God and Government

Between Facebook, Twitter, and the ever-expanding op-ed and “analysis” sections of online news sites, it’s hard to go online without finding political opinions. Too bad they all disagree with each other.

Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden is weak. Putin invaded Ukraine because the US has been encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence for years. Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless. Biden is doing too much for Ukraine and should pay more attention to matters at home; Biden can’t do more for Ukraine, because we might provoke Russia; Biden should do more for Ukraine and should make Russia afraid of provoking us. Biden is doing great; Trump would do much better; Trump would do much worse.

Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war (Mt 24:6).

Inflation is transitory and not much to worry about; inflation is a huge problem, and we should vote the politicians responsible out of office. Inflation is because of too much pandemic spending, so we should spend less. Inflation is because of supply chain problems or human infrastructure limitations, and we should spend more to address those.

Jesus said that we would always have the poor (Mt 26:11).

Covid arose naturally from a wet market; Covid leaked from a lab; Covid was a Chinese bioweapon; Covid was the product of an American conspiracy. The best way to deal with it is mask mandates and lockdowns; mask mandates and lockdowns are harmful and should be avoided; we need more vaccination; we need less vaccination.

Revelation says that death and pain will be removed in the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:4) - but not before then.

And I enjoy some of these discussions, and I’ve engaged in a fair number myself. But I can’t help but think there’s sometimes some arrogance there. I am neither a foreign policy expert nor an economist nor an epidemiologist; I can have an informed opinion, but humility should remind me that I likely don’t know better than the professionals, and I may not have much basis for thinking that my preferred remedy would actually work.

Within my chosen niche of software development, we have plenty of our own opinions to argue about - enough that these have earned the tongue-in-cheek name of “holy wars.” Which text editor should you use to write source code? Which hardware design is best? Which programming language is best? Should you use a Mac or a PC? One of the most famous holy wars is whether programmers should format their source code with the tab key or the spacebar; this has gained enough notoriety that it made an appearance on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

Even tabs versus spaces, though, pales next to the debate of Windows versus Linux. For years, an assortment of developers and upstart businesses pushed Linux, a free operating system, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, backed by Microsoft’s billions of dollars and monopoly business power. Countless marketing initiatives, technical whitepapers, and websites pushed one or the other. Developers on both platforms competed to write the best Windows-only or Linux-only software. Emotions ran high. In one of the more noteworthy examples, Dan Greer, a cybersecurity researcher, wrote a 2003 report arguing that Microsoft Windows’ dominance was a threat to national security. He was fired from his consultancy the day the report was released.

It turns out that the answer to Windows versus Linux is, depending on how you slice it, either “Both” or “Who cares?” “Both” is because businesses still happily run Windows, while servers and cloud computing (even at Microsoft) often run Linux; “who cares?” is because the operating system on your desktop matters little when all of your activities are conducted through a web browser, and mobile phones and tablets have replaced desktop and laptop computers, both as a focus of innovation and as many people’s primary computing device. Time and change rendered the entire debate irrelevant in ways that neither side foresaw.

Dan Greer is relevant to this discussion for reasons other than his Windows-versus-Linux foray. In 2013, he delivered a talk, “Tradeoffs in Cyber Security”:

I previously worked for a data protection company. Our product was, and I believe still is, the most thorough on the market. By “thorough” I mean the dictionary definition, “careful about doing something in an accurate and exact way.” To this end, installing our product instrumented every system call on the target machine. Data did not and could not move in any sense of the word “move” without detection. Every data operation was caught and monitored. It was total surveillance data protection. Its customers were companies that don’t accept half-measures. What made this product stick out was that very thoroughness, but here is the point: Unless you fully instrument your data handling, it is not possible for you to say what did not happen. With total surveillance, and total surveillance alone, it is possible to treat the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. Only when you know everything that did happen with your data can you say what did not happen with your data…

We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like “X did not happen” can only [be] proven true if you have the enumeration of everything that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We all know that when a President says “Never again” he is asking for the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives, is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience. Omniscience requires god-like powers…

