3 Principles to Guide Christian Voting

Before we get to the three principles to guide Christian voting, I want to lay some foundational biblical truths.

There is no political party in the world which is “God’s party”

In John 18:36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

It takes all of us walking humbly with God, together, to cultivate justice and mercy in our community.

As Christians we are not called to build God’s kingdom through a human political system. Those days ended when the Messiah came.

There is no longer any human nation or government through which Christians are to try and build a heaven on earth. Jesus’ kingdom is from another place. There is no single political party in Canada whose every policy reflects the goodness and justice of Yahweh.

Each political party has grains of Kingdom truth, grace that God is working in the world, policies that align with his love. And each political party has ingrained in it deep-seated rebellion against God’s good ways, has at least one policy that actively obstructs the justice of God and opposes his reign.

And this is to be expected! So we must approach our interactions with local and national politics with eyes wide open. We can’t just choose a political party to always vote with, turn on auto-pilot, and not think through the issues.

God’s people are called to speak truth to power.

In the Old Testament we see this particularly in the work of the prophets.

In 2 Samuel 12 we see how God called the prophet Nathan to directly confront and condemn David for his murder of Uriah and rape of Bathsheba.

In Jeremiah 22:1-3 the Lord tells the prophet to, “‘Go down to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim this message there: 2 “Hear the word of the Lord to you, king of Judah, you who sit on David’s throne – you, your officials and your people who come through these gates. 3 This is what the Lord says: do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.”

In the New Testament

We see the boldness of John the Baptist who called out King Herod’s sin of taking his brother’s wife. As a result, John was imprisoned and beheaded.

Jesus was not shy to speak truth to power; he did it all the time with the Pharisees. Read Matthew 23 for his particularly harsh critique of the Jewish religious leaders who were “putting heavy burdens on people’s backs but not lifting a finger to help them carry them.

In Luke 12:11-12, Jesus promised to equip us to also boldly speak truth to power.

On the day of Pentecost, God’s Holy Spirit filled all the people of God, not just designated prophets. The disciples immediately went out and began to testify to the crowd gathered in Jerusalem how those people had helped kill God’s Messiah but that he would forgive them if they repented.

Canadian pastor and author Paul Carter comments on this passage, saying: “Every true believer is a prophet in this sense. They are filled with the Holy Spirit of God and thereby helped to speak the Word of God to the people of God – and sometimes, when necessary, to people in power. There is therefore a great danger in becoming too identified with any particular political party or any particular political person. We must never allow ourselves to be co-opted. The church is not a voting block – she is a desert prophet. Existing on the margins of society – in the world but not of it – and ready, when necessary to speak truth to power.”

So, both the Old and New Testaments bear witness that we, the people of God, are called to stand for unpopular truths, and sometimes to suffer for it.

Three Biblical Principles:

Okay, now that we have those two foundational truths down, let’s read God’s three principles to guide Christian voting. Are you ready?

Micah 6:8

1. Act Justly

Yahweh is a God of justice. Deuteronomy 32:4 says all his ways are just, he is a faithful God who does no wrong.

Micah 6:8 calls us to act justly, to behave in a way that upholds God’s righteous laws.

So, what does God’s justice look like?

Well, we know from his law that God calls his people to deal with each other with honesty, fairness, and generosity. For example, he commands in Lev 19:35-36: "You must not use dishonest measures of length, weight, or volume. You shall maintain honest scales and weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt."

God cares about how we treat each other. One might argue that the heart of his justice can be found in “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

When Jesus quoted this verse from Leviticus 19, a man’s snarky reply was, “And who is my neighbour?” To which Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the punchline is: your worst enemy is your neighbour.

God’s justice is always relational. James says that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

He’s carrying forward for the Christians in the first century the enduring pattern of God’s justice in the Old Testament which is oriented toward the most vulnerable.

Isaiah 1:17 says “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” Here we see God’s justice defined as actively advocating for the most vulnerable. Zechariah 7:9-10 echoes Isaiah, saying, “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.’” Deuteronomy 10:18 tells us that God “defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.”

So we see God’s justice embodied in his defense of the marginalised and his commands for us to do the same. And who are the marginalized?

“The widow”, representing economically vulnerable people who are stigmatized by society and prohibited from providing for themselves.

“The orphan,” representing children who are vulnerable to exploitation, who are not embedded in safe families, who don’t have a future. They might have a caretaker, but they do not have a provider or protector.

“The poor,” representing those who don’t have the starting resources to build a life for themselves. They have been dealt a bad hand by the world and now they are suffering.

