This looks like a good thing to me

After watching the inauguration of Barak Obama I emailed an American friend whom I have not seen for many years, a professor at Baylor University. His response was very interesting. “When Obama won the vote back in November, I thought of Psalm 118:23 ‘This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes.’ I still can hardly believe it has happened.”

Jim is not much given to civil religion. He would be the last to suggest that America is a uniquely Godly nation, or that whatever happens in America is somehow God’s will. But there are times in the course of history when we see the hand of God at work. And surely this is one of those times.

The Abolition Movement was, in very large measure, a movement of prayer, preaching, worship, and deep spiritual conviction. John Newton, the pastor and preacher who wrote Amazing Grace, turned away from participation in the slave trade to became one of the leading voices of abolition. This was the result of the deep spiritual conviction that accompanied his conversion to Christ. And William Wilberforce, who led the battle in parliament to outlaw the slave trade throughout the British Empire, and eventually slavery itself, did so out of the deep conviction that accompanied his conversion. And the civil rights movement, with Rev. Martin Luther King at it’s core, was, of course, a direct descendent of this spiritual revolution. So it would seem to me rather perverse to see an African American taking the oath of office for the Presidency of the United States without some acknowledgement that God just might have had something to do with it.

Of course, there are those who will point out that many who carried on the battle to abolish slavery and promote racial equality over the years, even at the risk of their lives, did so out of different spiritual convictions, or no particular spiritual convictions at all. They simply saw the justice of the cause. This is an important point, and we who look to God in these things must not forget it. But it doesn’t follow that, in these folks, God was uninvolved. God is the God of everyone and everything; the Godly, the un-Godly and the non-Godly. He works in the lives of all his creatures, in all of nature, in all of history, and I believe has something to do with where everyone comes down in these things.

Whether Obama will be great, mediocre or dismal failure, only time will tell. But there is no doubt that with his election and inauguration an era has come to an end; the era when it was unrealistic to imagine that a black man could be president. But as great as this might be it’s only one of the things many are hoping Obama’s presidency will mean. The closing of Guantanamo and other "secret CIA prisons", the reassertion that America will not torture, and the humbler tone of rhetoric are music to the ear.

I, for one, am grateful to see the Bush era come to an end. I believe he was a disaster for the American people and for countless others in the world at large. But the upside is that democracy seems to work in the long run. And now we wait to see how up this upside might be.

What do you think?