And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. –Exodus 20.1-6

I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. Indeed, I consider that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles. Even if I am unskilled in speaking, I am not so in knowledge; indeed, in every way we have made this plain to you in all things. –II Corinthians 11.1-6

What a raucous year, eh! The kingdom of the Beast was exposed by the most ironic of figures, none other than: Donald Trump. It wasn’t the church bearing witness to Jesus Christ in contradistinction to the world system; instead it was a narcissistic unlikely character like the Donald. The Beast exposed itself over and over again; whether it is through the forwarding of false Russia claims, an impeachment of Trump based on actions that those impeaching him had engaged in, with the Ukraine and Russia. I mean who comes up with things like this? As they say: the truth is stranger than fiction. Not to be outdone by all of the aforementioned fabrications, by the Beast, then they concoct a way, through mass media, to fear people into believing that a flu-like virus (of the sort we have known for centuries) was like the Black Plague of yore; or at least the Spanish Flu. The Beast was then able to use this fear (and still is) to lockdown the economy; destroy the livelihoods of millions of people, domestic and abroad; keep people from physically fellowshipping in the churches; and then construct an elaborate scheme to use mail-in-ballots (and other means) to defrock the American populace of their right to a fair and legal election. The Beast has done all of this out in the open for those who have eyes to see; seemingly many of you who read me don’t have those eyes. And now the result has been a serious polarization of the society with people running into their group-thinks rather than towards the truth (and the correspondence thereof).

The real lurch of this whole thing though is that because of this deep polarization Christians have come to elevate personages, parties, and ideologies up to the level of God. The concern I have now is that those who placed ALL of their hope in Donald Trump have equated him with God’s providential will for America. Many of these Christians have bet all of their hopes on him. When he fails, and he will because he is a mere man, many of these folks will walk away disillusioned and no longer have a trust in God. Of course if things are this fickle for them, and they are for many!, then it would only be illustrative of the fact that they never really had a real and saving trust in the living God; instead it was only an ‘incidental faith’ wherein they had a felt need for God to bring them a sense of stability and salvation against a clear and roaring dragon. Once this conditional wasn’t met these people will walk away in despair of soul attempting to fill this divine vacuum—created by the loss of Trump as Savior—with some other self-incurved means of worship and delight. I see this as a real and pressing danger; it is always present for Christians and non-Christians alike; the danger of idolatry.

On the other hand all the never-Trumpers out there have elevated their never-Trumperism to a level of the divine just the same. Once they have had their need met they too will walk away with a sense of smug self-assurance, and maybe even think that God truly is on their side. But the sickening part about this ‘side’ of things is what it took for these wanderlust souls to get the god they wanted. They had to sell their souls for a big pottage of lies and deception; all in the name of being polite, and submissive. These types see normalcy and the status quo as God; they believe that the institutions of society provide the order and regularity that any civil society must have in order to flourish; thus they will divinize the indomitable human spirit just so they can achieve these component parts of what they take to be the stuff of a normal, polite, and quiet life.

There is clear overlap between the two-sides just sketched: the primary overlap is that all involved, whether their aims are ultimately noble or ignoble, respectively, is that humanity ends up worshipping humanity rather than the true and living God pro nobis. All involved in these sketches violate the paradigmatic commands of God to have no other gods before Him; and they primarily do so by assigning the Christ’s attributes to mere humans, or human-formed ideas that are merely self-projections of an openly wicked and depraved heart. Don’t get me wrong, I do think the Christian, in particular, ought to be about bearing witness to the truth; but they must be vigilant to do so in a way that is genuine witness bearing rather than ‘divinity-signaling’ their self-constructed messiahs or ideas. It is a good to go where the truth, where the evidence leads people; since the truth always bears witness to Jesus Christ, who is the Truth. But self-deception in every human pursuit is always present, and dogs the truth-seeker all the days of their lives; this calls for vigilance in humility before the living God in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ—you know, the ground of our very lives as Christians, as humans simpliciter.

I am concerned for the church, for the world. Both need Jesus.