Who’s in Charge?

Gordon Green, M.Div., M.A. Counseling

As the national election draws near, I grow increasingly weary of the demagoguery and mudslinging from candidates. When I try to imagine our next US President, it’s hard for me to feel positive about our nation’s future. I have not heard or read anything from the party nominees that would lead me to believe that they would uphold our Christian worldview. But I’m not surprised. Without an understanding of the condition and nature of sin, our elected officials can only identify symptoms of our nation’s struggles, not the root cause. As Tim Keller writes:

Only the Christian worldview locates the problem with the world not in any part of the world or in any particular group of people but in sin itself (our loss of relationship with God). And it locates the solution in God’s grace (our restoration of a relationship with God through the work of Christ). Sin infects us all, and so we cannot simply divide the world into the heroes and the villains. (And if we did, we would certainly have to count ourselves among the latter as well as the former.) Without an understanding of the gospel, we will be either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it. This is, in the end, what all other worldviews do.