John Gilmore famously said, “Never give a government a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.” I might amend that to read “Never demand the government have a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.”… When you embark on making failure impossible, and that includes delivering on statements like “Never again,” you are forced into cost-benefit analyses where at least one of the variables is infinite. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t know Greer’s religious beliefs - if he’s actually trying to make a theological point, or if he’s using (to him) nothing more than a vivid metaphor. But he’s right. In some of the more extreme versions of our political debates - and in some of what we ask our governments to do or seem to think they can do - we act like war or poverty or disease would cease to be urgent issues if our opinions prevail. In doing so, we claim to solve problems that Jesus himself says are not fully solvable in this lifetime. At best, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment; at worst, we’re asking fallible humans to try to claim enough power to do God’s job. Bob Weinz at Christianity Today made a similar point in 2005, reflecting upon 9/11:

Last March former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the U.S. government “failed to prevent the tragedy of 9/11.” He proceeded to apologize for that failure… Clarke seemed to presume that “your government” should somehow have been able to anticipate and prevent evil from happening—both the evil that we call natural disasters, and the evil that comes directly from the hearts and hands of evil people. It is a false premise. To presume the government’s ability to prevent such a catastrophe is to assume that it possesses qualities and abilities that no person, let alone a government, can ever possess. Omniscience and omnipotence are qualities that we ascribe only to God.

There’s a saying: “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has a couple, and most of them stink.” I saw a more positive alternative online: “Opinions are like luggage: expensive, and heavy to carry around, so don’t take more than you need.” Paul wrote to “reject foolish and ignorant controversies because you know they breed infighting” (2 Tim 2:23) and to “avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law because they are useless and empty” (Titus 3:9). There’s nothing automatically wrong with having opinions, debating, and discussing them. It can be an important part of loving God with all of our minds and trying to use our gifts and positions to serve others. But let’s practice humility, realizing that we may easily be wrong. Let’s travel lightly, saving our time and energy for people and service. Let’s avoid foolish controversies, remembering that time and change will render so much of these moot. Let’s remember that we ultimately depend on Jesus to solve the world’s fallenness, rather than hoping in or foolishly empowering our institutions to try and do so.

Psalm 22

Sometimes, I think, we may not give the Psalms enough credit. We read them for moral lessons (like the importance of God’s Word from Psalm 119), or comfort (Psalm 23), or as prophecies of Christ (such as Psalm 110). Or we use them as the basis for praise songs like U2’s “40” (Psalm 40) or Third Day’s “Your Love Oh Lord” (Psalm 36).

And all of those are good and true and wonderful. But the Psalms are more than that; it’s the prayer book of the Bible, and the prayers and praises written within it can become part of our prayers, shaping our thoughts and attitudes towards God and giving us the words to say if we don’t know how to pray. As my grandfather used to say, the book of Psalms is unique because, in it, humanity’s words to God become part of God’s Word to humanity.

What would it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer?

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.
My God, I cry out during the day,
but you do not answer,
and during the night my prayers do not let up.
You are holy;
you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted in you and you rescued them.
To you they cried out, and they were saved;
in you they trusted and they were not disappointed.
But I am a worm, not a man;
people insult me and despise me.
All who see me taunt me;
they mock me and shake their heads.
They say,
“Commit yourself to the Lord!
Let the Lord rescue him!
Let the Lord deliver him, for he delights in him.”
Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb
and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts.
I have been dependent on you since birth;
from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Do not remain far away from me,
for trouble is near and I have no one to help me.
Many bulls surround me;
powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in.
They open their mouths to devour me
like a roaring lion that rips its prey.
My strength drains away like water;
all my bones are dislocated.
My heart is like wax;
it melts away inside me.
The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery;
my tongue sticks to my gums.
You set me in the dust of death.
Yes, wild dogs surround me—
a gang of evil men crowd around me;
like a lion they pin my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones;
my enemies are gloating over me in triumph.
They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;
they are rolling dice for my garments.
But you, O Lord, do not remain far away.
You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me!
Deliver me from the sword.
Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lion
and from the horns of the wild oxen.
You have answered me.
I will declare your name to my countrymen.
In the middle of the assembly I will praise you.
You loyal followers of the Lord, praise him.
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.
All you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him.
For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed.
He did not ignore him;
when he cried out to him, he responded.
You are the reason I offer praise in the great assembly;
I will fulfill my promises before the Lord’s loyal followers.
Let the oppressed eat and be filled.
Let those who seek his help praise the Lord.
May you live forever!
Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the Lord and turn to him.
Let all the nations worship you.
For the Lord is king
and rules over the nations.
All the thriving people of the earth will join the celebration and worship;
all those who are descending into the grave will bow before him,
including those who cannot preserve their lives.
A whole generation will serve him;
they will tell the next generation about the Lord.
They will come and tell about his saving deeds;
they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.

