Although I don’t mention it often, I have mentioned publicly a number of times through the years that I don’t vote. I recently received a letter from a good friend who has a hard time with me over my position and urged me to rethink it. I promised him and others on a broader basis that I was going to write an article on the topic, and here it is.
As a young person growing up in Louisiana (then a very strongly Democratic leaning state), everyone in my family voted, as did most everyone else I knew. I remember hitting the voting age myself and how much I was looking forward to voting. I was a senior in college when I cast my first presidential vote – for Barry Goldwater in 1964. He carried six states, of which mine was one, the beginning of the turn toward being a Republican state when it came to electing presidents. I remember how immersed I was in that election. I literally had dreams about America going down the tubes unless Barry was elected. I should mention that I was about as far from God at the time as a young person could get.
I remember that many of my relatives and friends of my parents were divided in which political party they favored. But the big difference between then and now is that they could differ and even make jokes and laugh about those differences. For one to say that they were Republican and the other to say that they were Democrat was about like one saying that they were Baptist and the other saying that they were Methodist. Differences, yes. A call to arms, no.
Run the clock forward to our move to Dallas at the end of 2014. In the process of getting new driver’s licenses and other necessary documentation changes, my wife said she wanted to register to vote. I had stopped voting by then, but cheerfully drove her to the place of registration and played games on my phone while she registered. I have never tried to persuade anyone, including my wife, not to vote. I am not writing this article for the purpose of trying to persuade anyone who reads it not to vote. I am just trying to explain carefully, using biblical principles, why I choose to exercise my rights as an American citizen NOT to vote.
Loss of Influence
When we moved to Dallas this time (4th time for me), I was a part-time ministry staff member and still teaching quite a bit. (Now I have been put out to pasture as far as speaking!) Politics had become an increasingly heated topic, and I knew that both the nation and the church were pretty evenly split on party preference. If I publicly identified with either party, I would lose some influence with those on the other side of the political aisle. My spiritual influence is far too important to me to do that. That is one reason why I don’t vote and make that fact known. Influence. Spiritual influence.
The responses to this have been very interesting. Some get emotionally worked up and tell me that I should be voting and fulfilling my “God-given duty!” Wow, just where is that duty described in the Bible? Others would confine it to my duty as an American citizen, but some of those also get worked up about it. I often tell them that they are likely assuming that I am a reasonably intelligent person, and as such, I would vote as they do. But I go on to tell them that if they knew I was going to vote opposite them, in effect cancelling out their vote, they would be glad that I didn’t vote!
Effects on Fellow Disciples
Seeing what getting strongly emotionally involved in politics does to my fellow Christians deserves its own subheading. In the 2016 election, we started reaching the boiling point when Donald and Hillary squared off. I did make the statement in a sermon that one side was saying that the other candidate should be in prison, while the other side was saying that the other candidate should be in a rubber room somewhere. It was quite the atmosphere. Social media comments, from professed Christians, were shocking to me. I finally “defriended” one of my Facebook friends, a very dear personal friend, because he simply refused to contain himself in print. I spoke to one of our mutual friends, who was actually on the same side politically as the defriended, who had done the same. You know what I am talking about, right? Social media can be a very encouraging tool, and it can be a tool of the devil. In the political realm, it is most often the latter.
In my next subpoint, I will attempt to explain why these effects are taking place and hopefully say something helpful. I understand that I am treading on a controversial path, but I am not hesitant to do so if it seems like help is needed. My last book would make that point for me, “The Bible and Women: How Did I Miss So Much?” I believe that topic and the political topic often involve righteousness or a lack thereof.
I understand that present politics is more complicated than I’ve ever seen in my nearly 82 years of life. On the Democratic side, until very recently, you had a candidate who obviously had an age-related issue mentally. Yet, if you believed in the platform issues of the party, what to do? That issue has been settled at least to some degree and yet many of the Democratic persuasion are not too happy with the new candidate. So, in that case, as one of my relatives sometimes said after voting for his party when not liking the candidate, “I held my nose and voted for…!”
We have a similar situation with the Republican party, in that some strongly hold to the platform issues of the party, but don’t like the candidate. Others love the candidate, although I don’t understand that myself, for a number of reasons. But calm down and remember that I ain’t voting or supporting either side. Yet the dilemma is there for those who like the platform and not the candidate. In both parties, millions will vote for their party while “holding their nose” regarding the specific candidate.
