Frankly I am sick and tired of hearing - on Facebook and in person - expressions of disdain, name-calling, and outright slander of the President of the US, Barack Obama. Yesterday I was surfing some FB posts and I encountered some of the most vile language you could imagine coming from some “friends” calling Obama shameful names. I immediately de-friended this person who calls himself a Christian! But not before I shared with him and his haters the verse “You shall not speak evil of the ruler of your people.” No responses in 24 hours!
OK, I am outed. I am a Republican and I voted for McCain. I think that Obama’s policies will not be good for America in the long run. I disagree with his soft attitude toward the Islamicists. I could go on and on, but you should know that I also am a Christian and I believe that being a follower of Jesus should lead me to a charitable kind of speech - something that I am finding rare among these Christian Obama-haters.
I also wrote to these FB free speech abusers that you can never find such vitriolic attacks from the pens of Peter, Paul, James and John about the Roman rulers of their days. And those rulers were the immoral Claudius and Nero, the last of whom even burned Christians. That is because they taught that we should respect the authorities and honor the king (Romans 13:1-7; 1Peter 2:13-17).
I heard this past week that President Obama was going to refer to the White House Christmas tree as the “holiday tree.” On Thursday night at the tree ceremony he delivered the closest thing to a Christian confession of faith that I have ever heard from an American President! When I told this to a friend who was talking about Obama’s “holiday tree,” he immediately blurted, “He’s a hypocrite who says what he wants people to hear!” In other words, he is damned if he doesn’t and damned if he does!
Why is it that oftentimes we evangelicals forget that we are Christians when we talk about politicians? Some who read these words will desire to push back. If you do, please do it with your Bible in your hand and not with your unscriptural and mean-spirited words that slice and dice people instead of edifying them (Eph 4:29). Read it!