Rev. William Cook
September 25, 2018
It is not a shepherd’s prerogative to forgo political discourse, when the temporal welfare of his flock is jeopardized by their political ignorance and apathy. The “salt of the earth” is obliged to vote knowledgeably, if for no other reason than to counterbalance the darkened thinking of the “children of disobedience.”
Fundamentally, if we believe Holy Scripture, every citizen is in one of two camps—those who are alive in Christ, and those who are dead in trespasses and sins. The Apostle Paul confidently asserted that the predilection of a child of disobedience is to “walk according to the course of this age, according to the prince of the power of the air [i.e. the devil], the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.” (Ephesians 2:2) If the Scriptures be true, how can Liberty endure, much less prosper, when large numbers of Bible-believing Evangelicals habitually cede the voting booth, and with it the Civil Society, to the children of disobedience? To know what will happen we need only watch thirty minutes of nightly news.
It is morally incumbent upon every Christian of voting age, to vote in every election. If voting is a moral duty, it is a sacred duty that we vacate at our peril.
Abortion on demand and infanticide are not the result of the moral decay of America. Sodomy, transgenderism and other departures from the Imago Dei (Image of God), did not gain a foothold in America because of secularism, secular education, the removal of God from the public square, or foreign propaganda. All evince the cumulative effect over time, of impotent salt. having abandoned its curative mandate, a dereliction that is justified by the myopic and heretical view that the Church’s sole mission on earth is preaching the gospel, society be damned. If this had been the thinking of our Christian forbears, America would never have become what it continues to bear resemblance to today.
Imagine if in every election since the turn of the last century, every child of light had voted in every election? Would Progressivism have the hold it exerts on governance in America today? Would progressive jurists have been nominated to the Supreme Court, and would the Court have ruled as it did in Roe v. Wade in 1973? Would more than 300 million unborn babies have been murdered? Would the Johnson Amendment, which effectively gagged the American pulpit, and ended the annual election sermon, a tradition that had held for more than three hundred years, have been signed into law? Would the “sexual revolution” be part of our national history? Would Johnson’s Great Society have resulted in rampant poverty among minorities in our inner cities? Would a Federal Deficit so high that it exceeds the imagination be hanging over our heads today?
If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, then the only thing necessary for a nation to begin the march toward Armageddon is that enough good men do not vote.
Clearly, voting is as much a sacred duty for the individual Christian as it is for the Christian community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s oft-quoted aphorism is no less true with the word “vote” substituted for “act,” for not voting, or voting without the requisite knowledge is “Silence in the face of evil [and] is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to vote is to vote. Not to act is to act.”
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