One of the more humorous sides of being single comes in the form of getting unsolicited relationship advice from every person you know who is currently in a relationship. For the most part the advice is usually either obvious or anecdotal, but every once in a while a diamond-like shiny piece of coal emerges from the black abyss of useless relationship advice and sticks with you. One such instance occurred when I was told that “men are like waffles and women are like spaghetti”. Admittedly, chicken and waffles is one of my favorite unlikely pairings for a meal but spaghetti and waffles sounds, at best, confusing. The idea, though, is that men are very good at compartmentalizing their life like the individual squares of a waffle, where women tend to be a tangled weave of integrated interests where one decision could affect the whole bowl of noodles. While we will leave the validity of this statement open for debate, I would like to take the mechanics and apply them to a wholly different aspect in the Christian life.
In about two weeks, the United States will undertake one of our most cherished past times and vote for the Presidency of the United States. To say that this election is contentious and full of issues to consider is like saying the Boston Tea Party was simply a spring cleaning aboard English ships. Yet, many times the church, and thus their parishioners, deals with voting as if they are a waffle. We have a compartment for Sunday and then compartments for everything else. This idea promotes a dogma that somehow we can separate our politics from our worldview and our ethics. It is almost taught that the butter and syrup of sanctification must be present in every other square of the Christian life but not in the political square. Somehow God doesn’t care if that square is Spirit filled like the others and our voting choices do not reflect the character of our heart. In fact, if we just put more butter and syrup in the other squares then no one will be able to tell the difference in the taste of the waffle that is our Christian life. We think its okay to vote for a party that promotes murdering pre-born children and yet we find catharsis in volunteering at the pregnancy crisis center. Somehow we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we can advance the Kingdom of God while voting for a candidate who’s platform promotes the kingdom of darkness.
And here is my central point to this culinary metaphor. God cares for the way that you vote. If God stated in Psalm 24 that “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” then I think that would include the system of government that we have formed. And if God has made it, then He has the authority to demand to define how it is to be used. His demands are made in 1 Corinthians 10:31 where God states that He demands everything that we do glorify Him. God cares about how we eat waffles in reality and God cares about our life as a metaphorical waffle when it comes to voting.
So God cares about how we vote. But aren’t both candidates flawed? Yes, they are both deeply flawed, but this is not to say their flaws are equal in degree or in impact. Simply put, many in the church are involved in false equivalence. Gary DeMar recently said that “a vote isn’t a love letter to the candidates but rather a chess move for the way you want the world to be.” Since Jesus is not running for office, (no true king would ever stoop that low) we are voting for sinners and sinners are going to sin. I don’t love their sin. I am not blinded to their sin and I am not tolerant of their sin. That is why Jesus told us in Matthew 5:13-16 to be salt and light to the world. We are to be salt in that we prevent the decay of the world’s depravity with the Law of God and we enhance the flavor of this life with the Gospel. We are to be the light of truth and the light of the Gospel in a dark world. So when we vote we must ask ourselves which platform will prevent decay the most. Which candidate will result in more restraint of evil?
One of the arguments that I continually hear is that “Candidate X is mean and a jerk and, though I don’t agree with the platform of Candidate Y, he is so much nicer so I am voting for him.” This where the false equivalence bears it ugly head and people try to tell us why their apple is better than our orange. Certainly we have been exposed to the horrors of an unfettered twitter tirade more than few times and certainly we have seen the wisdom of James play out as a tongue has lit more than a few forest fires in the last four years. And yet, somehow, we as waffles try to compartmentalize someone’s platform from their moral character. Most aptly put by a recent twitter post, people see one candidate as unifying and another as divisive because they wrongly believe mean words have more power than evil ideologies. I mean certainly an unfettered tongue and twitter thumb speaks to a sinful heart, even an unregenerate heart, but so too does a platform that would promote evil. 1 Corinthians 13 states that true love does not rejoice in evil but rejoices in the truth. So, promoting the evils of murdering the pre-born child or supporting the mutilation of the 8 year old post born child through sex change surgery is evil and also speaks to a darkened heart. A person who would want to suppress the religious liberties of Christians through the support of the paradoxically named “Do No Harm” bill is also one who supports evil. So while many may have their ears tickled with the sweet num nums of a candidate that plays the part outwardly very well, I would like to remind those who may have lost their sense of smell to COVID that there remains a pungent, repulsive odor of dead rotting bones inside that carefully groomed tomb. You ask me how I can vote for a candidate that regularly and unabashedly slanders people and I will ask you how you can vote for a candidate that smiles to our face while legislating, through executive order, our children to be literally murdered and mutilated. All sins are equally worthy of Hell but we have a progressive sentencing structure in criminal justice because we know not all sins are the same. Murder has always been at the top of that list and thus the the sins of the apple are greater than the orange, not equivalent to them.
And while I have your attention, can someone please tell me how a Christian can vote for someone that supports limiting religious freedoms? Apparently the American Church needs the therapy of God’s Word to break the Stockholm Syndrome it has with certain political platforms. I mean we all agree that we don’t send a battered spouse back to the their abuser and yet we seemingly think its okay to send the bride of Christ back to her leftist abusers. I mean this is nowhere more apparent than the argument that Christians should align with the left because the left cares more about the poor and oppressed. Truth be told, we have known for over a decade that the right consistently gives more of their money to charities than the left. Now the world will try to twist this truth by stating that giving to church is not really charitable, but then again we are in a war and can’t expect the enemy to be happy that we are trying to supply the ranks of God’s Kingdom. And yet, though the facts consistently defy this myth, we still believe it because if you say a lie enough times, people believe it to be true. Plus guilt is the great tool of Satan, the accuser of the brethren, to render the Christian ineffective, and boy does he know how to make a church ineffective in politics.
The way out of this labyrinth is simple though not easy. We need truth. We need to stand for truth and we need to find the truth. In a day where the narrative of most media takes more left turns than a NASCAR race, we need to do the work of finding truth for ourselves. I could spend a whole other post writing of this truth and how the media has made an empire out of calling darkness light, ` but suffice it to say that I’m confident that the choices of this election are very clear. I am also confident that God cares deeply about this square of your waffled life and how it shows His glory. So vote knowing your vote shows your character, your character shows your worldview, and your worldview shows your God.
-Paul Grenelle