forwards urging us to “refuse” to accept one of those new George Washington dollars because it doesn’t say IN GOD WE TRUST on it. The idea of the e-mail forward is that we can make the world a better place. Really? A better place? Would this not just serve as a “witness” to cashiers all over the world that all Christians are jerks and idiots? (And by “jerks” I mean it in the network-TV-censorsed Marty McFly sense—”What happens to us in the future, do we all become jerks or something?”)
The funny thing is, IN GOD WE TRUST is on the coins, but it’s placing cleverly on the outside edge, following the model of the British 2-pound coins.
I actually listened to a Q & A session from John MacArthur at the Shepherds Conference in which someone asked him a question about politics and he said something along the lines of, which singular person has the job of president of the United States for 4 or 8 years matters very little in the scheme of things. He laughed it off and moved on to the next question (in this same session he spent like 15 minutes talking about his pens). This article is about how much more important the cause of Christ is than one temporal election season. I encourage you to read it.
When the church takes a stance that emphasizes political activism and social moralizing, it always diverts energy and resources away from evangelization. Such an antagonistic position toward the established secular culture invariably leads believers to feel hostile not only to unsaved government leaders with whom they disagree, but also antagonistic toward the unsaved residents of that culture—neighbors and fellow citizens they ought to love, pray for, and share the gospel with. To me it is unthinkable that we become enemies of the very people we seek to win to Christ, our potential brothers and sisters in the Lord.
And this, from musician Shaun Groves:
I understand wanting to vote for someone under whom Christianity would flourish. I get that. Let me think about who that might be for a second. OK, well, because of what history teaches us about the conditions under which Christianity thrives you might want to vote for a guy or girl who will lock up our churches, strip us of our freedoms, imprison us for praying, and is a bit of a psychotic pyromaniac [like Nero]. That’s the kind of guy whose intolerance and brutality helped turn a Jewish cult into a major world religion. God and His Church have never needed a president’s or Caesar’s support in order to survive.