On Good Friday, we read this as referring to Christ. And we should! The details of Christ’s death - pinned or pierced hands and feet, thirsty, surrounded by enemies, with sarcastic taunts that God should save him, his clothes divided up and used as gambling prizes - are uncannily accurate for something written one thousand years before. Clearly, the Spirit spoke through David, to enable him to prophesy. But I don’t think that David necessarily knew he was prophesying; instead, I think, he spoke metaphorically about his own life, and his prayer was truer than he knew.

David could have written Psalm 22 in response to several circumstances in his own life. Saul, his master and the anointed king of Israel, went insane and tried to kill him; David’s son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar; his son Absalom conspired against him, forcing him to flee Jerusalem for his life; his trusted advisor Ahithophel betrayed him and joined Absalom’s rebellion; his son Adonijah tried to steal the throne in David’s old age.

Since the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, and if David initially wrote Psalm 22 about his own life rather than Christ’s, then can we pray it, too? I believe we can. Most of us have experienced times when God seemed to not answer, or when his help seemed far away. We haven’t (I hope) had enemies like David’s, but we have experienced enemies; we’ve seen people taunt believers and sarcastically dismiss God’s help; we may have felt times when our strength drains away, when our hearts are like wax. Praying Psalm 22 helps us give words to these experiences. And it also reminds us, as David reminded himself, that God protected our physical and spiritual ancestors; that he has provided for us since we came out of our mothers’ wombs; that we look forward to praising God for his response; that nations and future generations will acknowledge God. And remembering God’s faithfulness in the past, both to past believers and in our own individual lives, and remembering his promises for the future can help us in the present.

What does it look like to pray Psalm 22 as our prayer on Good Friday? Good Friday reminds us that, just as David’s words in Psalm 22 were truer than he knew and ultimately applied to Christ far more directly than they did to David, our own prayers are truer than we know. If we feel that God does not answer, Jesus felt that too; if we feel weak or despondent, Jesus felt so more; if we face opposition from others (either personal hostility from individuals or generalized rejection or indifference of a fallen society), Jesus received far worse. And he chose to do so: all the suffering that David prayed, that we pray, Jesus voluntarily took upon himself on the cross, to defeat evil and show his love for us. All the pain that believers throughout history have prayed, all the pain from believers and unbelievers alike that has gone unspoken, Jesus took upon himself. Not only that, but all the times when we’re the enemy - when, knowingly or unknowingly, we’re the ones hemming others in, piercing them or pinning them down, acting like we don’t believe in God’s help, leaving someone feeling weak or in despair - Jesus took that upon himself too.

Because Jesus didn’t just pay the penalty for our sins on the cross (as if the word “just” could apply to so great a salvation). Easter shows us that God the Son fully identified with humanity; that, whatever the depths of our fallenness and suffering, Jesus did not exempt himself from that; that we can therefore trust in him and his love.

Four Anecdotes

One

There’s a blog called Coffee & Covid that made the rounds a couple of times on Facebook during the pandemic, so several months ago, while the delta variant was making the news, I took a look at one of the posts. The author, a Christian lawyer, makes the following arguments:

1. Covid (and the delta variant in particular) aren’t nearly as bad as they’re made out to be, and the Covid vaccines aren’t as helpful as they’re made out to be.
2. Culture is surrendering to a “Spirit of Fear” about Covid. Fear is a spiritual problem, not a medical or scientific or political problem. It’s manifesting itself in anxiety, depression, and more. The Bible teaches is not to fear (Phil. 4:6). The church needs to boldly speak out against this Spirit of Fear.

I could argue with some of his first point, except that I’ve made a policy to not get involved in Covid debates online. I agree with much of his second point: Covid has caused a lot of mental harm, and the Bible does command us not to fear. I think that fear is an “acceptable” sin among Christians - the prevalence of anxiety and stress and worry among Christians (not just around Covid) suggests that we aren’t taking Scripture’s teachings seriously here. If the church can speak to this and can help people with their fears and anxieties, as the Coffee & Covid post argues that it should, then that’s great!