But as I dip my toe into the waters of even mentioning the two parties by name, I know that some of you reading this already have elevated blood pressures. That is a second reason why I don’t vote. If it makes those who claim allegiance to Christ react like that, I don’t want to have anything to do with voting. But now, let’s get to the Bible, the Word of Almighty God.
What I Can Know About Satan
The final two subpoints need some careful explaining. A part of my reason for choosing not to vote concerns what I can know about Satan and what I cannot know about God. I know that Satan is a liar and a deceiver, and an absolute master at both. His intent is to divide, destroy and kill. You already know that if you know much about the Bible at all. I don’t need to quote the verses. These facts about him are undisputed by Bible believing people. Paul did say in 2 Corinthians 2:11 that “we are not unaware of his schemes,” referring to Satan. And what was the context? One of trying to make sure brothers and sisters in Christ were not divided. The battle plan of “divide and conquer” was not initially devised by some general on the battlefield. It belongs to Satan. He is constantly devising ways to divide marriages, families, groups of all types, nations and the entire world. He has done a hell of a job, I must say.
He also divides church families and does that astoundingly well – throughout history. He has done it over doctrines, spiritual and non-spiritual practices, leaders, spiritual terminology and this list could go on. In recent years, he added another weapon to his arsenal like never before – politics. I am trying hard to obey this passage and its principles: “Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer” (2 Timothy 2:3-4). For that reason, I don’t profess to totally understand what I am about to illustrate here, so bear with me. I simply am not going to get pulled into civilian affairs far enough to understand the nuances of politicized issues.
But here is what I observed during our last election. There were people for and against wearing masks during the Covid pandemic, and there were people for and against being vaccinated for protection against contracting Covid. I don’t know how such a situation developed and what one’s political leaning had to do with it, and I don’t care. I was just shocked that such things could even be connected to politics in the first place.
I have gone “under the knife” for several surgeries in recent years. In every case, all of the medical personnel wore masks for my protection. I know enough about medical history to know that this wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t that long ago historically when the transmission of germs causing disease wasn’t understood much at all. Doctors would go from one patient to another without ever washing their hands. Thankfully, someone figured out that germs are transmissible and have learned the various ways that certain types of diseases are transmitted.
But somehow the wearing of masks became a political matter, which affected me and others like me. You see, my wife of nearly 60 years has COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). She has fought off pneumonia seven times, once in the hospital for over a week. We both have managed to avoid getting Covid. But at age 80, if she gets some sort of serious lung disease, she very likely won’t make it. When we first started back trying to attend church assemblies after the pandemic subsided a bit, most were wearing masks, but those with politically related “Non-mask” convictions (I suppose?) were present also in their designated seating to one side. So here’s what I was thinking. The non-mask people valued their political stance more than the health of people like my wife. Whatever you may think about my observations here, I know what Satan thinks. He is a divider with a capital D.
Then we have the vaccine divide. I remember polio vaccine first being made available. We gladly stood in long lines to eat that little sugar cube with that pink or purple liquid on it. I knew people who died from polio. I was often in high school classes with a girl in an iron lung because of polio. Even back in the late 1950’s, they figured out a way to patch her into the class via a phone line. Her dad was an elder in a local Church of Christ, and her uncle was one of the most famous biblical scholars in that group and in the religious world in general. Oh yes, we were anxious to eat that little sugar cube.
My granddad died at age 30 with a disease that is no longer a threat in the US because of vaccinations against it which became widely available after his death. The 100th anniversary of his death is this coming December 9th. My mother was three years old when he died. One of my uncles was a few months old. My grandmother raised four children through the depression, leaving her and her children emotionally scarred for life. One of those scarred children raised me and left me with some of my own scars. You want to talk vaccinations with me? I have plenty of thoughts about it.
I have often traveled to parts of the world to preach and teach which required various types of vaccinations to enter the country. I used to keep a yellow folded document to show the types and dates of all the shots I took to be able to preach the gospel in those countries. What should I have done? Say, “If you insist on me getting those shots, then you can just stay lost!”
