Politics and Christianity

This article was originally posted in the Christian Community group here on Multiply. I started that group back in September 2004, but I've decided to remove myself from there and focus on my DandelionWine site instead. So I'm reposting several posts that I had made over to there.

I'm rather overwhelmed by the degree to which Christians ally themselves with certain parties here in the U.S. In fact, a member of the church I attend recently compared the choices in this election to Christ vs. Satan. I can understand the fact that in the US we are free to choose our leader and free to tell others our reason for doing so. But when they suppose they know God's will on the matter I get a little disgruntled.

We can't know the minds of the candidates, only God does. Moreover, who we *think* might be the best for the position, may not be. I'm sure the Romans never would have chosen Nero if they had the choice, and yet God allowed him to take office. But God has plans that reach far beyond our own. He makes political choices based on his will, not our concept of what his will might be in this moment in history.

If we believe that God is sovereign, then why do we get so hung up on elections? Why do we put our hope in "our guy" winning?  

Adam and the Garden

This article was originally posted in the Christian Community group here on Multiply. I started that group back in September 2004, but I've decided to remove myself from there and focus on my DandelionWine site instead. So I'm reposting several posts that I had made over to there.

God Formed the Man from the Dust of the Ground

...the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. -- Genesis 2:7

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. -- Genesis 2:15

God formed Adam from the dust of the ground. Therefore, Adam's relationship to the earth was more than intimate, it was integral. When the New Ager's and mystics croon on about our "oneness" with Gaia (or Mother Earth), in a sense, they're right. We were formed from the very stuff of earth. God certainly could have poofed us into existence, and yet he chose to use a substance that he had already formed, and to remake it and breathe life into it.

It is interesting to note that after the rather short description of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7, there is a rather longer description of where he was put. It seems that some sense of "place" was important. Adam was made, and then he was given a place to be. In our modern day where we can communicate with people on the underbelly of the earth with only a few clicks on the computer, and where we move from job to job, city to city, with relative ease, we seem to have lost this sense of "place." Perhaps there's a connection between Adam being made from the stuff of the earth and then being placed in a specific place on the earth.

But Adam also had a job to do in his place. He was there to "work it and take care of it." He wasn't told to use and abuse it as many have interpreted Genesis 1:28 to say. Rather, his position was one of a care-taker who had authority (or rule) but who used that authority to govern well (to be a servant leader). If we are Adam's children, then
we also have this same mandate, to care for the "garden."

And women can't claim that this was Adam's mandate only, for in Genesis 1:28, the command was given equally to both of the people that God had created. Ownership of the land was also given equally to both the man and the woman in Genesis 1:29. So Adam and Eve, together, were formed of the earth, were settled in a specific place on that earth, and were told to be governors over the earth and all that was in it. In a sense, they were the first
environmentalists.

Unfortunately, both Adam and Eve were also the first anti-environmentalists. In their disobedience (Genesis 3), they brought sin into the world--sin that affects not only people, but the entire earth as well. They were cast out of the garden (displaced from their sense of place) and in the curse that Adam received, God said, "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Even Paul refers to this larger extent of Adam's sin when he says, "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8: 20-22)