Author: Kirk E. Miller

How Can Christians Pray for the Election?

Kirk E. Miller

How can Christians pray for the upcoming election? Some suggestions:

  • Pray for political peace and stability that provides a platform for the gospel to spread (1 Tim 2:1–4).

  • Pray for a peaceful and clear electoral process (Jer 29:7). Pray that all would acknowledge its results and not resort to violence or destruction (e.g., rioting, insurrection).

  • Thank God for all those who invested in the political process (e.g., candidates, canvassers, poll workers, etc.) Regardless of their positions, we at least thank God for the fact that they show concern for the welfare of our society. That’s a common grace (Rom 2:14–16).

  • Pray for wisdom for the soon-to-be-elected officials, that they would fear God (Prov 8:14-16; 9:10), acknowledge Christ as the true king (Ps 2), and lead accordingly.

  • Pray especially for the poor, oppressed, and vulnerable (e.g., the unborn, refugees, those in poverty, those affected by international conflict), that our political decisions would not negatively affect them, but instead might actually aid them and alleviate their conditions (Isa 1:17).

  • Pray for your congregation, that it would remain united in the matters that unite (the gospel; Eph 4:1-6), and not experience divisions over permissible differences. Pray for mutual understanding as some in the congregation may be rejoicing and others simultaneously discouraged at election results (Rom 12:15).

  • Pray for your hearts, that your hope would center on Jesus, not political results or candidates (Ps 20:7).

  • Pray for the general population, that God would divest and disillusion anyone of putting their hope in politics so that they might put their hope in Jesus instead (Isa 31:1).

  • Pray for all the candidates as they find out the results of the election, that they would find their sense of worth in Christ, not souring with pride if they win or plunging into despair if they loose (Phil 4:11-13).

  • Pray that God’s kingdom would come (Matt 6:10), remembering that every time we pray this, we are praying for the end of the United States. Our ultimate citizenship belongs elsewhere (Phil 3:20).

You Have No Need to Worry: A Political Paraphrase of Matthew 6:25-32

Kirk E. Miller

Paraphrase of Matthew 6:25-32 (Presidential Election Version)

“There’s no reason to be anxious about the presidential election, its impact on things like whether you have enough food, drink, or clothes to wear. Is not life more than politics?

Consider the birds. They don’t even have political candidates. Yet your Father feeds them, and does’t he treasure you far more than they? Or consider flowers. They don’t stress out about making sure they have clothes, yet even Solomon in his best fashion wasn’t ‘dressed’ as beautifully as they. If God cares enough to provide for the flowers, which are here today and gone tomorrow, certainly he will take care of you!

I mean, let’s be real. Can all your worries about politics improve them even the smallest bit?

You don’t have to stress about such things like, ‘Who will get elected? How will it affect the economy? What about freedom of religion; global warming; increase chance of war? What sort of country will my kids (or grandkids) have?’ These are the worries that dominate the thoughts of unbelievers. But you have a heavenly Father who already knows all your needs. Relax.

So be reassured. There’s no need to have such little faith. God’s got this.”

Why Ecclesiastes Needs Jesus: the Answer to Death’s “Vanity”

Kirk E. Miller

Ecclesiastes recounts things, not as they should be, but as they actually are (unfortunately so). In Genesis 1, God creates and repeatedly calls it “good” (Gen 1). In contrast, Ecclesiastes details instance after instances of conditions it declares “vanity.” What is the source of these conditions? The curse.

In Romans 8:20 Paul says God subjected this world to “futility” (or “vanity”). Here he uses the same word for “vanity” as does Ecclesiastes (LXX), and I tend to think he does this intentionally. As such, these conditions (e.g., evil, suffering, and the sorrow they bring) are not the way things are suppose to be. Though may be typical—and so they are, universally so! But they are not normal.

So too, death is a product of the curse (Gen 3). In fact, Ecclesiastes 9 describes death as “an evil.” Death serves as another instance of the “vanity” that has thus far characterizes Ecclesiastes’ account of life “under the sun.”

But death is more than just one “vanity” among the others though. Death functions like the “final boss” of these vanities. It’s the ultimate “vanitizer,” as I have said elsewhere. That is, even if the other vanities don’t get you, this one always does—without exception. According to Ecclesiastes, death casts a long shadow over all that proceeds it, rendering it all “futile.” No matter what you accomplish or experience in this life, what difference does it make when, at the end of the day, death brings it all to naught?

Leo Tolstoy (Christian) and Albert Camus (non-Christian absurdist philosopher) capture well this absurdity that death imposes on our lives:

“My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

—Tolstoy, A Confession

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In other words, Ecclesiastes needs Jesus.

That’s precisely why Paul’s discussion of Christ’s resurrection—the very thing that secures our own—mentions “vanity”/”futility” so frequently throughout 1 Corinthians 15 (four times: vv.2, 10, 14, and 58). It’s a controlling theme in his argument, the operating background to the importance of resurrection. “Futility” results if Christ is not raised. If Christ is not raised, we labor in “vain,” our faith is “vain,” our preaching is in “vain,” etc.

However, as Paul goes on to proclaim in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection (our hope) is what undoes the vanity of death. Or in Romans 8, the “futility” (again, the same word as in Ecclesiastes) to which creation was subjected meets its match at Christ’s return when he resurrects his people and restores all things (Rom 8:20). Christ undoes the realities of Ecclesiastes.

Praise God, the wisdom Ecclesiastes provides is provisional. There will come a day when we no longer live “under [its] sun” by in the light provided by the Son (Rev 22:5).

Does Time Heal All Wounds? How “Getting Over It” Is the Wrong Approach to Grief

Kirk E. Miller

People say, “Time heals all wounds.” We talk about “getting over” things or “moving on.”