I’m more interested in the relationship between the first and second points. If Covid isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and if the dilemma about whether or not to get vaccinated isn’t as high-stakes as it’s made out to be, then fear is an intellectual and emotional error, not a spiritual problem. (In other words, we don’t need to fear because there isn’t really anything to be afraid of.) Saying that fear is a spiritual problem means that, even if whatever we’re afraid of is genuinely terrifying as all get-out, we need to trust God regardless.

Two

Donald Trump’s position on abortion has been the focus of much scrutiny over the last several years. In older interviews, he described himself as pro-choice, but starting in 2011, he said that he was pro-life:

I’m pro-life, but I changed my view a number of years ago. One of the reasons I changed – one of the primary reasons – a friend of mine’s wife was pregnant, in this case married.

She was pregnant and he didn’t really want the baby. And he was telling me the story. He was crying as he was telling me the story. He ends up having the baby and the baby is the apple of his eye. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.

He elaborated in a 2015 debate:

“Friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances.”

In another exchange,

he responded to a reporter who wondered if he would have become pro-life had the child been a “loser”: “Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.”

In some of the ensuing abortion debates, some pro-life advocates pushed back on Trump; they argued that abortion should be opposed because human life is intrinsically valuable, not because the fetus may go on to be a superstar and an outstanding person.

Three

In Joy at Work, Dennis Bakke, a Christian business leader, talks about his philosophy and experiences as the head of AES, a multi-billion-dollar international energy company. When he and cofounder Roger Sant started the company, he adopted the philosophy that enjoyment - joy - at work came from making meaningful, challenging, and rewarding decisions, and companies’ approach of a centralized hierarchy of authority stifled employees’ ability to do this. AES therefore radically decentralized its decision-making; decisions such as HR, salary, and acquisitions were pushed out as far as possible to those most directly affected, while executives merely gave advice. Bakke also made a commitment to operate the business on Christian principles and to consider its impact on society, employees, suppliers, and customers, instead of prioritizing the interests of the shareholders.

When AES went public, they included the following text in their public-offering memo:

Adherence to AES’s Values - Possible Impact on Results of Operations. An important element of AES is its commitment to four major ‘shared’ values: to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible. See ‘Business - Values and Practices.’ AES believes that earning a fair profit is an important result of providing a quality product to its customers. However, if the Company perceives a conflict between these values and profits, the Company will try to adhere to its values - even though doing so might result in diminished profits or forgone opportunities. Moreover, the Company seeks to adhere to these values not as a means to achieve economic success, but because adherence is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. The Company intends to continue these policies after this offering. (p.39)

Bakke explains that, when they submitted this memo to the SEC, the SEC suggested that they move this paragraph under “Special Risk Factors,” advising potential investors of risks of investing in the company. He writes:

In our case, the SEC thought our values were a hazard… I loved it. I could now say that the U.S. government thought it was very risky to attempt to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun.

AES was very successful. Bakke goes on to write, though, that explaining its values was a constant challenge; the board of directors kept thinking that AES was successful because of its values and its radical approach to decision-making, and Bakke kept trying to explain that AES followed its values because they believed it was the right thing to do, and he would continue to do it even if it wasn’t successful. He ultimately failed; when the energy industry was rocked by the Enron scandal in 2001 and AES’s stock price tumbled, the board decided that its philosophy was no longer working, and they forced Bakke out.

Four

I didn’t watch the 2014 movie God’s Not Dead, but I heard enough about it that I’m familiar with the basic plot. A Christian college student named Josh enrolls in a class taught by an aggressive atheist who challenges the class, “God is dead.” Josh ends up being challenged to a formal debate with the professor. At the end of the movie, Josh is vindicated: he wins the debate, and the professor reveals that his atheism stems from anger with God at some past tragedy in his life.

The movie was very popular within evangelical circles: it cost $2 million to make, grossed $62 million, and spawned three sequels. I felt like the ending was a little bit of wish fulfillment, though; evangelicals feel harassed or looked down upon by broader culture (especially the cultural elites of media and academia), so we wanted to see a movie where the Christian “won.” If Joshua had lost the debate (which, humanly speaking, would be likely, given the professor’s broader learning and experience), flunked out of college, and worked as a Starbucks barista for the rest of his life, it would still be a story of faithful Christian witness; in fact, compared to many historical Christian witnesses (the original meaning of the Greek word “martyr”), he would have gotten off easy.

