Category: Good & Evil

A Meditation on Common Grace Following Election Day

God causes the sun to shine on the evil and the good

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Families harvesting fruit and vegetables in a colorful rural garden beneath a rainbow

A few days after election day my thoughts are still swirling. Actually not swirling, really, but focusing on things that Jesus said. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his audience to “be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The context in which Jesus said this is loving our enemies:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'”

Matthew 5:43-48

The illustration Jesus used is the fact that God causes the sun to shine on the evil and the good and his rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. God demonstrates his love for the world that is filled with people in opposition to Him by providing common grace.

Many fellow Christians in this country have been fighting a culture war for decades and trying to take over the U.S. government for Jesus. What they don’t realize is what they will accomplished if they succeed. If they succeed in making the US a Christian nation today, they will change the character of a country.

It will no longer be a country in which there is liberty and justice for all. It will no longer be a country in which all people are protected in the freedom of their conscience, to worship as they choose, and to speak according to their conscience. To make our country a Christian nation means to favor Christianity.

That may seem like a good idea as long as Christians are in power. As long as Christians fight to maintain their power and to prevent a takeover by another group, everything will be fine for us.

In the meantime we establish precedent for might makes right. If it was good for the Christian cause, it will be good for the atheist cause, or the Muslim cause, or the cause of whatever group rises to power and dethrones the Christians.

This dynamic continues to tear apart countries around the world, and it always has. The United States was comparatively a shining city on the hill from the date the wet ink on the Constitution dried. To make this country a Christian country is to ignore the First Amendment of the Constitution that protects all people from the establishment of a state religion and protects the conscience of all people to worship as they individually determine.

To ignore the Constitution is to negate the power of it and to open our country up to the same tribal conflicts that occur in many other nations around the world. Christians who are fighting to make the United States a Christian nation are short-sighted in pursuing that goal and are laying the foundation for our country to be controlled by whatever thought group rises to power.

I believe that the effort also is not biblical. God does not force people to love Him, to honor Him, or even to acknowledge Him in this world. He causes the sun to shine on the evil and the good and sends the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.

God desires that all people “would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.'” (Acts 17:27-28) If He did not want us to have any choice in the matter, He would have programmed us like obedient robots. Of course, then we would not truly love Him.

Instead, He gave us a world in which we are not required to love Him, and that means we can truly love Him for who He is. He became incarnate and sacrificed Himself to show His love for us. Stands at the door and knocks, and all who will open the door He comes into them. The people who reject Him or ignore Him will not be required to spend an eternity with Him – to their sad loss.

If we want a country that demonstrates God’s love to the world, it should be established to protect and promote common grace – liberty to all – the way our Constitution now reads, and we should do nothing to undermine it. We should protect the liberty of every individual to seek God and perhaps find Him, to discover that in Him we live and move and have our being, to love Him for who He is and not because of any law that was passed by a Christian legislature.

It may sound very Christian to take over the U.S. government for Jesus, but it actually isn’t. The Gospel spread steadily over the first three centuries in a hostile Roman government that crucified our Savior. God does not need the U.S. government to protect His sovereignty or His plan of salvation that extends to all the nations. He only needs His children to be faithful for the harvest is great and the workers are few.

Jesus Shunned the Authority of the Kingdoms of the World

The temptation of power and influence

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Modern-dressed man and robed figure overlooking an ancient city at sunset

“And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, ‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.’

And Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ”You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.””

Luke 4:5-6, 8 ESV

From this passage it seems clear that Satan has authority over the kingdoms of this world. Satan has the authority to grant authority and the glory that goes with it to whomever he wishes. That the kingdoms of the world have been delivered to the devil. is a jolting statement.

In this passage, Jesus does not deny what Satan says, but he refuses to be tempted by Satan’s offering. He rejects the idea that he should take the authority that has been given to Satan over the kingdoms of the world, saying that a person should worship the Lord God and serve only Him.

This is one of the four temptations of Jesus with which the devil confronted him in the wilderness before he began his public ministry. All of those temptations are instructive for us, but I think this one in particular is instructive for us in this political moment of the United States.

As Jesus was about to go into his public ministry, he certainly knew that he could usurp all the authority of the kingdoms of the Earth. Jesus also knew that all the authority over the nations of the Earth came from God, but that authority had been given to Satan for the present time.

I believe this is why Jesus did not deny that authority existed, and he did not deny that the devil had been given that authority to hand out as he desired. Jesus did not deny any of that, but he rejected the idea that he should take the authority the devil had to give. (Matthew 4:8-10)

To be clear, the offer was “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” in exchange for worshipping the devil. The fact that the devil has the power and authority to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world does not necessarily mean that someone who is in a position of power achieved it by worshiping the devil. I don’t want to leave any impression that I think that.

