Polemics, Christianity & Politics: A Marriage Made in Heaven?

All right, well, I have to confess that while we're talking about Christianity and politics, the only thing closest to political office I ever held was the band president in the ninth grade. So it's not very impressive. It's definitely not on my job resume.

But it is important that we look briefly, because I mean, we could spend probably a whole semester talking about this. But briefly, one of the two taboo subjects, we've already covered various other things that were hot topics, but definitely not so much the taboo things. I guess that's gonna be in the next week time elective when we're gonna talk about sex and other things like that with the family classes. So religion and politics are definitely hot topics. But we really need to, to look at what scripture says about certain things rather than personal experience. I have a subtitle here, Why Jesus Wasn't a Republican or a Democrat.

The truth of the matter is that we have all experienced at some point or another the frustration of looking at our political system here in the United States. And I want to focus this class on the United States political system primarily, because if we look at world politics, we could be here. That's when you need the whole semester. But we're going to narrow it down. Looking at our modern politics and what's there, we've seen our system fail at times.

How many of you have experienced or seen someone who is not of your political persuasion reference President Bush in Christianity? Just a raise of hands. I think that's mostly everybody and if you haven't, maybe you're lucky and you've just not talk to enough people, but it seems like whenever I talk to folks about politics, Bush and Christianity come up. What are some terms that come up when you talk about Christian politics? Can anybody think of some hot words? Tom?

Right-wing extremist. Separation of church and state. Fundamentalists, okay. Radical, right wing, you know, the right wing or the Christian right. Separation of Bush and state. Yeah, separation of Bush and state. Yeah, there's a lot of different terms that come up. Islam definitely comes up. We're supposed to be equated with Islam. Oh yeah, you know, cause you're a fundamentalist.

They wrap them together and blindly distribute the word. Those are all some key things, and actually those I have towards the end of the handout here, so we will take a look at those hopefully. I wanted to briefly take a look at the history of God and politics in scripture, and it's very brief and very selective, because quite frankly there's a lot of interaction throughout the text, but since this isn't going to be a semester-long discussion of Christian politics, I had to whittle it down.

When God created Adam and Eve, did he set Adam up as the first president of the world, or dictator, or anything else? He just set up Adam and had him walk in the garden. Adam's dominion was the garden. It was the whole world, technically, but God set the garden aside for him and made it a place for him to live. Did Adam screw that up? Of course he did, because we live in Colorado. I have to be more broad, because I live in Aurora, but not all of you live in Aurora.

But we don't see government and God really directly dealing and interacting people very intimately with government until 1 Samuel. And I've got here some key verses between 1 Samuel 8-10. I'm not going to go ahead and read the whole thing, but let's take a look at 8, 5-8. here and then discuss what's in this content.

And they said to him, this is the people of Israel speaking to Samuel, Behold, you have grown old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations. But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed to the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Like all the deeds which they have done since the day that I brought them up from Egypt, even to this day, in that they have forsaken me and served our gods, so they are doing to you also."

So here it is, God uses a man centered leadership title for himself in this context. Describing God as king over a small group of people is kind of funny. Here's God, created the whole universe outside of the time-space continuum, and he goes ahead and says, yeah, I was king over Israel. It's ready for a comedy routine, because this is God we're talking about.

Describing him as just king over Israel, it almost seems belittling. except that he chose Israel specifically and special to be his people to represent him in the world. So being their king isn't so little. But here's God, and who wants to have an earthly king? His people. It's Israel. And God says, go ahead and do it.

Yes, Art? the people wanted a king like the other nations, the other nations, non-Jewish, of course, where did they get the idea? Or that must have been just their own, that came about by their own conceivance. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, I would personally consider it to be the arrogance of mankind that leads certain, usually men, but obviously not always men, to go ahead and dominate and want to control. And so, outside of this, here you see, we want to have a king like these other nations.

Every time I see man deviating in such a strong way, it reminds me of Genesis chapter 3, with Eve in the garden. The concept of having the king like all the other nations is so enticing. It looks just like the fruit of of the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil, they're like, but I want to have what they have. I want to have what God has.

There's this idea of, I want my own dominion, I want to be in control of my own destiny and my own stuff. What's funny is that God says, okay, tell them what the king is going to demand of them later on in the passage, and I clipped out the verse, but he says, the king's going to want your sons. He's going to want a tenth of your sons for the military. He's going to want a tenth of what you have from your harvests. He's going to want to have a tenth of whatever you raise for his own.

