Lux Lucet

The Prophet Isaiah, from a monument in Rome.

“How do you know when a politician’s lying,” runs the set up to an old joke. The answer? “When his lips are moving.”

Ouch.

Now granted, that’s funny joke. But it’s funny only because it highlights vast chasm most of us have seen between most political rhetoric from most political reality.

George H.W. Bush wont the 1988 presidential election in part on his famous promise, “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Not long after his election he conspired with Congress to, wait for it…raise taxes.

More recently, Barak Obama told the nation in no uncertain terms that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

And this wasn’t the only lie that was told with respect to Obama Care. After the passage of the bill, a video of Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and one of the chief architects of the Affordable (sic) Care Act, surfaced that made clear that Obama Care always was a hustle, and that those behind the bill knew it all along. Gruber’s words were, “(L)ack of transparency is a huge political advantage and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to getting this thing (Obamacare) to pass.”

It seems that we Americans have grown used to being lied to. Maybe we even like it more than we like hearing the truth.

For my part, I’m sick of the lies; I’m sick of the fraud. Just stop it already.

But lies aren’t the only problem with human politicians. Inability is another. A man may have the most earnest desire in the world of actually doing what he promised to do in his campaign but find himself unable to carry our his plans for one reason or another.

The lies, the inability, it’s all enough to make us throw up our hands and say with the psalmist, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

I say all this by way of a preface to a thought I had on a passage I read in Isaiah this morning. In chapter 45, the prophet reports the words of the Lord who promises to send Cyrus, some 200 years hence at that, to free his people from their bondage. The Lord says he will do this thing “For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect.”

With those words, God himself once again shows himself the faithful God of the covenant. There is no false way in him. There is no lack of power.

Unbelievers and believers alike make the mistake of supposing God is altogether like them. The unrepentant unbeliever, satisfied in his evildoing and accustomed as he is to empty threats of punishment, will one day find to his horror that he has gotten away with precisely nothing, but that all things are open and naked to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

But even those who trust in Christ fail at times to take God seriously when he makes a promise. “Perhaps he’s forgotten his word,” we think, knowing our own weaknesses.

But God is not like man. He neither lies nor forgets, neither does he lack the power to carry out his plans. He can and will fulfill all his decrees as he has promised and in his own time, and he will do this for his own name’s sake and for the sake of his elect.