On the other hand, we should not be unaware that the authority over the kingdoms of the world is the province of the devil, given to the devil by God until Christ comes again.

This was the last attempt by the devil to tempt Jesus – a last ditch effort. I think this underscores the seductiveness of power and political influence. Power and influence is almost always accompanied with the accumulation of wealth. If the love of money is the root of all evil, the power and influence is its twin brothers.

In practical reality, there seems to be little separation between money and influence. People who have great influence nearly always amass wealth. Just look at the net worth of people in politics, especially at the national level.

Of course, money (itself) is not evil. It’s the love of money that is the problem. Jesus handled money, and it did not corrupt him. At the same time, the one man who handled the money for Jesus is the man who betrayed him.

Jesus warned his followers of the seductive influence of money when he said it is harder for a wealthy man to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Given the correlation between money and power/influence, we should be just as wary.

Christians should not rush to gain influence any more than Christians should seek wealth. We cannot serve two masters. If we love one, we hate the other. This is true of literally anything we seek, exalt, focus on, depend on, etc., more than God.

When Jesus talked about love and hate in these ways, he wasn’t talking about emotions. He was talking about priorities. When he said that a person who follows him must hate his mother, father, sister, and brother, Jesus wasn’t actually telling us to hate them. He was telling us to prioritize them below our love of God.

And so it is with God and money. To love money is to prioritize money above our love of God. To prioritize influence and power above our love for God is to hate God in comparison.

To focus on governmental authority or to focus on money is a dangerous endeavor for a Christian. If Jesus could be tempted by power and influence, how much more are we tempted by those things? How much more susceptible are we to giving into that temptation?

I am going to be frank here. I think we have seen the disordering of Christian priorities in our country. As Jesus has plainly told us, there are many who will say, “Lord, Lord.” There are many who will say the right things, who will speak of God and of Jesus, but their hearts belong somewhere else. And Jesus said we would know them by their fruit. If anyone has gained power and wealth, but they have not love – the primary fruit of the Spirit – they are like clanging gongs and cymbals.

We overcomplicate what love is. Paul tells us plainly that love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy or boast. Love is not arrogant or rude. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5)

Power and wealth corrupt. It warps our priorities. It twists our character. We begin to think that black is white and white is black. We begin to think of power and influence as a blessing from God, rather than a burden that threatens our very souls.

Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who are persecuted.

Notice that the devil did not tempt Jesus with any of those things! None of those things would be a temptation, would they? Yet, Jesus tells us plainly that people who experience those things are blessed. None of these things are desirable in the world, but they lead to the great treasure of eternal life and relationship with God.

Power and wealth are highly desirable in this world, but none of it will matter in the next. They are a stumbling block in this world. The attachment to power and influence hangs like a dead weight on the backs of human beings who have not shunned it like Jesus did.

Jesus did not preach that a wealthy man cannot enter into the Kingdom of God, but it’s harder than you might think. It’s like a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. However you understand that metaphor, you should not miss the point that wealth is a very heavy burden when it comes to entering the Kingdom of God – and power/influence is the cousin of wealth.

I think we should take notice that the devil did not tempt Jesus with money. He tempted Jesus with the power of the kingdoms of the world. Perhaps, that is because wealth naturally flows from having power. If it’s difficult for a wealthy man to get into the kingdom of heaven, how much more difficult is it for a powerful (and wealthy) man to get into the kingdom of God?

I think we should be sober and alert to the devil’s schemes. If Jesus shunned the power that is the devil’s to give power, how much more should we shun it? Do we have more willpower than Jesus?

That attitude, of course, will not get us anywhere in the world. It looks utterly foolish for us to shun power and influence, but that is the foolishness of the cross. It is the foolishness of God’s wisdom, and I think we would do well to reclaim some of that foolishness.

Trusting God from Beginning to End in 2026

How do trust God in a world that is violent and corrupt?

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Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. (Revelation 1:8; 21:6; and 22:13) Jesus was in the beginning with God, the Father, and the universe and all that is in it was made through Jesus. (John 1:1-3)

At this time of year, we celebrate God descending to become man in Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem into a common family in a far flung place. Jesus was God in his very nature, but he deigned to shed himself of that glory and power to become man, to become a servant to his own creation, and to humble himself to the point of death at the hands of his own creation. (Philippians 2:5-8)

In the end, Jesus will be exalted to the “highest place” with a “name that is above every name.” (Phil. 2:9) Every knee in heaven and on earth will bow to him, and every tongue will acknowledge that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:10-11)

From the garden of Eden to the new heavens and earth and the New Jerusalem in which God will dwell with His people, God has had a plan from the beginning to the end. God set eternity in the hearts of people, but not so that we would know the beginning from the end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) We don’t know, but God knows. Do we trust Him?

