Posted on 11/13/2017 9:38:52 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There are some Bible stories that really stick with you. Here’s one that’s challenged me my entire life.
Centuries before the birth of Christ, the tiny and vulnerable kingdom of Judah faced an existential threat from the Assyrian empire. The prophet Isaiah’s message to the Judean king, Hezekiah, was clear: Trust God for your salvation. He alone can and will protect his people. The demand for trust was so absolute that Isaiah unequivocally condemned any quest for a military alliance for protection. His words echo through the ages:
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord.
Consider the challenge here: A king is told to shun a military alliance with a pagan power and to face death and destruction alone, trusting solely in God’s deliverance. I never forgot the lesson. I remembered the admonitions of Sunday-school teachers, my Bible professors at college, and my pastors: Christians, never forget, our ultimate hope is in the Lord. Be wary of an alliance with evil, even when the need seems overwhelming.
Obviously, these fools didn’t understand the importance of electing a junior senator from Alabama to fill out a partial term of office. Sure, Hezekiah faced the Assyrians, but by golly we face Doug Jones. We’ve got no choice but to ally with a dangerous, unfit man — a man who proclaims Christianity while systematically violating the law, seeks to deny the most basic civil rights to his fellow citizens, and now faces heavily sourced and corroborated claims of past sexual misconduct with minors.
I keep hearing these words from Evangelicals: We’ve got no choice. The Democrats are after our liberties. They’re seeking to destroy our way of life. Some even go so far as to say that even if the allegations against Moore are true, they’ll still hold their nose and put him in office to keep Jones from serving three years in the Senate.
I’m sorry Evangelicals, but your lack of faith is far more dangerous to the Church than any senator, any president, or any justice of the Supreme Court.
I’m sorry Evangelicals, but your lack of faith is far more dangerous to the Church than any senator, any president, or any justice of the Supreme Court. Do you really have so little trust in God that you believe it’s justifiable — no, necessary — to ally with, defend, and even embrace corrupt men if it you think it will save the Church?
Though I didn’t agree with the decision to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I also didn’t doubt the sincerity of Evangelicals who expressed real worry about putting the awesome power of the presidency in Clinton’s hands. But what now? There’s no defensible argument for choosing the “lesser of two evils” in Alabama. Yet I see friends and allies excuse and even defend sins in Moore (and Trump) that they’ve never, ever excused or defended in any Democrat. And for what? To win the news cycle? To gain influence?
This disease is spreading, too. The Family Research Council, to its great shame, invited Steve Bannon to address it’s so-called “Values Voter” conference. Bannon, by his own admission, helped make Breitbart a “platform” for the vile alt-right, a violent and viciously racist movement that has time and again threatened even the FRC’s Christian friends and allies. What crisis could possibly demand an alliance with such a man?
I’m beginning to realize that countless older Christians misled their kids and grandkids. They said that moral character matters in politicians. They said they were building a movement based around ideas and principles, not power and party. They said those things right up until the moment when holding firm to their convictions risked handing Hillary Clinton the presidency, and at that point the dam broke. Now, they’re willing to sell out for a lousy Alabama Senate seat.
The bottom line? Through word and deed they chose to trust bad men and not a holy God. Some apply double standards, granting the benefit of the doubt to ideological allies even as they condemn their opponents. Others distort biblical stories to rationalize their alliances. It was bad enough to see Donald Trump compared to King David. Now we have to endure an Alabama official’s comparison of Roy Moore to Joseph.
Yes, I know there are many instances in which godless kings did good things for God’s people. God can turn the heart of any man. But there is a vast difference between seeking favor from an unrighteous ruler and choosing, defending, and embracing the same unrighteous ruler from the start. Evangelicals, you’re putting people like Donald Trump and Roy Moore in office. You’re declaring to the world, “He’s our man.”
In graver times, God’s people have demonstrated much greater faith. We stumble when the stakes are comparatively low. Our failures will come back to haunt us. There will be woe to those who’ve compromised with evil through lack of faith. A reckoning is coming. May God have mercy on us all.
David French - one of the prime reasons the National Review is down the tubes.
And they are out there begging for money to stay in business.
National Review has turned out to be such a bag of dicks.