You see, in the past, this stuff wasn’t an issue, certainly not politically. It is possible that some must avoid shots purely for possible health reasons (potential reactions). Although I might not see it as you do in those cases, that is not my issue. My issue is how politics has somehow divided us over things that no one could have possibly imagined a few short years ago. So, does Satan know his stuff? You bet he does. Division, division and more division. This point really is just an illustration of my second subheading – what politics does to people, even those who profess Christ.
As a segue to the next point about not being able to figure out what God is doing, let’s look at another aspect of Satan’s work. He deceives us about ourselves, about our own sins. In a little book of mine (“God, Are We Good?”) written during the pandemic, I examined all of the ways we can sin (words, thoughts, motives, actions, not doing and being what we could do and be). I quoted one theologian who guessed at the number of sins a mature adult might commit in a lifetime, even if they were trying not to. It was predictably a very large number. If Satan can deceive each of us time and time again in order to get us to sin in many different ways, how can you be sure he hasn’t deceived you about your political views? After all, the other half of the population differs from you and both sides have highly intelligent people in them. If Satan is trying to destroy the world, how can you be sure you have all the right views and are not being used by Satan to accomplish purposes you cannot fathom? That leads to the next point quite naturally.
What I Cannot Know About God
Although Satan is far more intelligent than any of us humans, he doesn’t hold a candle to God. Therefore, I can learn more and understand more of Satan’s purposes than I can of God’s. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
One thing I do know about God is that he is in control of all the nations. Read the following.
Psalm 22:27-28
27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, 28 for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.
Psalm 33:10-11
10 The LORD foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples. 11 But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations.
Isaiah 40:22-23
22 He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in. 23 He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
Isaiah 40:15
15 Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
When you look through the Old Testament, especially the prophets, you find many nations mentioned by name and what God said he was going to do to them and with them. They had no idea. Like our nation and all of the nations of the world right now, their finest and brightest intellectuals were planning and plotting the directions they believed their nations should follow. God was sitting up there (wherever “there” is) and saying, “O yeah? Watch this!” Then he did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, any way that he wanted, to anyone he wanted, and all of the rulers of the nations and their citizens could do nothing about hindering his plans. Nothing about that has changed from that day until this one. To think otherwise is illustrative of the foolishness of mankind, which the Bible affirms over and over and over. Humans think they are so smart and well informed, but compared to God and his purposes, they are abysmally stupid. We cannot know what God’s plans are for any nation, including our own. Period.
That said, I do know that he will ultimately bring nations down because of their sins. He is astonishingly patient, but nations reach a point in their sinfulness that he takes them out. He always has and always will. The verses quoted above say it plainly. A very interesting verse to me is Genesis 15:16: “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” Here God is talking to Abraham about the promise to build a great nation of his descendants and give them a land to inhabit. But he informs Abraham that it will be about four hundred years from then because the Amorite nation hadn’t reached the point of the necessity of being destroyed. So yes, God is patient, but he knows exactly when he is going to destroy any given nation. He knows exactly when he is going to take America down, and he is going to. How could he not, given our constant descent into worse and worse sinfulness at an almost inconceivable rate?
When I was a young preacher, an older preacher named Richard Rogers often made a rather shocking statement. He said, “If God doesn’t punish America for their sins, he is going to owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah!” I have repeated that statement many times. However, although it is a clever sounding statement, God can do whatever he wants and knows is best and will never owe anyone an apology. But when I first repeated it fifty plus years ago, I was even then shocked at how fast our nation was departing from biblical principles into the dark night of sin’s degradation. At that point, I could not have envisioned where we are now in sin’s degradation. The sins of a nation are like a snowball going down a hill, getting bigger and going faster as it goes.
When I was yet a young minister, I also heard another quotation, this one about what would most likely bring on the fall of our nation. It involved an immense study of civilizations historically and what their progression of sin in one particular area was like. This study was done by an Oxford social anthropologist named J.D. Unwin, who published his findings in a book entitled, “Sex and Culture.” Although it was more than 600 pages long, Unwin said it was only a summary of his research and that it would have taken seven volumes to fully report all of his findings.
