When the Room Is Full of Fumes

With the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, we all know that the room is full of fumes. This knowledge is a grace from God. He would be perfectly just to wipe our nation off the face of the earth without warning, given our high-handed and unrepentant sin. With the sexual corruption and abortion that marks our land, we have reached the point where one wonders if God will have to apologize to Sodom if He continues to spare us. We should be grateful that mercy belongs to the Lord and He indeed will show it to whomever He pleases. This is precisely what He has done for us. So one of the points we must keep in sight as we navigate the days ahead is that it is sheer mercy that has kept us from devolving into national chaos.

My friend Doug Wilson has been preaching for a good while now that we should not take the bait. That counsel is all the more fitting right now. But one does wonder if people can resist the bait that is now being dangled. Might there be another attempt upon Donald Trump’s life? Of course, there might be. And would CNN come out with another disgusting headline about it? Of course, they would. And are you really going to trust that the liars and thieves who have compared Trump to Hitler are going to start acting like decent people? If you’ll buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona; from my front porch, you can see the sea. Our material problem is that the hits will keep coming. Our formal problem is that a nation that spends the kind of money we spend on pornography isn’t exactly what you would call a bastion of temperance and fortitude. In other words, we will only have more fumes pumped into this building, and we are the kind of people that like to play with matches.

That folly was on full display during the first day of the Republican National Convention. In the immediate wake of God mercifully protecting former President Donald Trump, the RNC thought it would be a good idea to platform an unrepentant whore and a Sikh to pray to the demon-god Waheguru. The temptation for most conservatives at the moment is to mumble qualifications and attempted justifications. It doesn’t matter if the majority of the RNC doesn’t worship Waheguru. It doesn’t matter that these moves are simply political and an attempt to get elected. They certainly are. We can agree on that point. It also doesn’t matter that Harmeet Dhillon, the Sikh who prayed to the demon, offered up a similar prayer at the RNC in 2016. We should readily admit that we have a long and ongoing cancer. We should do so while also noting that you can’t roll the clock back too far in the United States and find the RNC promoting the bald-headed, porn star, atheist lady. Some things indeed are genuine developments. The fact is, a person who attempts to justify the abomination of platforming Ms. Rose and the Sikh prayer has lost the plot entirely. That is a person who simply isn’t reading the story we are in at the moment.

The former president was an inch away from losing his life, and our nation was an inch away from chaos days ago. The blood hasn’t even dried on the bleachers, and the RNC publicly praises a prostitute and a foreign god in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our rot runs deep, a point that is manifest given that the same diversity, equity, and inclusion were on display in the secret service as multiple women were employed to shield the former president from gunfire during the assassination attempt. The pictures and videos are shameful and hard to watch. Not only or primarily because they depict gross levels of incompetency and embolden serious enemies of our nation, but because they evidence that we have become a cowardly and misogynistic nation who pay women to shield men from bullets.

Add to our story that we are coming fresh out of NatCon, where J.D. Vance, Trump’s new VP pick himself, spoke. Senator Josh Hawley called himself a Christian Nationalist. Albert Mohler insisted that we maximize the Christian commitment of the state. And Doug Wilson admonished Donald Trump that as he loves God, the country, and his own soul, he should give explicit glory to God in the name of Jesus Christ. Go ahead and anticipate plenty of conversation about the size, impact, and viability of the Christian Nationalist movement, or what place and influence it has in the GOP. All of that is fine and good. But the major story is not the morphing of the Republican Party in the Trump era.

The main story is that you will have Christ as Lord over your nation and politics or your nation and politics will come to ruin. You will bow to the Lord’s warnings or you will be broken like Pharaoh, who hardened his heart. It is one thing for the RNC to contract the Sikh in 2016 to offer thanksgiving and petitions to an idol. It was wicked back then. But it is another thing entirely for the RNC to offer up strange fire and platform the slut with the forehead tattoo after our tyrannical COVID lords suppressed the worship of God and freedom of man, the George Floyd riots set cities ablaze across our country, and an assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump exposed our monumental ineptitude. That’s going full Pharaoh, after the ninth plague.

There is only one way out of this tinderbox. Repent of your sin and confess Christ as Lord. “Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest” (Psalm 95:7-11).

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