The OT views of God ran in quite parallel fashion to those of Israel’s older neighbors. Those people groups believed that their gods were with them if they were faithful, and punished them with defeat and humiliation if they were not. Israel’s view of YHWH was no different. It was a tribal view of deity. It is why it is so dangerous today to view the OT as normative for how God engages with nations, and people groups.
To see the clearest picture, one must look to the NT, and see what Jesus said and did in relation to such matters. If we do, we find that Jesus frustrated the desires of his countrymen and even his closest followers for a military solution to Roman occupation. He refused to be drafted into the “God is on our side to get the immoral pagans out of our land movement.” He refused to give priority to his own tribe, bloodline, or soil, over/against Samaritans and Gentiles in general, as if God gave them favored nation status. He finally said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight.” IOW, according to Jesus, God’s dealings with the kingdoms and power players of this world was not to play the same power games as them. It wasn’t to favor one group or nation over another, and to intervene on their behalf because of their religious profession or lack of one. It got Jesus crucified.
Jesus inaugurated a kingdom, the reign of God, that was like leaven. It grows silently and unobtrusively amidst the noise and clamor of nations, armies, strife, and conflict. These are human endeavors in which Jesus played no part during his life. And, if we believe that Jesus gives us the clearest revelation of God, as the NT claims all over the place, we can thus assume that God plays little to no part in such endeavors now. If we assume that he does, like the OT writers did, we have to then explain how God was involved in and guided the Holocaust, the pogroms of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and countless atrocities perpetrated not only by nation states, but by people groups and religious bodies throughout history in his name.
If we believe in Jesus, we can never assume like so many evangelicals, and their patron saint in the WH, that God is on the side of America against the Muslim hoards. Jesus has no part in that thinking and rhetoric. It’s why the people wanted to throw him off a cliff in Nazareth at the beginning of his public ministry (see Luke 4), and why many professing believers today would want to do the same if truly confronted with him and his message.
It’s too bad that this article, in giving a proposed explanation of God’s involvement in the political world, jumped ahead a thousand years after the template of Daniel, and skipped over Jesus in the middle of it all.
Thanks…
Frank