So how does that equate also with the system in the Old Testament that God set up for the Levites? What is the tithe? Does everybody know the tithe is 10% for the Levites? On top of that, there was other offerings. And then on top of that, now you've got another 10% that you're going to give to the king.

So these people are like, yes, we want at least 20% of our earnings and or things that we grow and raise to be gone. And they're excited about it. How many of you are really excited about the concept of paying more taxes or, you know, we don't get excited about that. But here you see, The people are hungry of it.

They have the choice of submitting to God, who can make perfect, accurate decisions, is already getting 10% for the Levites, and has provided a prophet who can represent Him, at least one in this earlier context, to lead the people, and they're rejecting that for a man-based system. Yes. No, the judges are, let's see here. The judges are earlier, if I'm not mistaken. Is my chronology correct? I don't want to misspeak. Yeah. Yeah.

So the Lord appoints Saul. and Saul is really not so keen on being the king at first. In fact, when it comes down to God appointing Saul as king, Saul is hiding in the baggage. He's hiding. And this is the king that God chose for Israel. And I think it's a sign. If you're ever going to reject God, He's going to show you the character of mankind really fast. He's like, okay, here's the flesh. So, okay, we've got to be quick here. 1 Samuel 8-10, definitely read this at home for your own studying, especially when you're going to find yourself talking about it.

This is an Old Testament context. It's not for New Testament believers, but it is the first recorded, clear giving of a king for saints in the Old Testament. My dad and I talked last night briefly about the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 9, and God establishes capital punishment, and some people call that God's instituting some sort of government. That's a bit of an overstatement to me, so we won't spend any time really looking at that.

But this Samuel passage is definitely very clear. Now, jumping way ahead into what is considered a New Testament book, but still an Old Testament context. We're going to take a look at Matthew 22, 15-21. Then the Pharisees went and plotted together how they might trap Him, Him being Jesus, in what He said. And they sent their disciples to Him along with the Herodians, saying, Teacher, We know that you are truthful, and teach the way of God in truth, and defer to one, or to no one, for you are not partial to any.

Tell us then, what do you think? Is it lawful to give a poll tax to Caesar or not? But Jesus perceived their malice and said, Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the poll tax. And they brought him a denarius. And he said to them, Whose likeness and inscription is this? And they said to him, Caesar's. Then he said to them, Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

Now, this doesn't right off sound like it's tied to politics. It sounds like it's more tied to taxes, which is kind of like politics. How many of you are familiar with this passage in Matthew, or the other cross-references? Just for the sake of it, what is the purpose of Christ's statement to this group of Pharisees? What is he saying about the Denarius and mankind.

Caesar represents the government. Whose image was on the coin? He asks them. Caesar's. Whose image is on you? Whose image are you made in? You are made in the image of God, in referencing Genesis 1.26. Let us make man in our image. So Jesus comes and he says, whose image is this? It's Caesar's, it's got his image, give it to Caesar. Whose image are you made in? Who are you giving yourself to?

Man-made governments are often a distraction for us, as citizens, if we're not involved actively in a political organization and we often get distracted by taxes or we get distracted by, you know, who's going to be the next governor of Colorado. Or in fact, I had dinner with the case family last night and as we were driving along Crystal asked, so who do you think we should vote for for governor in Colorado? And I was like, I haven't even studied it myself, which is something I need to do before the election.

But the truth of the matter is that in this context, The government is its own entity, and as believers we're created in God's image, and we may interact with that government, but we need to be careful that we don't pour ourselves into what is man-made when our focus, as Colossians 3 says, or 3.1-3 says, should be heavenward. Does that make sense here? The truth of the matter is that politics isn't evil by itself as a concept. But where is our focus supposed to be? This is pre-Colossians 3, but Christ is already dealing with the issue. You're made in God's image.

When you talk about politics and government, you need to have that as your context. I can see how a Christian in politics would be in a very, very difficult position, because if that was your job, as it were, to maintain your focus on the Lord and do your job, it's got to be really hard. Yeah. Well, and obviously it depends on what the position is, because, you know, in a federal level, you're going to deal with a lot more pressure than maybe being a local a person doing something like on a city council, you're still going to deal with some high pressure situations, but it may not be at the level of some other things.

