How should Christians celebrate the good Donald Trump has done?
Within the first two weeks of being inaugurated, President Donald Trump has:
Signed off on the “Mexico City Policy” which bans federal funds from going to any groups that facilitate abortions overseas.
Questioned the mainstream media as to why they don’t cover the annual, and massive, March for Life, which then embarrassed them into covering it this year
Sent his Vice President to speak at the March for Life, who also, the night before, hosted a reception for 40 pro-lifers leaders in the White House. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, also spoke at the March where she declared the right to life “is a right, it is not a privilege, it’s not a choice. It is God-given.”
Tweeted The #MarchForLife is so important. To all of you marching --- you have my full support!
Nominated a Supreme Court justice that seems truly conservative (the judge, Neils Gorsuch, co-authored a book on euthanasia in which he wrote “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”)
So what are Christians to make of the new President of the United States? This is night and day from what we could have expected with a President Hilary Clinton!
And yet this is the same man who has show himself to be:
Petty – a favorite pastime is coming up with silly insulting names for his opponents, like “Lyin Ted” and “Little Marco”
Vulgar – with appearances in Playboy, and on the Howard Stern show, and a recording of him talking about sexually assaulting women
A proud adulterer – in his autobiography he brags about the married women he has bedded
So can we celebrate the good he does? Or is that, in the eyes of the world, going to too closely align us with him, and mar our Christian witness when he ends up doing something petty, vulgar, or faithless?
To know how to act we need to recognize Trump for who he is. As Pastor Douglas Wilson has noted, the best biblical comparison is Jehu (2 Kings 9-10) who was used by God to punish Jezebel and Ahab’s house:
was an instrument in the hand of God…At the same time, all was not entirely well. “But Jehu did not turn aside from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin – that is, the golden calves that were in Bethel and Dan (2 Kings 10:29).”
In the same way, Donald Trump, in these actions for the unborn, has most certainly been an instrument of the Lord. But that doesn’t mean he is a follower. It doesn’t mean we have to go all in for him. Pastor Wilson writes:
Political factions want everything to be a simple binary choice on the human level. You either are all in for Jezebel or all in for Jehu. What Scripture invites us to is qualified support, or perhaps qualified disapproval. So and so was a good king, but did not remove the high places. Jehu removed much that needed to be removed, but God brought judgment on him later because he did not do all that needed to be done. Our foundational allegiance is to God and His ways, and is not to be wholly given over to any man.
There has been a lot to celebrate in the opening two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, so celebrate we should. But rather than focus on the man, let’s focus on what God has done through this man. When we give God the glory, no one will be confused about where our loyalties lie....
