The election is over, and I have no trouble in affirming that the candidates who won are those whom God ordained to their positions, and that God so ordained them for his purposes. I do not, however, believe that those purposes are for what most people would conceive as our blessing as a nation; I do affirm that times of trial and judgment are part of God’s blessing, but that’s hard to see when we’re in them. I feel, at this moment, rather like the prophet Habakkuk: I don’t like what I see coming, but I believe that God is sovereign in it, and I am committed to prayer and praise.Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.—Habakkuk 3:17-19 (TNIV)Therefore, I will be praying for those who will be hurt by the resurgence of the abortion holocaust in this nation. Theologically, I don’t believe in praying for the dead, and in any case I trust in the grace and the love of God for those who will die unborn as a result of the policies of the incoming Democratic government; but I will be praying for the mothers who will bear the guilt, felt or unfelt, of planning and consenting to the deaths of their unborn children, and for those who bear the active responsibility for killing them. I will be praying as well for those whom God has called to particular roles in resisting this holocaust, both that they will stand firm and that they will find ways to do so which will communicate the grace and the love of God and the caring support of his church to those considering abortion, rather than merely warnings of judgment.I will be praying for the media of this country, reporters and editors alike, that they will report on the Democratic administration with the diligence and honesty which they did not show in reporting on the Obama campaign. I’m tempted to pray that they will remember their adversarial role with respect to the incoming administration and pursue it with as much vigor and determination as they did with respect to the Bush 43 administration, but that would be vindictive of me; as it is, I will pray that they will have the intellectual and moral courage never to quash a story for ideological or financial reasons, but that if a story deserves to be reported—in God’s eyes, not necessarily in mine—that they will report it, no matter how much it hurts their own political agendas. I’ll be praying for this for their own sake as much as anything, since if they don’t, they’ll regret it in the long run.I will be praying for the Republican opposition, that they will learn (and learn the right lessons!) from this; I will be praying that they repent of their surrender to business as usual and their accommodation to power and money and the corruption that come with them, and return to a principled conservatism. After all, for at least the next two years, they will be irrelevant regardless; they might as well use the freedom that comes with irrelevance to reclaim the conservative agenda (and, one hopes, find ways to convince people that they actually mean to stick to it this time).And, neither last nor by any means least, I will be praying for Barack Obama, who has won what may well turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. He has won the highest prize of all by putting himself in hock to his party’s machine and creating incredibly high expectations among a majority of the American electorate; he simply cannot keep all the promises he has made, and the ones he can keep—and indeed, will have to keep, will he or nil he, to the party machine—will only accelerate and worsen his breaking of the rest. Disillusionment is inevitable with any politician, and particularly with any new president, but he’s set himself up for a particularly severe response, when it turns out that his election does not in fact mean that “the oceans stop their rise, and the planet begins to heal”; for Barack Obama, there is nowhere left to go but down.This means that he needs the grace of God in an extraordinary way in order to succeed, and I will be praying for him that he will receive that extraordinary grace. I will pray that he will govern with the wisdom of Solomon and the integrity of Nehemiah, and that he will seek the righteousness and justice of God ahead of the best interest of his party or his own political future. In a sense, he too has won a peculiar freedom: the freedom of having no higher aspiration left to him. If he claims and uses it, rather than becoming the slave of his desire for re-election, he might be able to break free of the chains his party believes it has on him, and actually become, to some degree, the figure of change he claimed to be in his campaign. I will pray this for him. I will pray for him that God will give him wisdom, courage, and resolve in dealing with the enemies of the nation he has been called to serve, that he would do so in ways that will be for the blessing of this country and the world, and that he would stick to his guns and not back down in the face of opposition. And most of all, I will pray that the Holy Spirit will convict his heart on the matter of abortion, bring him to repentance for his past actions, and raise him up again as a defender of the most powerless and vulnerable among us: those who, like the slaves of centuries past, are denied the most basic human protections, in this case not because of the color of their skin but because they have not yet been born.I will be praying. May God’s will be done.