The globalist, open-borders National Review now is reduced to PREACHING to Alabama voters. It’s clear that they and their other Establishment conspirators recognize that their hit job against Judge Moore is stumbling toward failure.
My faith is fine.
You and your master Satan can go fly a kite.
Hugs and Kisses
HTB
Wasn’t the Nat Rev just calling for Judge Moore to step down?
And now they assume to preach a sermon at us here?
Scum. The Nat Rev is liberaltarian scum.
I heard corroborated rumours that David French is a thief and terrorist. Let him disprove it.
Wherein the fool David French believes himself to be the equivalent of Isaiah, a prophet of God.
What a nutjob.
This is the second time today I have heard the meme that if you defend Moore, you are condoning his ACCUSED illegal conduct.
No, we support Moore because we don’t believe his accusers,
not that we condone the conduct his accusers accuse him of.
Anyone who promotes that deception is vile.
Nuts.
I personally don’t have a problem with him kissing an 18 year old once or twice, which is what she stated.
And I don’t believe the accuser who says she was 14. She has a history of trying to get money from churches by claiming various pastors tried to have sex with her.
Her own mother said the accuser lied about having a phone in her bedroom.
I understand Hitler didn’t drink and was a vegetarian.
Read Sharyl Attkisson's The Smear....this alleged behavior may be just that, a company or person paid big bucks to Smear Roy Moore.
I provide the direct quote because I, for the life of me, am looking for some shred of truth to any of it and can't find any.
Moore is not a "dangerous, unfit man". Based on what evidence?
Moore doesn't systematically violate the law. He's a sitting judge. Gives us examples of what you're claiming Mr. French.
Moore doesn't "face heavily sourced and corroborated claims of past sexual misconduct with minors." The WashCommiePost makes innuendos but never claims anything untoward was committed. Where are the heavily-sourced sources? This is just she-said, he said. No corroborating witness or evidence is presented. Not sexual misconduct was committed.
Mr. French is a big Trump hater and and just can't help himself to some exaggerations and embellishments and enhancements of the facts of this smear job against Moore.
The guy is surrendering, then again his name is French.
Hummmm, my bible says you don’t convict somebody except on the word of at least two, or three, witnesses. So far, I’ve seen no witnesses to the accusations against Moore. Just unsubstantiated allegations.
President French indulges in heep big Biblical-speak but still sounds like a rank hypocrite.
Anyone who wants to wear the label “conservative” should be mindful of the fact that in the longer term (before this current spat between so-called principled conservatives and the vaguely defined alt right) the main foundation of the conservative movement was adherence to the rule of law.
This cannot be replaced by the rule of public opinion, and this applies everywhere, to people anywhere in the spectrum. For example, if Hillary Clinton is suspected of breaking the law, then the only place this can be reliably tested is in a court of law. The same standard applies to Judge Moore and anyone else accused in public. I would include Harvey Weinstein except that he’s made a qualified public confession of guilt (yes I did it but they were sluts willing to trade their bodies for career advantage, a claim that while probably true is not much of a legal defence or a moral defence).
You or I may suspect one person is guilty and another is falsely accused but we don’t know for sure, how can we?
As to the National Review convicting Judge Moore on the basis of questionable allegations that show at least some potential to be politically motivated, this is hardly a clarion call to anyone of faith to abandon their support either. Jesus taught that we should not cast stones even at sinners but the concept of false accusation is only covered indirectly in the whole context of the false charges brought against Jesus himself. So the support of anyone falsely accused is probably the best possible political choice for a Christian.
This goes deeper than the aforementioned schism on the political right. It is a society-wide problem now that any scold with a twitter account or a blog (let alone a published magazine) can just fire away at random at political adversaries with stories of any sort and hope that enough mud sticks to destroy that person, regardless of whether the charges would meet any legal standard. This has got to stop, and one way to stop it is to signal that nobody is above the law, one reason it started is because certain prominent people appear to be above the law and never subject to prosecution. This fact has been hanging around like the smell from an uncleaned outhouse since about 1969 and I think we know what happened then, it wasn’t man walking on the moon but man leaving girl to drown. Or perhaps buried in some redacted documents, 1963 when one powerful man had another one executed. We may never know about that. But we do know about certain other things that should have been the subject of prosecution and never found their way into court simply because the guilty parties were too big to fail. Instead it is justice that has failed.
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