“The foreigner,” representing immigrants and refugees who are considered second class citizens and vulnerable to being taken advantage of or persecuted by the majority culture.

These are the people God looks after. Psalm 68:5 says, “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.” God’s justice flows from his holiness, that is, from his impartial and perfect love.

And we are called to be conduits of that justice on earth. To treat each other and all people with honesty, fairness, and generosity, and to actively care for the economically, socially, and racially marginalised in our society.

So when you consider the referendum questions, ask yourself how your vote can best reflect the justice of God to the world.

2. Love Mercy

When I looked at Micah 6:8 in the Hebrew I saw something surprising. “Love mercy” is

“vahabat chesed”.

So the first word comes from the Hebrew verb “ahab”, to love, which “emphasizes action and commitment.” It appears in Deuteronomy 6:5 “Love — that is, ahab — the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Ahab, therefore, “signifies an all-encompassing devotion rooted in faithfulness and obedience.”

Love — ahab — mercy. Be completely devoted to mercy out of obedience to God.

But the word translated mercy is actually the noun chesed. This word can be rendered as love but it is far more complex than that. In fact there is no single word in the English language that fully encompasses the meaning of chesed. So translators render it as “lovingkindness” “steadfast love” “loyal love” “mercy” and so on. It describes the covenant love of God toward Israel.

Lamentations 3:23 says the “Because of the LORD’s Chesed — his great love or steadfast love — we are not consumed, his compassions never fail.”

Micah 6:8 tells us to “love love” that is to ahab chesed. Be devoted to steadfast lovingkindness, the sort that Yahweh shows Israel through his committed, persevering, covenantal love.

So when you consider the referendum questions, ask yourself how your vote will best reflect your commitment to live out the steadfast lovingkindness of God to the world.

3. Walk Humbly

I think the repeating theme of humility in the Old Testament is for a person to know in their heart and live out in their life the reality that God is God and they are not. God is God, and I am not. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. God knows what’s going on, I don’t. God can see the whole picture, I can’t. God knows in full, I know in part. And so, I walk in humility rather than self-assurance and pride.

Job learned this humility when he suddenly found himself in the whirlwind of God’s presence. He said, “‘I am unworthy – how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.

5 I spoke once, but I have no answer – twice, but I will say no more.’”

To walk humbly with our God we must sometimes put our hand over our mouths and admit we don’t have the answer.

Isaiah 55 says:

Seek the Lord while he may be found;

call on him while he is near.

7 Let the wicked forsake their ways

and the unrighteous their thoughts.

Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,

and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the Lord.

9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

God’s ways are higher than my ways — even though the wicked don’t deserve to be forgiven, if they turn from their evil ways then God will freely pardon. That’s not my human way — my human way is, you do something horrible and you get the appropriate consequences, regardless of whether or not you’re sorry later! But that’s not God’s way.

When we humble ourselves we acknowledge our Creator and his ways as the only right and true and just way to live. And we have to daily walk with him to learn what those ways are because they are not natural to us! In fact, they are often contrary to what seems rational or obvious to us. Why? Because God doesn’t act like us!

But in his salvation — praise God! — in his salvation we are increasingly transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit to learn to act like God acts.

This should give us pause when we approach important civic duties like voting. What seems obvious to us and to our friend as the “right choice” may not actually be in line with God’s ways. Paul says we need to “walk in step with the Spirit”. Every decision we make needs to be submitted to the Holy Spirit with humility so that we move in the world in ways that reflect God’s justice and God’s mercy.

CONCLUSION:

Friends, I hate to tell you this, but one of the reasons we need to walk humbly in step with the Spirit is because we don’t know what God is doing. God may call one person in this room to vote yes on Question 5 and another person in this room to vote no. Why? We don’t know yet. We don’t know what God is doing with this referendum.

Remember, the church is not a voting block. We are a holy people called to build the Kingdom of God that is not of this world, that speaks truth to power, that asks God for wisdom and then acts on it in obedience.

God’s people are promised wisdom.

James 1:5- 8 Ask God for wisdom and he will give you wisdom. But don’t doubt, don’t be a wave of the sea tossed about by the wind, don’t be doubleminded. Be resolute in your faith in God. He will direct you. And guess what? He may direct Carole to vote yes on a question and David to vote no on the same question.

Have humility. You don’t know what God is doing through this referendum. You don’t know what he intends to accomplish. What you DO know is that you can trust God to direct your vote and you can trust your brother or sister that they are doing the same thing and you can love them and let them follow the direction of God’s Spirit because you share one and the same Spirit.