Five days after the 2004 presidential election, my friend Al Mohler preached at Covenant Life Church a message titled “After the Election.” What follows in this post are a number of lengthy but very helpful excerpts from that message that will provide you with a biblical perspective, regardless of who becomes the 44th president of the United States. I encourage you to take a few moments to read them.

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We are here on the Sunday after a national day of decision. And when I was asked to come and to preach to you on this day and to speak about the meaning of the election, we had no idea what would happen on Tuesday that would frame the background of our discussion today. In one sense it really mattered. In another sense it really didn’t.

We are living in one of those awkward moments when we are trying to decide what is really important, not only in terms of the present, not only in terms of our nation’s trajectory, but in terms of eternity.

We, as Christians, had to come together on a day like this in a service of worship to bring ourselves into the counsel of godly wisdom and to seek to unthink the thinking of the world. And this is so difficult because the seduction of worldly thinking surrounds us.

It is very easy for us to turn everything into a sociological calculus. We can explain these things on the basis of sociological patterns, voting demographics, and all the rest. It is very seductive for us to fall into some kind of amateur political science. We can map red and blue America. We can come up with the voting patterns. We can look precinct by precinct. It is very seductive to think we can psychologize this and determine why people made the choices they did in the voting booth. It was because they were afraid of this or afraid of that or they were hopeful of this or they had this need that was represented in this vote.

We could turn ourselves into therapists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and we could pool all the wisdom that the secular world has to offer, and it would be an interesting conversation that in the end would tell us nothing about eternity.

So we are coming together this morning to think about what the election means. And in contrast, in order to do that faithfully, we are going to have to talk about what the election means and what the election doesn’t mean. We are going to have to talk about what is at stake and what wasn’t at stake. And we are going to have to try with godly wisdom, submitted to the authority of Scripture, to put all of this together.

In the Christian world, we face a perpetual temptation either to minimize the importance of the political question or to maximize it.…There is the temptation in both directions. We can trace the history of the church, and we can see at various times the church has been more tempted to go in one direction of unfaithfulness and at other times in that other direction of unfaithfulness. But our responsibility, perhaps most acutely on the Sunday after an election, is to get our hearts and minds together and submit them to the Word of God and ask: What should we make of all this?....

We are reminded that the political process is important, but it has its severe limitations. It is so important that I believe it is no exaggeration to say that by our political process we must contend for righteousness, uphold the dignity of law, uphold the administration of justice. And we do so as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that justice is God’s gift and command and expectation to his people, that when God removes a sense of justice from a civilization, what follows is God’s judgment and wrath poured out in sheer chaos and dissolution.

We should be thankful insofar as we recognize [that] our opportunity to vote in this society is a Christian obligation to bear witness, even through that vote, to what we consider to be most important. That means at times we as Christians have to vote against our economic interest for a higher interest. We have to vote against our personal interest for a more significant interest.

With an issue like human life and human dignity on the line, a vote that would lead to the further destruction of human life or a failure to vote in a way that would restrict the destruction of human life is a vote that makes a citizen complicit in the taking and destruction of human life. There is no innocence. There is no neutrality.

Augustine, the great Christian theologian of the fourth century, tried to help the church understand this even as the Roman Empire appeared to be crumbling and eventually was destroyed, was fallen, and was no more. Writing in his famous book The City of God, Augustine said we must remember that there are two cities: a City of God and a City of Man. The City of God is ruled by a heavenly sovereign. It is the eternal city. It will never pass away. And there is the City of Man. It is God’s creation. In this age it is administered by sinners and has only a hint, at its best, of the grandeur of the City of God. At its very best it only hints at justice. For at our very best, our justice is tainted by our own finitude and our own sinfulness and our own limited wisdom. But in the City of God, justice reigns supreme because a just God administers his justice directly.

The same thing is true as we pass through all the virtues and all of our understandings of how God would order a society. But Augustine wanted his church members to remember that the City of Man is still important, because God created the city and put his redeemed people in it to make a difference for eternity.

