Tag: Hillary Clinton

How To Treat Enemies

How do we treat our enemies? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters.

If anything has been disturbing about the assassination attempt I wrote about last time, it’s been the response from many on the left about how disappointed they are that the shooter didn’t miss. There is a saying that when people show you who they are, believe them. What we have seen from multiple people is who they are and how they view their enemies.

What happens if you become their enemy?

As a Christian, I know Christ told me to love my enemies. Isn’t it interesting that He never denied we will have enemies? The Old Testament didn’t, even within the community of Israel. Exodus 23:4 told the people of Israel that if they come across the ox or donkey of their enemy wandering off, return it. This would be within Israelite territory most likely.

I hope many of you have known on this blog that I try to treat my enemies fairly. I have not held back in saying that I am a conservative Christian. Thus, I view people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as enemies. I have some extremely strong viewpoints about both of these people.

However, when I have seen something false being shared about them, I have answered it. I used to get email blasts from someone who would talk about the latest horrible thing Obama had done when he was in office. I would spend a few minutes researching it, find out it was false, and then send out an email response to everyone back documenting the claim.

Yes. Conservative Christians share fake news also.

Some of these people who were getting these emails were liberals. I know that some of them came to respect me even though they disagreed with me because I cared about getting facts right. I have often chided Christians, even on this blog, for sharing information that can easily be shown to be false by a five-minute web search. If you want people to believe you on a claim about what happened 2,000 years ago, they need to be able to believe you on what happened two days ago.

Some of these responses have been public posts. Consider when Reclaim America shared a claim about Hillary Clinton. Another one was about Muslim apologist Zakir Naik. Now if I oppose these people ideologically, why would I write posts defending them?

Because truth matters. I will not take down my opponent with a lie. If they are as bad as I think they are, the truth about them is sufficient.

Let’s talk about present realities. You might be surprised, but I pray for the Biden family every night. I pray our president will have long life and health while he’s in the office. At the same time, I think he has done great damage to this country and the world and I do pray for justice, but that will come at God’s hands, not mine. I also realize we both have to answer to the same God one day.

If anything, the person I think has the roughest time in all of this in that family is Ashley Biden. Think about this. How many of you ever kept a journal or a diary where you would write down your most private and intimate thoughts. It wasn’t meant for everyone to see. Her diary was meant to be that, but now it’s public. Anyone can see it.

Would you like yours being open for everyone to see?

Now let’s get even more personal.

I have an ex-wife. I’ve spoken about my divorce. Does it hurt? Yep. Every day. Is it tempting to speak ill of her and even to think ill of her? Yes. I can easily say no other person on Earth has hurt me as much as she has.

I still pray for her well-being every night.

I challenge you even to come to campus and see if you can find anyone who has heard me speak ill of my ex-wife. If anything, I try to avoid doing that. I don’t even think you could find someone on Facebook who has seen that happen. That’s a bold claim, but I’ll make it.

Christ told me to love my enemies. That is unconditional. There are no exceptions to that rule. He didn’t say “Love your enemies, except that person who hurt you more than anyone else ever has. It’s cool to hate them.”

This is something I wrote about years ago in a post asking if your murderer will be in Heaven. I love how someone in the comments said that Stephen and Paul are together right now. That is the kind of radical love and forgiveness Christ calls us to.

Sometimes I see people on my Facebook feed say awful things about their exes. Every time, my thinking is the same. “I don’t know much about that person, but I sure know a lot more about you.” There are a lot of people I suspect in this election season who are seeing the reactions and saying “I wasn’t sure where I stand on Trump, but seeing how you all are reacting, I think I’ll stand with him.”

One tip I offer you all for your enemies is to pray for them. I mean real prayers for their well-being. It’s easy to say you will pray a Psalm of judgment on them. I have said before we often ask justice on our enemies and mercy on us. We hardly ever if ever reverse that and ask for mercy on our enemies and justice on us.