I wanted to take a quick look at Acts chapter 19, which is a whole chapter, so it's kind of hard to be super quick, but let's discuss a summary of it. Paul is in Ephesus. and he spends several years there teaching. Paul has been there for several years. This took place for two years, so that all who lived in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks. because Paul is spending time here in Ephesus.

All right. And then he's ready to move on. And then the politics comes out after two years. It's like, you'd think this, this should have happened within like two days or two months or two weeks, but no, this is after two years versus 23 through 41. Um, I'll, I'll just go ahead and start reading this about that time.

There occurred no small disturbance concerning the way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, was bringing no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together with the workmen of similar trades and said, men, you know that our prosperity depends upon this business. He's really honest and straightforward and says, it's a business. The whole fact that Artemis could or may or may not be a deity is really of second importance.

He figures, again, by the purse or the pocket book, he knows exactly where the priority is. And they rile people together and they have an assembly and they go into the local coliseum or theater and have a bit of a ruckus. So here's Christianity and an entire city up in arms because of what Paul's been doing that's saying that their religious ideas are not true.

Do we deal with that in our modern culture where religious ideas are considered to be opinion? And your opinion and my opinion, they're all the same. And how dare you say that my opinion is wrong? I mean, do we not face that on a very regular basis when we deal with either the public or the media or friends or family?

Especially if you have a non-believing family, it's very easy to to have them wheeled that at you. It's this, oh, that's your opinion kind of a thing. So after two hours of rioting, they quiet it down. And the meeting is dismissed. Or at the theater, this very charged up group of people is dismissed. In this context, we can see a historical document of Christianity upsetting people in an entire city.

And the question that I have to ask you is, is what you believe that upsetting to those around you today in modern America? Do you find yourself upsetting people that extremely with your faith? And I'm not saying that if you don't, that there's something wrong with you. I'm asking you, is what you believe that upsetting to people anymore?

So there are definitely some circles, particularly if we stay within a Christian circle of friends, it's not a big deal. When I go down to Texas and discuss things with some of my friends and coworkers down there, usually once our workday is over, since I'm down there for you know, several days, and I sleep at a hotel, and, you know, what do you do when work's over? We go out and spend time with other people who are down there doing the same thing. Almost 100% of the time, we end up talking about politics or religion or world politics and religion together, and it definitely stirs some emotions. It definitely gets people worked up, and they see financial things tied in with it, just like this. It affects their whole worldview. Your Christianity doesn't just have a political tinge to it, it affects your whole life. Here, this affected a whole city.

What is Ephesus doing now, today? The city of Ephesus, or the place in Turkey. How many churches are there? I think you could say zero, if I'm not mistaken. They may have old buildings, but haven't they been converted to Islam? Yeah, Doug, are there still churches? I mean, there may be missionaries doing some mission work. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

But living in Turkey, her husband is Turkish. He's a former Muslim and is now a believer. But everything that they do can have a system around in Turkey. They've got to be very quiet about it. They cannot, I mean, they would definitely be, you know, probably killed. He played professional soccer on a Turkish team. And they seem to know that he It's their own personal secret sort of, huh?

Yeah. Primarily, yeah, definitely. But you can see that the political environment and the religious environment of a place are often very well tied together. You know, it's funny, I was talking to a friend who's an agnostic, I think, And I said, it just seems like more and more of the world is either agnostic or atheistic that I come in contact with in a Western context, not necessarily Islam in the Middle East. Well, that's exactly what Islam is. Is what?

Altogether. Yeah, it's unified. But her perspective is that more and more of what she's coming in contact with is conservative Christianity, which is like, wow, I wish that I could say the same, but I just don't perceive it. But it's a difference in experience. We'll see what ends up being the case with that. I actually want to skip The Romans 13 passage, it's definitely important, but I'll summarize it and say that Paul says that we as believers should be subjecting ourselves to the government because God has instituted who's in control and who's in leadership because of his sovereignty and his work. And I also want to skip the historical Christianity and politics section there.