Why?

What do a pandemic blog post, a president’s pro-life conversion, a billion-dollar energy company, and a possibly kitschy Christian film have in common? All of them confuse means with ends; all of them confuse the value that a thing can bring with the value of the thing itself.

We say that God’s eye is on the sparrow and that we don’t have to fear anything, yet we can’t help but try and argue that our fears are smaller instead of remembering that God is greater. Truly conquering the spirit of fear would mean saying that, even if all of the worst doomsayer predictions of Covid were right, and it killed one of out ten people and could spread through surfaces and even the briefest outdoor contact and required brutal lockdowns and became endemic with unending variants, we can still know that our heavenly Father will provide all the things that we need (Mt. 6:31-33).

If Trump’s friend’s baby really did help Trump realize the value of life, then that’s great. But the reason we’re pro-life is because we believe that human life has inherent value, because it’s made in the image of God, and that life has value and is worth protecting even if Trump’s friend’s baby grew up to be a total scuzzbucket who brought his parents nothing but grief and heartache.

Countless business books, articles, and talks espouse virtues such as leadership, teamwork, trust, communication, and responsibility and talk about how these can promote success in business. Few business leaders are willing to say, like Bakke, that the real reason to talk about these good traits is because they are, in fact, good, and they remain good even if they don’t “pay off“ and even if they hurt a company in the marketplace.

And I appreciate God’s Not Dead’s depiction of a Christian willing to stand firm for his faith. But I can’t help but think that it would not have been nearly as successful if it didn’t also show him winning the debate and succeeding in college as a result of standing firm for his faith. (Case in point: Silence, a movie about the brutal persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan, featuring a Catholic missionary who renounced his faith, earned only $22 million against its $50 million budget, despite critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination.)

And so forth. So many of the stories, fables, and works of fiction, both for children and adults, show someone doing something good and then being rewarded for it. Good stewardship is encouraged as a means of achieving financial success, instead of simply the right way to treat the finite resources God gives us. Christian purity culture encouraged abstinence before marriage by saying that it would result in better sex within marriage, even though that risks getting further involved in culture’s over-sexualization rather than offering a meaningful alternative. Left-wing writers, in a well-intentioned effort to oppose inequality and discrimination, insist that there are no meaningful differences in skill or aptitude between men and women; maybe so (the topic of gender differences is worth books by itself), but this argument leaves unchallenged the deeper lie that our skills and aptitude determine our worth, that someone who’s smart or a math genius or socially adept is simply better than someone who isn’t. Right-wing writers uphold Christian values as part of what makes Western civilization great; maybe so, and following God’s ways can certainly brings blessings, but we’re better served (and better serve) by quietly living out Christian values (1 Pe 3:15-16) than by getting involved in culture wars over Western civilization.

Most of us within evangelical churches are very aware of the dangers of the prosperity gospel: the “name-it-and-claim-it” idea that God will always reward us with financial success, physical health, and temporal happiness, as long as we approach him with the right kind of prayer and sufficient faith. But the prosperity idea can be much more subtle than that: the idea that it’s better to be smart, sexy, successful, rich, well-respected, independent than not; the idea that goodness and morality and God’s ways are good because they can help us achieve these states; the idea that doing the right thing will produce good results; the idea that, if you didn’t get good results, it’s because you did something wrong. Now, obviously, God does bless those who do the right thing. And following God’s ways will make things go well for you (he did, after all, create the universe in accordance with his ways) - but maybe not right away, and maybe not in this lifetime, and maybe not where we can see it. And, regardless, that isn’t why we do it - the point is our desire to please the One we love, not the benefits that we may or may not get out of it.

When the fig tree does not bud,
and there are no grapes on the vines;
when the olive trees do not produce
and the fields yield no crops;
when the sheep disappear from the pen
and there are no cattle in the stalls—
I will rejoice because of the Lord;
I will be happy because of the God who delivers me!
The Sovereign Lord is my source of strength.
He gives me the agility of a deer;
he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain.

—Habakkuk 3:17-19