What is the most important thing that is happening this week? All eyes have been on Washington for the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president again. I notice there was some controversy about Franklin Graham saying that God had raised Trump up. I agree with my friend Steve Kneale here. We can talk about God being sovereign and raising up world leaders to fulfil his purposes, whatever we think and feel about their character, ideology and agenda.
This is why I’ve argued that it is legitimate to refuse the choice if it seems to be a choice between the lesser of two evils. After all, God’s people in the Bible didn’t get to choose their rulers. Once the person is in office though, you respect the office and submit to the authorities in so far as they do not tell you to go against God’s commands.
Now it is important to be clear too about what that means. As well as meaning that recognising God’s sovereignty does not mean that God is raising them up for the purpose of fulfilling their own political agenda, or that their agenda is a good thing. I don’t for one minute think that God’s concern is to “Make America Great Again.”
Our church have been spending time in the post Exile books of the bible, particularly Haggai and Nehemiah. The big picture is that God raised up powerful Persian emperors, Cyrus, Darius, Artaxerxes leading to great geopolitical shifts, notably the fall of the Babylonian Empire. However, something that looked smaller but was actually far bigger. God’s focus, the very purpose he raised these men up was so that his people would return to their land and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. From a secular historical perspective, the important stuff seems to have been happening in the capital city of the Empire and on its frontiers as furtherconquest happened. However, from God’s perspective, what really mattered was his purpose for this tiny little province, a depopulated outpost of the empire. Of course his purpose was even bigger than the return of the people and rebuilding of the city, his plan was for something that would seem smaller still, the birth of a baby in that provincial backwater in an ordinary family home in a much smaller town than Jerusalem.
Back in 2008 the world’s financial markets crashed, a global credit crunch was followed by world wide recession. History books in the future will focus on the big political events, the end of the Bush era, Barak Obama’s historic election victory and maybe even the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown claiming to have saved both the banks and the World. That stuff looked big. However, there were other things happening that looked smaller. We got a glimpse of this about 7 years later. One Sunday a South American man turned up at church, someone sat next to him and using their best A-Level Spanish began to translate. The next week, he came back with a few friends, the following week there were more and before long they were joined by their families. Soon we had lots of South Americans from Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and so on who were hungry for the Gospel.
Most of them had come via Spain. They’d settled there looking for a better life. However, Spain had not recovered from the 2008 crash and so these families had been pushed to move again looking for work. Whet hey arrived in the West Midlands they found something better than work and economic security and increasingly this became the reason for them staying. I’m sure there are many other similar stories. There was something bigger than the big news stories of presidents and prime ministers, banks and markets. God’s purpose in all of this was the spread of the Gospel.
Which brings me back to what is really important this week. Far more important than Trump’s return to the Whitehouse or the actions of Putin and Xi, far more important than whatever Keir Starmer is up to this week is something that looks much smaller but is actually huge. It’s the work of the Gospel in local churches around the world.
So, in our case, the big exciting story of the week isn’t about Trump’s inauguration but the wonderful joy of seeing several young men planning to get baptised this Sunday.
Faithroots 