It's brief. But I think really what we ought to take a look at is what I've got here in this section, modern issues, because those are ones that we need to be aware of. Brian and Julia, we talked about them during the prayer request time, are living in South Carolina, right? They're in North Carolina? Okay, I'm sorry. I gotta update my memory map. Okay, South Carolina is actually, No, I'm talking about South Carolina. South Carolina is actually gaining a large number of covenant or reformed Christians because of this theonomist movement. How many of you have heard of theonomists or theonomy?

This is the idea that people in our American society and in the world as a whole, once they can get control of it, should live under most or at least part of the Old Testament law and use the Old Testament law as a governing set of rules for society. Now, they of course reject certain very Jewish things like clothes you should be wearing and the way you cut your hair, but they really like the Ten Commandments. Those are our favorites. And so there's this group of people that think that Christians, okay, believers, should be under the law, should be living under the law, and that all people, even if you're not a Christian, should still be living under the law.

And they want you to move to South Carolina and help them wrest control of the state from the pagans and participate in this. Now, they have a website. It's called ChristianExodus.org. I ran across this several years back. I wrote about it on my website and immediately got some very angry people who were from this organization coming to my website and giving me a good thrashing because I obviously didn't understand God's Word, I obviously didn't understand how holy the law was, and I obviously didn't understand why I needed to move to South Carolina.

So, definitely I would recommend looking into this, but as a believer, you need to be prepared on some level to discuss with people the importance of the Old Testament law in the Old Testament, but the importance of grace and living by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. If everybody who is a believer moved to South Carolina, How would we affect Colorado, or Texas, or California, or maybe the rest of the world outside of the United States?

We have missionaries that go out. I mean, Brad and April, y'all went to South Carolina, South Korea. They're kind of the same. They have South in them. And you did missions work there, and you were involved with a local body there, and you were reaching out for Christ. What were you thinking? You should have been in South Carolina.

But the truth of the matter is that this is a group that is working very hard to get believers to act. And at first, it sounds kind of appealing to some folks. I can move to a Christian community. That's kind of the way they build themselves. Yeah, Tom. Jim Jones, yeah. It is similar in that we're gonna go start our own community that's gonna do it the right way.

Definitely what's happening within, there was a Mormon guy that was recently caught near Las Vegas, ironically, who has his own fundamentalist group of Mormons that, The phone's ringing, okay. But he was caught there and he's got a group in Waco, which is really a bad place. I don't know why people would still want to build a religious cult in Waco. They tried that once, didn't end well. But here you have these groups and they want to just go isolate themselves. It becomes very problematic and it also makes you an easy target.

We have the military power in the United States to take out a state. You know, I mean, we really do. And so it'd be easy to say, well, okay, we're done with the theonomists. But so how would you deal with coming in contact with somebody who is a theonomist who comes and tells you you need to move to South Carolina? How would you answer that? Tom.

We're not under law, but under grace. But don't you want to have everybody else around you to be living by what God has instituted? I'm playing the devil's advocate, so to speak. Are you allowed to do that as a Sunday school teacher who's hopefully abiding? And then who needs to decide which one is right?

Because the guy who started Pizza Hut? Oh, I don't know. Domino's. Domino's Pizza wants to start a community that is all Catholic and only functions under Catholic rules? Well, that's convenient for him and his billion-dollar company, but... I'm sorry, but... Should we be pre-theonomists or...? Dominant pizza. Dominant pizza, yeah. Yeah, the Amish folks. Yeah.

How do you interact with somebody like that? This comes down to, again, when we've talked briefly about covenant theology versus dispensational theology, which tends to be the view here at Holly Hills, You need to understand hermeneutics. Like I said before, please, if you have not already done so, take the hermeneutics class. Get the tapes or listen to CDs or whatever you need to do to get a hold of the material.

Understand how to rightly divide the Word of God and make the important distinctions that are there and say, the Old Testament law is clearly not for believers. For example, read Galatians. Or read Romans 6, where you are dead to the law and the life of sin that's associated with it, and you are alive in Christ. You live by the Holy Spirit. Is the Holy Spirit bound to 613 Old Testament laws? I am certainly glad to say no. So as a citizen, if I'm abiding and the Holy Spirit is working through me, then I am going to be operating in my community in a godly fashion, and hopefully that will be beneficial for my society that I'm part of.