That is the question in my mind on this 1st day of the New Year in 2026. That is the question with which I challenge myself. Will I trust Him with my life? With the world? With the insanity that seems to characterize the year that just ended in United States of America where I live?

Since God created the universe and populated it with people and animals, God ordained and allowed people to populate the Earth. God didn’t dictate how the history of His creation would unfold. He created Adam and Eve with the capacity to live in sync with God and the universe, but He also gave them the capacity to go their own ways. God had a plan from the beginning, but He allowed the universe and mankind, His crowning creation, to unfold as it would.

I am beginning a new year of reading through the Bible as I have done many years in the past. I have read through the first handful of chapters in Genesis, and my thoughts gather around the question: will I trust God better in the New Year?

Continue reading “Trusting God from Beginning to End in 2026” →

The Sin of Sodom & Gomorrah Summarized: A Warning to the United States of America (and a Reason for Hope)

It may be worse then you think and more relevant than you assume

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Since I noticed how Ezekiel summarized the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah earlier this year, I wanted to take a closer look. Ezekiel’s summary was surprising to me, and I wondered, “What did I miss in reading the story?”

I thought it was about sexual sin, and specifically homosexual sin, but Ezekiel doesn’t even mention sexual sin in his summary. This is what Ezekiel says, speaking to Israel:

“You not only followed [the ways of Sodom] and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways you soon became more depraved than they. As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.

‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me.'”

(Ezekiel 16:47-50) Obviously, the story of Sodom & Gomorrah isn’t what I thought it was.

Like most people, I was taught a simple version: God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. End of story.

But when I actually took the time read the text carefully, I realized the Bible tells a far more unsettling story, and a story that is far more relevant to our world today than I imagined. The Bible contrasts hospitality and hostility to strangers (angels) to highlight the root of Sodom & Gomorrah’s sin.

I did a careful exegesis of the Sodom & Gomorrah story previously that demonstrates what the primary the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah was, but today I am just going to summarize it. The summary needs to include the context in which the story of Sodom & Gomorrah is embedded in the Bible.

Before Genesis 19 where we find the story of Sodom & Gomorrah is the story in Genesis 18 of Abraham’s and Sarah’s magnanimous hospitality to three strangers who turn out to be “the Lord” and two angels on their way to Sodom. The one called “the Lord” remained behind talking to Abraham, while the two angels continued on to Sodom where Lot sees them sitting in the gateway of the City. Lot calls to them, invites them in, and shows them the same magnanimous hospitality Abraham showed. (Gen. 19:1-3)

The parallel stories of Abraham’s and Lot’s hospitality that mirror each other in the same pattern set the stage for God’s judgment on Sodom. That’s when things go sideways. The men of the town surround Lot’s house and demand that Lot send them out to be violated sexually.

Abraham welcomes strangers with generosity and honor. Lot does the same, but the men of Sodom do the opposite. They rage against the strangers. They threaten Lot because he is a “foreigner”, and they warn Lot they will treat him worse than what they plan to do to the strangers in Lot’s house if he doesn’t comply.

The town’s men resented Lot being there and resented him inviting other foreigners into his house. They formed an angry mob to humiliate and violate Lot’s guests as a warning: you are not welcome here!

As Ezekiel says, the reason for this conduct is because they were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned about others. They did not help the poor and the needy. Worse, they didn’t just turn the foreigners away; they didn’t just drive them out of town; they tried to punish, violate, humiliate, and shame them.

The Lord told Abraham that He was responding to the great outcry against Sodom & Gomorrah due to the grievousness of their sin. (Gen. 18:20) Such an outcry is the response of people when great injustice is done to them. The scene echoes the story of Cain and Abel when Abel’s blood was said to cry out from the ground in Genesis 4. The same word is used for Israel’s outcry under Egyptian oppression in Exodus 2.

God responds to injustice. God responds specifically to the outcries of people who bear the oppression of that injustice, and God judges those who are unrepentantly responsible for that injustice.

The story of Sodom & Gomorrah is a story of God’s judgment on sin, but it isn’t sexual sin that brings God’s judgment. The sin that prompted God to respond was the sin that caused people to cry out under the weight of injustice.

Jesus later confirms that the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah is inhospitality when he warns towns who do not welcome his followers, saying, “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” Jesus says this in Mathew 10 when he sent his 12 disciples to proclaim the kingdom of God, and Jesus says it again in Luke 10, when he sent out 72 of his followers to heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom.

The context of these statements was the hospitality (or lack of it) shown to his followers. There is no mention of sexual sin—only refusal to welcome, refusal to listen, refusal to be hospitable.