Each of these two cities, Augustine said, has a love. In the City of God, the only love is love of God. It is an undiluted, undistracted, unrefracted love of God. But in the City of Man, there are many loves. Most of them are loves for the wrong things. All of them, even at their very best, [are] tainted by human sinfulness. Augustine said that love of neighbor should, in the City of Man, compel us to political responsibility, political honesty, and even political action.

But even as the church, the redeemed people of God in the City of Man is busy at work at policy, at politics, at strategy, and at tactics. All these things that do matter. The redeemed people of God must always have our hearts set on the City of God.

The apostle Paul put it this way. He said, “But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20, ESV). We are citizens, first and foremost, of a heavenly kingdom. But in this earth we are also, in this age, citizens of an earthly kingdom, and we must show the glory of God by being God’s people at work for good, at work for righteousness, at work for that which will preserve and protect and nurture. But most importantly, we must be in this age at work preaching the gospel, an issue that has no direct political allegiance, but does have political meaning, political extension, and political implications. We must understand that the main responsibility of the church in every age, whatever its government that is around us in our society—whether we be in the Roman Empire with Caesar sitting on the throne, or whether we be in some kingdom where there is some lesser king who considers himself a sovereign monarch, or whether or not we are in a representative democracy where we elect our own leaders, or if we are in any form of government imaginable to mankind. The one thing we must know is that this government, at its very best, is only an incompetent core of sinners doing, we hope, their very best.

Incompetent, not in a human comparison with each other, but incompetence in the theological perspective that there is no government that will solve the problem of human sinfulness. There is no government that will come up with the end-all solution to human poverty. There is no government that will reach into the hearts of men and turn those who plot murder into those who no longer have such plans. No government will ever be able to reach inside the human soul and bring about transformation or regeneration.

Government, according to Paul in Romans chapter 13, has very specific, defined responsibilities. The first is to maintain justice, to punish the evildoer, to maintain the rule and administration of law—that law to also correspond to God’s moral law. And in the New Testament, we have very clear indications of the Christian responsibility. We are to pray for our leaders. We are to pray and we are to respect the king. And by extension, that means in our situation the government we elect, and especially the president and others who have the most strategic and important constitutional responsibilities.

We need to pray for our president. We need to pray for all of those who are in elected office. We need to pray for all of those that are in appointed office. We need to pray for all of those who are in the part of the ongoing mechanisms of government. We need to pray because those are men and women making very real decisions that will have very real impact in the City of Man.

And we know from the perspective of the City of God, they are often brushing up against matters of eternity without knowing it.…

I am thankful that we can, on this Sunday after the election, as Christians, come together and seek some theological sanity, and do so in a way that will mobilize us and prepare us for the big job that lies ahead.

I am thankful that as we stand here today, we come in the name of the one true and living God who is the electing God and not the elected God. We are here in the name of a sovereign, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. His name is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are here in the name of the triune God who reigns over all things. We are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ our Redeemer. We are here in the name of One who reigns over the affairs of nations, who looks down upon the affairs of men and sees grasshoppers, insects in debate, insects in decision, hopping bugs with the weighty affairs of state [Isaiah 40:22].

Scripture says that the Lord God shows his sovereignty in the rising and in the falling of nations, in the waxing and in the waning of empires. With biblical discernment, our task is to look to the affairs of the world and see the action of God, the judgment and the mercy of God outpoured as God’s sovereign and perfect will will dictate and as God’s humble people should observe.

We are people that know politics is important, but not ultimate. We know that politics has its place, an urgent and important place where, in the City of Man, decisions are made that can make the difference between life and death, injustice and justice, mercy and no mercy, commonweal or common disaster. But we also know that there is in this world at its very best only a hint of the kingdom that is to come, where God’s reign is supreme.

No government will ever be able to say, “Every tear has been wiped away.” No government will ever be able to say, “The blind have received sight and the deaf have received hearing and the lame now walk.”…That power is God’s alone.