His book was published in 1934 and can be downloaded as a PDF file from the internet. In his book, Unwin examined the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there was a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. It is important to note that Unwin was not a believer. He was not writing from a religious perspective at all, but purely as a social anthropologist researcher. A good summary article can be found at: https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
The quotation I heard from Unwin’s findings was that all of these nations fell when their sexual morality (lack thereof) reached the stage that many sexual acts condemned by the Bible were accepted as normal. Although I have not read the long book, other articles I have read about it supported the concept that all sexual activity apart from that between a man and woman married to each other was a part of what led to the downfall of nations, and the more flagrant such activity became, the more certain it was that the nation was nearing its end. The fact that a highly acclaimed non-believer through massive research came to the same conclusions that a Bible believer would imagine to be the case is absolutely astounding! The Bible was not wrong in Proverbs 14:34, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.”
Sin at a certain point destroys a nation and sexual sins will play a big role in that destruction, based on Unwin’s research and the history of the 86 nations he researched. The level of sexual sins America has now reached, including many different types of sexual sins, suggests strongly that we are nearing our end as a nation. Sex was created by God and is a beautiful thing – in one setting and one setting only – between a man and a woman married to one another. All other sexual activity is degrading God’s design. I have no question that America is nearing its end, and sexual sins are not the only reason I say that. Satan is a liar and the father of lies, and our nation has reached a point that a popular dictionary (Oxford) labeled the word, “post-truth” as the word of the year in 2016. America is filled with every sin mentioned in the Bible, and the majority of our populace doesn’t even consider most of these as sins, as they have become so widely accepted.
So yes, I believe our nation is nearing its end, and though it is a personal opinion, if true, no human being can know when and how it will occur. God is God and unpredictable. His ways are not our ways and not discernible to us. For example, and this is a most pertinent example in my argument, God has used pagan leaders of nations as his servants – to inflict horrible punishment on his own people. Plus, he has also used pagan leaders of nations as his servants – to bless his own people. You and I cannot know how God is going to use any leader to accomplish his purposes, nor can you know what his purposes are. Let’s look at two of God’s OT “servants.”
Jeremiah 25:9
“I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon,” declares the LORD, “and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin.”
Nebuchadnezzar was going to be used as God’s servant to punish his own people, and when you read the details of what that destruction was going to include, it was indeed punishment of the most horrific kind. God will not hide his just nature in a corner for you or for our nation, although his incredible patience sometimes makes you think he has. Judgment always comes when repentance doesn’t. And sin can reach the point where repentance is simply too late to avoid the consequences of sin. On a corporate level, you can look at the people of Noah’s day. No doubt people were banging on the side of the ark as the water rose, begging for entrance. No doubt parents were holding up their babies, begging Noah to at least take them. The answer was no —they had sinned away the day of grace.
On an individual level, the same result can occur. Take a look at Esau’s case.
Hebrews 12:16-17
See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. 17 Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done.
On the other side of the coin, pagan rulers also served as God’s servants, blessing the people of God in quite unexpected and amazing ways.
Ezra 1:1-3
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing: 2 “This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: “ ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. 3 Any of his people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and may their God be with them.
As you continue to read this passage, Cyrus was beyond kind to the people of God, offering them gifts and protection as they traveled back to their homeland to rebuild in preparation for the ultimate coming of the Messiah. The Jews of that day must have been shocked at what happened. The Jews who were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies would not have believed in advance that they, the very people of God, would be so harshly treated at the hands of their God.
All of this should illustrate the opening point of this section about God’s utter unpredictability. I can know a lot more about Satan’s purposes and schemes than I can about God’s. How God might choose to use an American president is only a guess. Could he use one of either party for his purposes to bless us? Yes. Could he use one of either party to severely discipline US inhabitants? Yes. Can you or I know who and how any of these answers might play out any more than those of history could know in their nations? No.
Bottom line, God knows exactly what he is going to do in and with America, and he ain’t telling. But some of you have it all figured out, do you? HaHaHaHaHaHaHa! Thanks for the laugh. I needed one about now. This is heavy stuff to me. The only thing I can think to do about the whole arena of politics is what God clearly said to do, and here that is.
Titus 3:1-2
Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, 2 to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone.
1 Timothy 2:1-3
I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people – 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior,
You have the choice to vote or not vote. You don’t need anyone’s permission to vote and I don’t need anyone’s permission nor forgiveness for not voting. And I am not. My only hope in these troubled times is God and I am confident that earnest, urgent prayers will weigh far more heavily than my vote might. End of story. Cheers!