Ezekiel is very specific about the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah:

“This was the sin of your sister Sodom: pride, excess of food, prosperous ease—but she did not help the poor and needy.”

Pride. Comfort. Indifference. Not just lack of empathy, but downright cruelty to the poor and needy – the vulnerable. That is the Bible’s own summary of the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah.

The angels/foreigners in the story of Sodom & Gomorrah are just one category of vulnerable people. Elsewhere, Scripture often mentions widows, orphans, and foreigners together to describe the vulnerable people in the ancient near east who God desired His people to protect and watch over – because God’s heart is to protect and watch over the vulnerable and needy.

Yes, there is sexual sin in the story, but the root of that sin is hostility toward others. In the context of the story as it sits in the greater context of the previous story about Abraham’s radical hospitality, the sexual act is a weapon of the people of Sodom. They use it out of arrogance, out of desire to guard their own wealth and comfort from foreigners, to humiliate, shame, and drive out the foreigners who dared to encroach on on what they had. It is the final expression of a society that idolized comfort, wealth, and lifestyle. Because they didn’t love God, they didn’t love people.

Sodom wasn’t destroyed because it was too permissive. Sodom was destroyed because its people were too proud, too full, too comfortable, and too cruel in their efforts to protect what they had from outsiders.

God heard the cries of those crushed by that system—and He acted.

That’s what makes this story disturbingly relevant today. The sin of Sodom isn’t ancient or obscure. It shows up whenever a society values its own prosperity above allegiance to God and clings to its own comfort, despises the stranger, and silences the cries of the vulnerable to protect what it has.

And that should give Christians (and non-Christians alike) pause in 2025 in the United States of America. God is no respecter of persons. People reap what they sow. God did not spare the people of Israel from His judgment when they repeatedly gave in to idolatry (putting their own interests above God’s interest) and oppressed their neighbors. He will not spare a country or a even a group of believers who do that.

The good news is that God is always, always faithful. He is aways just to forgive those who ask to be forgiven and repent of their ways. I pray that we can be such people.

Training in Godliness

Training in godliness may be a bit different than what you suppose.

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Life is a journey, and each day is a leg in that journey. Proverbs says that a man makes his plans, but God directs his steps. Basically, God is ultimately in control, but we have something to say in the process. Where we end up depends on whether and how we align ourselves with God and HIs purposes.

The weekly reading for the small group I am in (and the subject of the sermon this coming Sunday) is 1 Timothy 4:7-10. That passage inspires my writing today as part of the leg of my journey that I call today. My focus will be the following two verses:

Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

1 timothy 4:7-8 (niv)

I was fortunate today that I didn’t just set out to check off this reading for Wednesday night. I came at this reading with a more intentional and devoted mindset, which I suppose is appropriate for the topic. I can’t say that I always have the mindfulness to do that, but today I did.

I might otherwise have assumed I knew what “godless myths” are and what “godly” training is. I might have glossed over those phrases without really understanding what Paul is saying, but I realized as read them that I didn’t really know what he meant by “godless myths” and training to be “godly.”

Acknowledging this, I took one step back to read these verses in context. I read verse 6, which says:

If you point these things out to the brothers and sisters, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished on the truths of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed.

1 Timothy 4:6 (emphasis added)

Of course, then I had to step further back to see what Paul meant when he said, “If you point these things….” What things? The previously verses contain those “things”:

The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

1 Timothy 4:1-5

I am still not sure what “deceiving spirits” these people followed or what “teachings” Paul references here, but the fact that Paul calls these teachers “hypocritical liars” who taught ascetic religious practices (forbidding marriage and ordering abstinence from certain foods) is a clue. Affirming that God created everything good and receiving those good things with thanksgiving and prayer is another clue.

it seems that another clue lies in the use of the word, hypocritical,” which I learned recently was not meant in exactly the same way modern people think of it. We think of hypocrisy as saying one thing and doing another. The Greek word, ὑπόκρισις (hupokrisis), that we translate as hypocrisy literally means “to act under a feigned part.”

In other words, a hypocrite is an actor. A hypocrite according to the Greek meaning is someone playing a part, a person pretending to be someone or to know something than who or what they are.

As I considered these things, I realized that the Greek words translated into English as “godless myths” and training to “godly” might also give me a better understanding of what Paul is saying. When I dove into the Greek, the meaning became clearer, and it isn’t necessarily what I might have thought.

I might have answered, if someone pressed me, that godliness is how a person behaves. I might have said that godliness means doing right, living according to God’s rules, and conforming to biblical morality, but that isn’t what Paul is saying here. To be sure, godliness does bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit, but we should not confuse the fruit for the root.

Continue reading “Training in Godliness” →