The way I see it anyway, if I live with anger and hostility towards my ex-wife, she wins. She’s still controlling me. She’s still dominant in my life. The more I let my hostility go, the more I am free.

Will I continue to pray for the Bidens every night? Yes. While I think Trump will win, if by some chance whoever the Democrat nominee is wins, I will pray for them every night too. I won’t pray for their agenda to succeed, but I will pray for them as a person.

When Obama was in office people used to ask me if I could meet with anyone in the world who would it be, and I said it would be him. Why? I would sit down and tell him the gospel. I would say the same about Trump when he was in office. I would say the same about Biden now. Something all of us have in common is all of us need the gospel.

Pray for your enemies. If not, you are more likely to become that which you condemn.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Reclaim America And Bad Research

How should we look at claims about our enemies? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Politically, I am a conservative. I have always been one. Despite that, I have also tried to be as honest as I could. My own father had a problem in the past of sending out an email blast to a bunch of people or sharing something on Facebook about Obama and I would do five minutes of checking and find out that it wasn’t true. My stance was always we should aim to defeat our political opponents, but we must always do so in truth. This thread is not about politics though.

What I am doing I would hope anyone would do. If you are a Trump supporter for instance, do what I do and check claims on people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and also check positive stuff about Trump before sharing it. If you are of the liberal persuasion. Check the reverse. Make sure that negative story about Trump is true.

I find this interesting also in light of going through Abdu Murray’s Saving Truth now where he talks about a post-truth society. In this society, we will share something even if it isn’t true and even if we know it isn’t true because it goes against our opponents. For those of us who are Christians, this should never be the case.

So there is a page called Reclaim America on Facebook. Sadly, I have written about them before with bad research. I wasn’t surprised to see that there was more of the same. The about of the Facebook page says this about them.

“Our mission is to speak truth to the lies of the Progressive Liberal Agenda! This page is kept current with information by the team of administrators that run it. God Bless the USA & those that seek to defend her!”

Fair enough. If you think liberals are spreading lies, then you should want to combat them. However, if you think lying is a problem, shouldn’t you make sure what you share is true?

So yesterday, I am surfing Facebook and I see this picture. I want to say upfront that I do not like profanity and the only reason I share this is because I want to be as accurate as I can. Anyway, this is what was shared.

Now immediately, several people are posting about what an awful woman Hillary is. As a conservative, I am no fan of Hillary and I do understand some things. First off, Hillary does have a reputation of being foul-mouthed, including around the Secret Service from when she was in the White House. Second, we do know that there were leaked emails. On the face of it, this could be plausible then.

But darn it, I have this tendency. I want to check up on things. There’s a date to this email and there’s a specific quote. It should be easy to find.

Except it isn’t. In fact, I find an incident from September 7 that matches it. This is one where Hillary said the exact same thing out loud at a Matt Lauer interview.

There is also another source out there that is doing the same thing. I found this video doing my search. For them, they had an email from someone with a Comcast email address. The original page I linked to about the incident had an NBC associate producer as the source. None of this is backed by anyone else. No specific names are given. Nothing.

So we have a claim with different dates and different sources and different forums. It leads me to think that this whole thing is bogus. Now keep in mind, a lack of evidence does not mean that it is necessarily false. Perhaps something like this did happen and no one reported it except a few isolated individuals, but I’m skeptical.

Even if it’s not necessarily false, there’s still no positive evidence that it is true. Now someone did point out emails went through Bleach Bit. Okay, but if that’s true, then how did we get those emails so we can know what is in them? Furthermore, if you point a specific date and no one can find an email on this date that has this, what are we to think?

Now if Reclaim America or anyone else can find this email, I will gladly retract this and issue an apology. Until then, I am skeptical of this whole thing. For those of us wanting to be people of truth, it doesn’t help our cause if we spread things so easily that anyone can see is not necessarily true.

