Reflections on the eve of the Election

I've been listening to talk radio today, both Glenn Beck & Rush Limbaugh. The talk, naturally centers around the election, which it should. With a clear conscience I voted for Mitt Romney last week, in spite of my trepidation of his Mormonism. I know that our LORD raises up whom He will as He did with Cyrus of Persia.

I'll say it again, I am a Christian who happens to be an American and not vice versa. There is a difference. I believe that God is sovereign in all things, nothing catches Him by surprise and He factors and works our sins and errors into His purpose and that His will is going to prevail in spite of all of Satan's deceptions and efforts. My prayer for the election is that it is an honest one.

I am surprised that Barak Obama turned out to be a far worse and dangerous president than even I thought he would be in 2008. And I knew then he would be a bad one. I knew that our LORD allowed him to become president as a chastisement for America. God doesn't need America to work out His will and purpose, but we need Him and have turned our back on Him. These past 4 years I have viewed the Obamas as the modern equivalent of Ahab and Jezebel.

If this nation honestly re-elects Obama...then we know what this country has become. A few weeks again our parish priest during the announcements described him as the most pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-family, anti-religious freedom president this country has ever had. Unfortunately the fact that he is the president speaks volumes about what kind of people we have become. ALL of us, particularly Baby Boomers, bear a major mea culpa in both the process and results. What has happened to the Episcopal Church is a telling example of how we have both subverted and been subverted from the clear teaching of God.

I haven't decided in we are in the "End Times", or just at the end of the America that God brought into being for His purposes. A read of history and Holy Scripture provides us the pictures of empires and civilizations that the LORD has allowed to rise up and, to fall. We may very well be the next. Scripture also teaches that God always preserves a remnant of the faithful. The election of Mitt Romney MIGHT mean that God has given us one last reprieve, to truly turn around (repent) and seek His face. Or, it may mean that God is providing His faithful a bit more time to put their affairs in order and get ready for what He will do.

What ever the results tomorrow, it is my intent to be faithful, to stay firm in the faith of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In our personal world, we have going through our own tribulation of the hardship with both being unemployed and a family heartbreak that makes the financial difficulties look like a walk in the park. We are on a path and living a life that was not even remotely on our radar in 2008. There are times that I can't help but wonder what has our LORD been preparing for us to endure?

No easy answers

In the larger world and in my own personal life, I've been feeling for some time things are just not right.  Even on my Facebook status I posted that I was like Worf on Star Trek TNG; that I had somehow slipped into the wrong quantum reality.  So while I may speculate on other quantum realities and even appreciate and on some level understand the underlying physics that makes such speculations possible.....I must return again to that Truth with which continually I struggle.....God is sovereign.

Yes, there could be, there may be other quantum realities, but there are not.  These are realities with a little "r".  There is only one Reality as there is only one Now, one Eternal Now.  God is sovereign.  In "Out of the Silent Planet", C.S. Lewis posited a world in which their Adam and Eve had been obedient. But in our world, they were not and the whole of human history reverberates with the results and consequences of that first: "I'll do it my way, I know what's best for me."

God is not surprised.  The mercy, the love, the justice, the holiness, the very goodness of God are not contradictory to each other, or to His sovereignty, even in light of horrendous events like what happened in Aurora, Colorado.  I know that it is beyond a conundrum to the human mind, it is not fatalism either.  It was not God's will for an insane, evil-driven man to open fire in a movie theatre on strangers, killing many and injuring more.  Even in this, yes, even in this -- God is sovereign -- and His will and purpose are still being worked out.  His redemptive grace is always present and is still active.  God's omniscience does not negate that Heaven grieves with those who lost loved ones at the hand of evil.