2015-18.5
FRIDAY, MAY 8, 2015
Image from BBC News website on election night
Numbers 23:19 NIV
God is not human, that He should lie, not a human being, that He should change his mind. Does He speak and then not act? Does He promise and not fulfill?
Your intentions, God's intentions
God doesn’t change his mind: what a contrast with voters.
As I write, there are big questions being asked about opinion polls and what they actually tell us. Voters’ intentions to vote are shifting sands and often not the same as the pencil crosses they actually enter in the booths. We are a fickle lot!
I say that everyone should vote. However, today is when we begin to see all those manifesto promises wilt under the heat of economic reality. Pledges always look good before an election, but become tarnished by delays and difficulties in implementing them, because pledges cost money and the escalation in borrowing in recent years has to be addressed.
Fickle
Human promises, unlike God’s promises, can be all too changeable, which is (I suggest) why there is so much distrust of politicians and political process. There are notable exceptions, and they shine all the more brightly because they are lighting up a dark area.
God is neither fickle nor changeable and when we listen to Him, we have clarity and unity.
National governance isn’t quite like that, because its values are human ones. Parliament is comprised of representatives who are elected on the basis of a ballot, and who themselves are entitled to vote on issues of state. Everyone is free to express their own preference, although elected politicians will generally follow party lines.
Most of this was derived from the practice of Baptists and Congregationalists in the early to mid 1600s. These early Reformers possessed the sharpened spirituality that comes from persecution, and were keen to live out the Biblical principle of priesthood of all believers. We can do this, of course. If you have received Jesus as Lord, you have the Holy Spirit and can ‘hear’ God in the various ways He prompts us – very occasionally audible but more usually an ‘inner witness’ or sensed voice which is distinct from the voice of our own thoughts. Those early believers were in that sense truly charismatic in their church meetings where, with a pastor’s help, they would prayerfully discern God’s will for the church – a church gathering in which they were partners (members) but at the same time wanting to honour Jesus in all of its worship, missions and practice.
Democracy is not the same thing – the only common ground is the mechanism of ballot and majority. There is little or no spiritual discernment in democracy – it is about the expression and polling of individual preferences, often passionately held and argued.
In church we try to hold individual preferences lightly – it is simply not what we are about. We are a body, open to the Holy Spirit, and seeking to submit to Jesus as Lord and follow His way. His way is often going to challenge my preferred way and also yours at different times, and of course so it should: God’s ways are higher than our ways. God’s way is often to “do a new thing" and that will seldom be my preference or yours – at the time.
Here’s the lesson of the night: let fickle democracy have its way – render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, as Jesus said – but we resolve to gather as Church in a different Spirit, letting go of our desire to reign or control and welcoming Jesus to tell us how He would like to rule.
• The challenge: Not our way, but His way.