I think this can be true in some instances. For instance, maybe a dream you had doesn’t materialize. You grieve what never was, only to conclude, after some time passes, that you no longer desire that dream anymore. So you’re “over it.”

But in general, I tend not to like this framing (“getting over it,” “moving on”). I don’t think it’s true in a lot of instances. For example, when a loved one dies, do you ever “move on” and “get over it”, or do you—hopefully, because even this isn’t always the case—just learn to live with it, grow accustom to it, acquire the ability to manage it? In fact, it’s a bit messed up to assume we should just “move on” from a loved one’s passing, as if we come to accept it (death isn’t acceptable, and time doesn’t make it so). The same can be said of other suffering and evil we endure. Time doesn’t somehow undo those things.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s simply false. And arguably it’s an anti-Christian eschatology that sees time as salvific rather than the return of Christ (see Rev 21:4 where Christ wipes away all tears). Time can create some distance from the immediacy of our wounds, making the pain less sharp, more dull. But I think the pain is often still there. Instead, we (again, hopefully) simply learn to accommodate it.

“Time doesn’t heal all wounds. That’s simply false. And arguably it’s an anti-Christian eschatology that sees time as salvific rather than the return of Christ.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean we are resigned to wallow in our grief. Hope is a virtue according to the New Testament (alongside faith and love, e.g., 1 Cor 13:13). In other words, hope is something we must exercise. It’s not something we just happen to experience if we’ve lucky enough to experience its conditions, as if hope happens to us. No, we must fight to fixate on our hope. And that hope has a name: Jesus.

Nonetheless, hope anticipates what’s future. So, at present, hope does not undo suffering, pain, and grief. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, Paul says we do not grieve as those who lack hope. Nonetheless, he does say we grieve! Hope does not erase or invalidate grief. Hope sees its reversal as already accomplished, but not yet fulfilled; already won, but not yet enacted. Each side of this coin is important; to neglect one at the expense of the other is to adopt something less-than-Christian.

So we resist the sort of “toxic positivity”—yes, even its Christian variety; especially its Christian variety!—that, whether stated or unstated, expects one always to be happy, never to be sad or hurt. The Christian way is neither stoicism that tells us to simply accept what is (i.e., our problem is trying to resist) nor some Jesus-branded Buddhism that tells us our problem is our longings (i.e., we suffer because of unmet longing; so if simply we rid ourselves of longing, we eliminate suffering). No, Christian hope protests both these options. It forces us to long for something more—not to accept what is—to long for Christ (maranatha).

Lament has a firm place in our faith. In fact, lament is an act of hope, putting the current sorrows, evil, and pain into confrontation with the God of hope. Indeed, a failure to grieve and mourn the pain and evil of this word is not virtue but apathy.

Haunted by What Should Be: Christianity’s Resonance with Our Cursed World

Kirk E. Miller

I attended a “celebration of life” (read: post-funeral party) this afternoon with my wife. It was for my wife’s friend. She was only 36 and had a 3-year-old son. Absolutely tragic.

It was a bit of a weird scene. They had a DJ who was playing dance music and dancing in the corner. Lot’s of drinks, food, and chatter. They were going for good vibes as a way of honoring this woman who lived life full of energy. But it was a jarring juxtaposition given the reason that brought us together.

Have you ever noticed that some don’t call them funerals anymore, “but celebration of life” services? Our culture doesn’t like to deal with death. We like to keep it out of sight and out of mind. We find it unsettling. We probably don’t know what to do with it existentially. So even when we do have to deal with it, like at a funeral, we like to recast it as life, “a celebration of life.”

But the juxtaposition made me think: Gosh, this is all so tragic, this woman dying at the mere age of 36, leaving her son behind who will likely barely even remember her. It’s heart-breaking.

But the reason it’s so heart-breaking isn’t because we’re the natural result of some mere evolutionary process that causes us to develop attachments to others due to its evolutionary advantage, with the byproduct that we grieve their loss. No, the reason we experience such deep tragedy in this world is because it’s haunted by what it should be. And the more beautiful and good something is meant to be, the more tragic and distressing its loss and destruction is.

We don’t just live in a world where unfortunate things happen—and that’s just the way it is. No, I think we sense something more sinister at play. Thus, we’re instinctually unwilling to accept this world as is. We internally want to resist it. We internally protest. We feel it as evil. We deeply sense something has gone wrong, that things are not the way they are suppose to be. And not just that, but that something good and beautiful has been disrupted—making it all the severer.

Think about those movies where a curse is invoked. The curse becomes an active force wreaking havoc, ruining the good, a force of harm. Tragic events aren’t just happenstance, the way things are. They are the torturous workings of the curse. The characters are constantly haunted by its reality. It chases them down. It won’t leave them alone. They struggle to escape it’s presence.

C.S. Lewis speaks of Christianity as the “true myth.” By this, he wasn’t saying that Christianity is unhistorical or untrue. No, he was saying, Christianity makes sense of our myth making. Myths provide meaning. And Christianity is that meaning-making story that explains all of our other attempts to make meaning.

So too Lewis said he believes in Christianity like he believes in the sun, because it illuminates and makes sense of everything else. It resonates with reality, our existential longing, our deep desires and sense of this world. Christianity “resonates” with the way things actually are.

One of the ways I think Christianity resonates with reality is this idea of the curse. When Adam and Eve sin, creation came under God’s curse (Gen 3).

The older I get, the more and more messed up I feel this world and this life are. It’s not just happenstance unfortunate events. It’s like a curse from a movie, an active presence wreaking havoc. We feel the tragedy not merely of unfortunate things we wish weren’t the case but of things we know ought to be beautiful and good, like the life of a young 36-year-old woman and her three-year-old boy.