As a conservative, this bothers me, but as a Christian, it does so even more. If you have no reason to believe something I share based on five minutes of checking, why should you believe it when I tell you that the Son of God came and rose from the dead which will take much more time to research and study? I have already damaged my witness by that.

It’s my hope that not only Reclaim America but anyone involved in debate will learn even more to check claims. Whatever side we want to serve in a debate, let’s try to serve it truthfully. If we don’t want false claims shared about our side or unprovable claims to be shared, let’s make sure we do the same.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

 

What Christians Can Learn From The 2016 Election

What are the lessons we can learn from last night? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

It’s not a secret to many of you that I do vote Republican and conservative consistently. This past election was no exception. Like many of you, I was skeptical. I was thinking it looked like Hillary would win. So was most everyone else. The reality is that we were in fact, wrong.

As I watched the results rolling in last night and thinking there could be a chance that Trump could pull this off, I wondered what I could learn from this. Eventually, we got to the point where it was no longer asking “What does Trump have to do to win?” and instead had switched to “What does Hillary have to do to win?” No doubt, for the Democrats, this was an upset.

I went to bed shortly before the announcement came since I had heard Pennsylvania might not be called until the morning. I got up to go to the restroom during the night and checked my emails to see if there was anything new. One of my friends emailed me and said that Hillary had indeed conceded.

Some of you are pleased. Some of you are disappointed. Some of you don’t know. Still, I hope that the lessons I give here will be ones that you can use whether you agree with President-Elect Trump or not. I think there are several things he did right that we Christians can learn from.

First, if you believe something is true, be willing to say it. Something that I think people found refreshing in Trump is that he blew apart political correctness and yes, I think that does need to die. It got us to be more individualistic and centered on ourselves and our feelings and make those dominant. This is also one reason I think a TV show like House was so popular. A TV Guide cover I saw once about it said “People say they want House to change but they don’t. You watch it because he’s a jerk.” House’s being straight-forward was refreshing to a lot of people.

Second, along with those lines, don’t be afraid of offending people. There’s no need to offend needlessly, but at the same time, we’ve reached a point where we’re afraid to say anyone to anything that will offend them. If we give the Gospel, we will offend people. It will be offensive to people to tell them they’re sinners. It will be offensive to them to tell them Jesus is King and they are not. If you are afraid of offending people, you will not be able to do evangelism well.

Third, be able to accept criticism. Remember the basket of deplorables remark? Many people were described with slurs of racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. If you speak out against Islam, well you won’t make it anywhere. You had better get in line with the culture also on homosexuality as well.

The slurs didn’t stop the President-Elect at all. Too many Christians when they get told that they’re a homophobe or Islamophobe or something similar (And I am not saying that Trump is right in line with us on the issue of homosexuality) shut down immediately. They think the label might be true. All it takes then is to have your opponents put a label on you and you stop.

Fourth, we can win in the face of opposition. Trump did it. Naturally, the Republican candidate had the Democrats against him, but also many in his own party and the media. We Christians in the face of opposition often fall back and don’t do anything. What could happen if we push forward?

Finally, what led to his win? Because there were plenty of people who were staying silent, but were supporting him. Most every poll was wrong. There were a lot of people who were shy about their support of Trump and didn’t want to tell a pollster, but they were willing to show up and vote. So now we have to wonder. How many people out there could be silent but do agree with us on issues like abortion, homosexuality, etc.?

Ideological battles can be won. The problem isn’t that the church can’t win battles. The problem is that the church rarely shows up to fight the battle. We assume often that we are a lone voice like Elijah, but there could still be 7,000 that have not bowed their knees to Baal we don’t know about.

Maybe you’re disappointed after last night. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re not sure. Either way, wherever you are, this should be a learning time regardless. I often like to listen to Herman Cain and he ends each show with saying “I hope you learned something.”

I hope we all did.

In Christ,
Nick Peters