If God Won Our Elections

Copyright © 2014 Tim Morgan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission." (www.Lockman.org)

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-4314-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4316-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4315-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014911830

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/21/2014

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Section 1 Governing with God

Chapter 1 The Establishment of Religion

Chapter 2 The Hoax of Marriage Equality

Chapter 3 The Bible and Immigration

Section 2 Listening to God

Chapter 4 Getting It Across

Chapter 5 Orange Elephants

Chapter 6 Putting It Together

Section 3 Talking to God

Chapter 7 Josiah Cleans House

Chapter 8 An American Mizpah

Section 4 Obeying God

Chapter 9 Under God or Over God?

Chapter 10 Divine Endowment – Divine Court

Chapter 11 Swimming Against the Current

Section 5 Following God: The Church

Chapter 12 Declaring the Independence of the Church

Chapter 13 Who Hears a Mute Prophet?

Section 6 Following God: The State

Chapter 14 For Punishment and Praise

Chapter 15 Jesus or Robin Hood?

Chapter 16 Right of Passage

Chapter 17 Death and Taxes

Chapter 18 What Then Shall We Pursue?

Endnotes

In Memory of my sister,

Suanne K. Rolader.

She believed.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without the people of the Kellogg – Pleasant View parish which I serve. They welcomed me as their pastor, eager to hear me speak the word to which God had given utterance (1 Peter 4:11). When, with their support, I did so, they were the first to urge its publication. This book is the result. I thank God in all my remembrance of them.

I am grateful also to Kathrin DePue, The Writing Mechanic who, with professional dedication, helped turn these spoken words into words to be read as the copyeditor of this book.

My daughter, Lauren Morgan Buffington, with her enthusiasm and media knowledge, gave her aid in pushing this book into the marketplace of ideas. Her love and encouragement have been indispensible.

Therefore, I give thanks to our Savior, Jesus Christ who, by the working of His Spirit in His followers, has made this book possible.

Preface

In 2010, the Fourth of July fell on a Sunday. As a local church pastor, I had to consider what would please God for me to preach on this occasion when Independence Day and the Lord’s Day coincided. One is celebrated by the American state, the other by the Christian church. It seemed there could be no more opportune time for examining the relationship between the two.

This, of course, is not a neglected topic. It has been expounded voluminously and continues to be discussed. There is, however, one source of truth on this subject that is seldom consulted. Everyone inquiring into the correct relationship between church and state asks what scholars, lawyers, and politicians think, but who asks what God thinks?

Where to find out is no mystery. The place to go for answers is the written expression of God’s general will for all people in all times and places: the Holy Bible. As a preacher of the Bible, therefore, I prayed the Holy Spirit would inspire an understanding of what the Scriptures say God distinctly wants from the church and the state. I soon found the Word of God says much more than could be preached in one message.

Praying for what the Lord would have me say in worship is a weekly occurrence. As I did so in the weeks and months that followed, the Holy Spirit periodically led me back to the subject that began on that Fourth of July Sunday. When a few years had passed, I started to notice these messages, if combined and redacted into a book, would constitute a fundamental survey of the biblical roles of church and state. Still, the fact that they would make a book did not mean they should.

However, while these messages on church and state accumulated, God stirred up the spirits of my parishioners. They would say to me, Why haven’t we heard this anywhere else? How do we get the word out? Get me a copy I can share with others, and, This should be known in all the churches. I could not ignore the Lord as He sometimes speaks to us through the members of His church, which is His body. 1 Corinthians 14:31 says, You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted. This statement is addressed to the members of the church of Christian believers in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. By that Spirit, they may all prophesy: they may tell forth the divine counsels. As the Scripture says, with these counsels comes an obligation to tell them forth to all they may concern, so those for whom they are intended may learn and be exhorted.

Through the working of the Spirit in me and in these members of the body of Christ, my soul has been convicted: God’s purpose is for these counsels to be told forth. On these pages I now tell them forth to those whom they concern.

