I will admit it: I have spent too much time on Twitter since the election. Yes, I revel in the fact that former President Donald Trump is also our future President, and I am amused by stories that some on the left have suggested that President Joe Biden resign, so that Kamala Harris Emhoff can become our 47th President for the last 69 days of the term. In true capitalist fashion, my immediate thought was that it would mean that the existing MAGA 45 47 hats would become collectors’ items, and there’d be a whole new market for MAGA 45 48 hats!
Other liberal notions have been that Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the “wise Latina” on the Supreme Court, who is 70 years old and a serious diabetic, should resign, and let President Biden appoint Mrs Emhoff to the Court in his last days. Well, as an old professor of mine used to say, tempus is fugiting, and there’s really not enough time left — the new, Republican-controlled Senate takes office on January 3rd — to get any confirmation through, and outgoing Senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (I-WV) have said that they wouldn’t go along with such foolishness.
There are plenty of outraged leftists who want recounts, and as far as I am concerned, they’re welcome to waste their time and money: Mr Trump’s victory was, if not a landslide, far too substantial to be jeopardized by any recount. How could we good Christians vote for a man who is a proven adulterer, found by a civil jury to be liable for a sexual assault, and convicted of 34 felonies?
It was Sunday, October 20th when I was teaching our parish’s catechism class on the subject of Christian forgiveness that I brought up King David, the greatest hero of the Old Testament. Initially described as a young shepherd and fair youth devoted to the Lord, he becomes a great warrior, great general, and the anointed successor to King Saul, from whom God has withdrawn his favor.
Saul goes to war with David, but the Lord, though he is scant with his help to David, allows him to survive, and eventually triumph, though it is not David and his supporters who kill Saul.
At one point, David has crept into Saul’s tent at night, has the sleeping king at his mercy, but chooses not to kill him.
But in some ways, King David is as much of a reprobate as Donald Trum, and even worse. David, in his palace rather than on the battle lines, spies Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite and one of David’s best soldiers, bathing in her courtyard. David sends some of his servants to bring her to the palace, and they copulate. Bathsheba being married to Uriah, which David knows, makes this adultery. Though there is nothing written in the Bible to suggest that Bathsheba did not consent, it is also true that he was king, and Bathsheba could possibly have seen David’s attempt at copulation as a royal order, something she could not refuse.
Naturally, Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David’s child. David recalls Uriah from the field of battle, to try to get Uriah to sleep with his wife, so that the unborn child could reasonably be his, but Uriah, holding that he should not be more privileged than the common soldiers in the field, refuses. Unable to perpetrate his planned fraud, David then orders a battle plan designed to get Uriah killed.
The prophet Natham condemns David for this, at which the King repents of his sins, and is forgiven by the Lord.
My lesson was on forgiveness, and not politics, but politics is involved. For all of his faults, David was a man who knew and understood God better than almost anyone else. He was the author of many of the Psalms in our Bibles, and overall did teh Lord‘s work.
King David was not the only man of occasionally rotten character who was nevertheless used by God for good. Saul of Tarsus was a great persecutor of first century Christians, yet the Lord saw something in him, the resurrected Jesus struck him temporarily blind on the road to Damascus, and Saul became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles.
I would never suggest that Mr Trump is somehow King David, or Paul, but for all of his faults, it was President Trump who appointed the Supreme Court Justices which overturned Roe v Wade, and the nationwide abortion legalization. It was President Trump who greatly restricted the illegal immigration of criminals, and it was once again his judicial appointees who struck back at state governors who had dramatically curtailed our freedom of religion and of peaceable assembly. It was President Trump who began the process of getting the United States out of the twenty-year mistake in Afghanistan, and has been trying, even while out of office, to reduce our involvement in Ukraine. It has been Mr Trump who has fought the idiocy of transgenderism and racial preferences on our college campuses and in our businesses.
Whatever his motivations, however he thinks, regardless of his reprehensible personal life, Mr Trump has been doing the things in public policy that any Christian should approve. It will be up to the Lord to pass eternal judgement on Mr Trump, bit at least for now, what he has actually done tells me that God’s work is partially being done through him.