It's definitely an issue. So dealing with a theonomist, you need to be able to go back into the Old Testament and prove to them that it was written to the Jews, for the Jews, and that they are not associated with the Old Testament Judaism, and instead are associated with the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit in a New Testament context. So when you're discussing it, get ready for probably hours and weeks of time invested into somebody trying to discuss these things. Next issue. This is definitely a hot potato and has been for a long time and will probably continue to be until either the rapture or the United States goes out of existence or whatever.

Separation of church and state. How many of you have heard this used like, you know, every time Christianity comes up, we have to talk about separation of church and state or Islam for that matter. or Judaism, or any religious group, separation of church and state. How many of you want us to take, in God we trust, off of our currency, because that's separation of church and state? Things like that, it comes up over and over, because there are religious elements on our currency, and in our I ended up editing it out of here because I had five pages already, but if we look at the Declaration of Independence, who is cited as giving mankind the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? the creator or God, okay? There's this whole theistic or deistic idea that's built into it.

How do you deal with that in a separation of church and state? What was the purpose of the First Amendment since we're all law students? I think you could say that pretty strongly. That's definitely what I was looking for as an answer to my question.

Yeah, no state religion. Actually, no establishment of a federal religion. Yeah, federal religion. Most of the states had state religions for the particular state, and that was maintained until the early 1800s. Wow. Even after the First Amendment was passed, most of the states had and maintained Some sort of... State instituted religion. Specifically a Christian denomination. It's varied from one state to the next.

Wow. I see. They didn't teach me that in all my history classes. I think a lot of that came from the fact that many of them came over from England and they didn't like the church thing. Sure. Yeah. They saw the problem of, and I cut over it because we're out of time, but you look at what happened during European history where you have the Inquisition taking place where they're going in under the name of the church and torturing people, making sure that they'll all Well, they saw that as a problem.

You look at various groups. The Crusades are often cited every time I talk to a non-Christian about Christianity. They talk about the Crusades, it seems. Well, look what your people did. They pull that out as if it's such a strong and powerful argument.

When we deal with separation of church and state, I have a little second half paragraph, if you can call it that here, where it says, when the government makes laws about employment that affect churches, they have violated this First Amendment because the state is now forcing things onto the religious group.

I know that there were lots of people concerned with, okay, now you have to be able to hire somebody who's homosexual. for a job. Well, if you happen to be part of a denomination that's not friendly to homosexuality, how do you deal with that? Can this homosexual person sue you for literally millions of dollars for discrimination and shut your church down because you believe that the Bible says there's no justification for a homosexual lifestyle in a Christian context? How do you deal with that? What do you do?

We can't. As a citizen, if the government steps in, they're the government. They can make those rules. Or at least they seem to exercise the authority. And we have not, as a group of citizens, rejected that as voters in the United States. We have not pursued our assemblymen appropriately or our congressman in such a way that we have a law passed that clearly and explicitly states that churches may discriminate in their hiring.

It's something that's there. But it's important when you're discussing with somebody Christianity and politics that you be able to intellectually discuss some of these issues. How about other hot topics like stem cell research? How many of you have gotten into discussions with folks about that. That's definitely politically charged. Yeah. For the Rocky Mountain group, yeah, about stem cell research.

And the thing is that you have somebody like George Bush who makes very strong statements about it. And then I hear somebody like Bob Eccles making other strong statements about it in different directions with more, hands-on understanding being a research doctor. And quite frankly, I'm more inclined to talk to and believe Bob Eccle because he's there, and understands it, than I am President Bush, who's dealing with nine million political issues, things we know about, things we don't know about, and whatever else. It's very awkward, though, as a believer, because somebody says, that's George Bush, he says he's a Christian, or people say he's a Christian, and you say you're a Christian, and then you get equated with it. There you go. Now you and George Bush believe the same thing. Are you ready for that? Okay, that's what's happening sometimes in our culture. And so we need to be ready to intellectually discuss these political issues with a context that's biblical.

Does the Bible talk about stem cell research? So you can't go quoting some passage in scripture. It's not directly that says stem cell research. You might be able to talk about certain things. We could talk about how important baby's lives are or something, but when it comes down to it, the Bible doesn't say stem cell research. But it does have things that impact how we would look at that.

I did want to take a quick look at political parties. How many of you think Jesus would have been a Democrat, and how many of you think he'd be a Republican? Ready, say, who thinks he'd be a Democrat? Nobody. Who thinks he'd be a Republican? Wow, still nobody. That's really good. I'm impressed. I expected at least one hand. Okay. Sorry, that was my cell phone. All right, so back to page five.