Tim Morgan

Newton, Iowa

December 27, 2013

Section 1

Governing with God

Chapter 1

The Establishment of Religion

Every year, with the bonfires and illuminations John Adams suggested, we celebrate the day when this nation declared itself to exist under a government to which the governed give their consent. The electorate gives that consent by making, at regular intervals, a pilgrimage to the polls, which is preceded by months of speculation about who will win that election: who’s ahead, who’s behind, and who will have the upper hand in the end.

I invite you now to consider a far more significant possibility. What if God won our elections? One may say God is never on the ballot. Officially, of course, that’s true. But spiritually, God is always on the ballot wherever voters have a free and genuine choice. The question before them on Election Day is the same one Joshua put to his people over three thousand years ago: choose for yourselves today whom you will serve (Joshua 24:15). Will we choose leaders to serve us because they belong to our preferred political party or pledge to pursue what we think is in our personal interests? Or will we choose leaders who answer Joshua’s question the way he did: As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord? What sort of a country would we have if we were to choose such leaders?

Some say we would have something unconstitutional. If God won the election because the electorate chose to elect those who serve God, that would be an establishment of religion by the state—a profound evil.

More than a half century ago, the US Supreme Court issued its ruling banning prayer in the public schools; since then, it has been illegal for public school employees to pray out loud with their students. This too has been declared an establishment of religion by the state.

There are still many children across America whose school days start by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Complaints have, so far, failed to reach the Supreme Court, but we’ve probably not heard the last of attempts to make two words in that pledge illegal for our public school students to say. You know which two: under God.

This is the point to which that court ruling over fifty years ago has brought us: a public employee may not speak aloud the words under God in the presence of children at school without being accused of establishing a state religion. Did our national founders, when they wrote the Bill of Rights, really mean saying the word God out loud would create an establishment of religion? Can any reasonable person claim that’s what they meant?

The founders never explained what they meant because the definition was supplied by the time in which they lived. The colonists who had emigrated to America had mostly done so from countries in which one’s nationality determined one’s religion. If you were born Swedish, you were Lutheran; if you were born Spanish, you were Roman Catholic; if you were born English, you were Anglican; and if you were born Scottish, you were Presbyterian. If you tried to follow some religion other than the one you were born into, you were in trouble —going to prison kind of trouble; going to the rack and the gallows kind of trouble.

Our ancestors came here, in part, to get away from that kind of trouble. But that doesn’t mean they were ready to let people establish any sort of religion they wanted. They sought freedom for themselves but not necessarily for people with different opinions. The early colonists who came to America for religious reasons came because they thought they could have the established religion here be their religion. As soon as they got away from the state religions in their old countries, they set up state religions of their own.

The laws they promulgated varied from colony to colony and, later, from state to state. But, commonly, church membership was required in order to vote and hold public office. Church attendance was required, and lack of attendance resulted in a fine. There was a government-approved creed, and if anyone publically taught anything else he or she went to jail. Only clergy licensed by the government could preach or administer the sacraments. Non-official churches could not own or sell property. The established denomination put up church buildings and paid its clergy with tax money.

This was the establishment of religion the founders meant. A religion was established in a way that required legal penalties for refusing to participate in it or pay for it and for preferring other religions in its place. The issues the founders sought to prevent regarding religion and the state were not issues that might happen but those that had already happened. They were responding to objections that had been raised in response to actual events.

Therefore, the founders could not have meant to silence audible prayers on public properties or on occasions when no one is required to join in. They could not have meant to prohibit a public official from expressing a religious opinion or proposing action based on that opinion. They could not have meant to stop all things religious from being said or done where a non-religious person might hear or see. They could not have meant to ban prayer in publically owned schools if there is no penalty for not praying and no added cost to the taxpayer associated with the prayers.

But there is a still higher authority that a Christian must consult: the Word of God conveyed in the Holy Scriptures. How does the Bible define the establishment of religion? Where in the Bible do we find religion being established, and what are the indications of its establishment?

The last verse of the fourth chapter of Genesis, which is set around the time of the generation of Enosh, describes how "men