If God placed Trump in office, God put Biden there, too. And Obama before him.
For the past four years, I’ve heard repeatedly from Christians assuring me—and the world—that God himself divinely placed Donald Trump in the White House.
As I’ve said since 2016, I don’t doubt that. That may well have been the case.
You see, I’m not a literalist, but I do take the scriptures seriously. And they tell us to show respect toward all our political leaders because, as St. Paul warned in the book of Romans, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained by God.”
Whoever’s in charge here on Earth was placed in that position by the Lord for his own ends, St. Paul said. Sometimes those ends seem mysterious to us, but then we’re not God. We can’t see everything he sees. He knows what he’s doing; we mainly don’t.
In Paul’s estimation, that principle—“the powers that be are ordained by God”—even applied to pagan governors and caesars who sometimes persecuted the fledgling church (see Romans 13:1). It included Pharaoh, who enslaved God’s own children in Egypt (Romans 9:17, if you’re still following along at home).
Thus their being in a high position didn’t mean they were good people. Some were indeed wonderful leaders, but others were absolutely terrible. (I’m thinking here of Nero. Or Pontius Pilate.)
Still, good or bad, they didn’t gain authority unless the Lord had a purpose in granting it to them, at least for the moment. In the case of Pharaoh, Paul said, God raised him up simply to remind everyone who was boss by publicly smacking him back down again.
I believe what St. Paul said about all this. When people proclaimed that President Trump was God’s man for the hour, I didn’t argue. He might very well have been the Lord’s instrument.
But as I tried without much success to remind some of my fellow Christians four years ago, if Trump was God’s man for that hour, then President Obama by definition must have been God’s man for the previous eight years.
And today, by all indications, Joe Biden will be God’s man for the next few years.
In fact, I think that’s what St. Paul and the New Testament were trying to tell us: We’re not really in charge.
Today, living in a democracy, we do get to vote in elections. I voted this year and I hope you did, too. But ultimately God decides. That’s what St. Paul would say.
Such being the case, we don’t get to claim that God the divinely chose the president when the candidate we favor wins, unless we’re willing to agree God also chose the winner when our team loses.
You can’t say God picked Trump but somehow the devil sneaked Obama or Biden into the Oval Office. You can’t say God chose Obama and Biden but Trump was Satan’s spawn.
If God’s in charge, he’s in charge. If he’s choosing, he’s choosing. If he’s wasn’t powerful enough to choose in 2008 or 2020, then he wasn’t choosing in 2016, either. Or vice versa.
If God is only picking the winner when his choice agrees with mine—then really it must be I who am making the ultimate decision, and God’s occasionally bowing to my sharper judgment. In which case, he’s not God. I’m God.
That point of view—“I’m God and he’s not”—is a nasty little sin called idolatry. It’s dangerous territory to find yourself in.
To steal a well-known Anne Lamott observation, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Or when he only loves the candidates you love and hates the candidates you hate.
My view is that God put Obama in office. And then he put Trump in office. And now he’s put Biden in office. All for his own ends.
Yeah, I’d like to know his reasoning sometimes. I’m 64. I’ve seen a lot of elections great and small. God seems to have picked more than a few ringers. Sometimes I’ve thrown up my hands and said, “Really, Lord? This is the best you could do?”
But it’s always his call to make. He’s God.
Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.
This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 10:57 AM.