The fact that Jesus would have voted for neither of the parties is simply because they didn't exist when he was around. But trying to associate Christ with a certain political party based on scripture is eisegesis, which is pronounced sort of like icy Jesus, which is a slippery slope of conjecture.

Political parties seek solutions through human means. Did Jesus do that? When he was on the earth, did Jesus seek human solutions to human problems? The answer is no to that. And it's important as believers, when we looked at theonomy, that is humans seeking human solutions to human problems, and they try to use Christianity, you know, in quotes, to make it justifiable in a Christian context. It's Christian. that it must be good. Is that what Christ did?

In fact, when Christ comes in contact with politicians, at the end of his life here, as he's dealing with Pilate, Christ deals with Pilate. What does Pilate say about truth? Here he is, he's leading this whole region of the Roman Empire, and Pilate asks, what is truth? And you're like, wow. So you could see the disparity between Christ, who's standing for religious truth and absolute truth, which would be philosophically absolute truth as well, and Pilate, who doesn't even know what philosophical truth is as a concept.

And you've got this political juncture where Christ doesn't even care about the political side of things. Pilate levels statements against Christ that he's being accused for, and Jesus says it's true. That's it. So does Jesus deal with politics when he gets to Pilate? He doesn't. His authority comes from God. Jesus doesn't spend his time dealing with politics. When is Jesus going to deal with politics?

The millennium. Jesus is going to come down and he's going to reign. And guess what? It won't be like politics. It will be perfect implementation of government from the perfect governor that will rule the world perfectly. And we get to watch in awe and amazement. Yes, his vote matters. His vote counts.

And we won't have to worry about the electoral college or things like that. And I get people riled up. So political parties, when it comes down to it, Don't buy in. I don't care how attractive the book author is or how eloquent he speaks. Don't buy into the Jesus would be a Republican or Jesus would be a Democrat thing. I know Pat Robertson definitely has influenced that with the Christian Coalition. How many of you are familiar with the Christian Coalition? Hopefully most of you, if you're voters. John, you'll someday be bored out of your mind with it. He'd be an independent, he'd be like Ross Perot.

He'd just come in with, no, Jesus doesn't have big ears like that. I'm pretty sure of it. At least none of the paintings of the white Jesus I've seen have big ears. But I shouldn't say that stuff, Lord forgive me. When you're dealing with political parties, don't buy into Jesus being affiliated with a political party.

It's used often to manipulate people. It really is. And be careful and wary as a voter. When you see somebody representing Christianity and a political party running for a political office, then we should be extra careful as we evaluate their abilities because not only will they be representing political party, they will be representing Christ where they're at. There have been times, and I'm going to I'm going to reveal too much information.

No, there have been times when I have voted for somebody who is running on the Democrat ticket because I felt they were qualified for whatever their position was way better than the person running either independently or Republican ticket. As a voter, I did not care about their party. I cared about their abilities because that's the way that I was raised to think. None of the people in this particular election were believers. What do I do as a believer in the context of dealing with non-believers? How do I handle them? Do I look at them in the context of Romans chapter one, which we talked about at the very beginning of the apologetics series?

Yeah. I'm thinking that Peter addressed some of this in 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 13 and 14 and maybe even 15. He said lay yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king, as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of Hebrews. just such as the word of God, that how doing right may silence the ignorance of foolish men. Yep. And this passage of 1 Peter 2, 13 through 15, it was parallel to Romans chapter 13, which I definitely would recommend, again, folks read.

We're out of time. I think people are waiting to get in here and I'm long-winded as usual. But when it comes to politics and Christianity, the answer is the Holy Spirit. If we boil it down to us abiding in the Holy Spirit and looking at the circumstance as what does God say about the situation, all we can do is sit and rest in His will.

Is that any different from any other part of our lives? We should still be resting in our position in Christ, abiding. So, when it comes to politics, Remember that Jesus votes independent. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't. But no, we need to abide in the Holy Spirit and that's gonna affect our politics just like everything else. Let's close and go before the Lord.

Heavenly Father, we ask that you'd just help us to continue to study your word as we go throughout the week and look at how you affect each area of our lives, including politics. We just pray that you would be lifted up and we thank you in Jesus' name, amen.