“DID
GOD—OR FATE—SAVE TRUMP?”
Pastor
Terry L. Reese, Valley GBC of Armagh, PA; 10/11/24
1 Sam.
6:9: “And watch: if it goes up the road to its own territory, to Beth Shemesh,
then He has done us this great evil. But if not, then we shall know that it is
not His hand that struck us—it happened to us by chance.”
“I believe God saved his
life."—Rev. Franklin
Graham (BGEA, Samaritan’s Purse)
“My understanding of
Christian theology makes me certain that God did not save the former president
from assassination…"—Shane Claiborne (“Red-Letter Christian” and “Neo-Anabaptist”
leader)
Two starkly opposite perspectives: Rev. Graham
believes that Divine intervention saved President Trump from the assassin’s
bullet at Butler—but the “progressive-evangelical” leader, Claiborne, is
“certain” that God had nothing to do with it. According to Shane, FATE was Mr. Trump’s deliverer.
Likewise, View hostess Joy Behar ridiculed Mr.
Trump’s public expression of gratitude to God for sparing his life, defining it
as being arrogant and presumptuous:
“…you say something
like, ‘God was watching me.’ That is a very unchristian thing to say because
he’s very narcissistic.”
We might interject here that if Behar were
consistent in this line of reasoning, it would inevitably follow that thanking
God for anything that transpires would constitute sinful “presumption.”
The above passage from 1Samuel 6 was a favorite of the late Dr. R.C. Sproul in discussions involving the matter of sovereign Divine ordination lying beneath all events—good, bad, or ethically indifferent (Amos 3:6). The Philistine priests had established a “test” to determine whether or not Yahweh was behind the plague that had invaded their regions. The very fact that these men even considered it a POSSIBILTY that some events lay outside of God’s Providence and within the realm of blind “chance” revealed one thing with certainty: these men were, at their very core, ATHEISTS. They met the definition of atheists because their conception of deity was FALSE; their “god” simply didn’t exist! IF GOD IS TRULY GOD, THEN HE MUST BE SOVEREIGN OVER ALL THINGS, and He thus ordains and presides over ALL EVENTS!
Do you believe in a SOVEREIGN God—the real
God—or in some UNREAL, finite alternative?
