God gave us WHAT???
We hear some wacky things in election years, but Sarah Sanders got my attention with a recent mailing. She pledged to protect our “God-given gun rights,” and I had to read that a few times before I could really make the words go together.
Sanders grew up as a preacher’s kid, so she presumably knows her Bible. Me, I looked through all the concordances I could find without coming across a single reference to guns. But I had to remember that the Bible doesn’t mention cars or cell phones either, so we sometimes have to put things in context.
On that note, I looked at a verse from I Samuel differently, when God tells the Jews, “Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
In all honesty, I can see where if God wanted to deliver that kind of merciless devastation, He would expect His children to use the appropriate tools. Back then, the Jews didn’t have Uzis, so slaughtering innocent families required a lot of unpleasant face-to-face contact.
So I tried to see this the way Sanders would, but I ran into big trouble when I got to the New Testament. “WWJS?” I asked myself. “Who Would Jesus Shoot?”
I only found one instance of Jesus even losing His temper, when someone tried to make money off religion. That provoked some serious table-toppling, but no shots were fired. Jesus would not even tolerate violence when the soldiers came for Him.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an actual member of the U.S. Congress, recently suggested He should have had an assault rifle. (But then again, she thinks Jewish space lasers started wildfires.)
Other politicians have also tried to cash in on the message of fear and hatred, so at odds with every word of the gospels. Kandiss Taylor, running for governor of Georgia, kicked off her campaign with her simple message in huge letters on the side of her campaign bus. JESUS. GUNS. BABIES.
Jenna Ellis was part of the inept legal team who worked so hard to overturn democracy and install a tyrant. Apparently, her ignorance of the law extends to spiritual matters as well, because she attacked a candidate for the U.S. Senate on the basis of religion. Raphael Warnock has a doctorate and other divinity degrees, but Ellis told her Twitter followers he should delete the title “Reverend” in front of his name.
“People who don’t know Jesus pretend he was a soft-spoken philanthropist,” she said. “If Warnock’s church were truly biblical and Christian, he would not be a pastor. His theology and practice is inconsistent with the Bible.”
I have to confess, “soft-spoken philanthropist” has pretty well defined my picture of Jesus for most of my 70-some years. Or let’s put it like this: if you had to blame assault weapons on Jesus or the Devil, which one would you pick? (Hint: Jesus didn’t even like people throwing rocks at other people.)
Mike Ellis