Looking to Jesus

Summary

Once in a while, you will hear people say that the Bible doesn’t deal with politics. The Bible only deals with spiritual things, they claim, and has nothing to say about economics, race relations, refugees, and especially politics. For these people, the Bible only addresses spiritual issues. The Bible isn’t political.

But we who read the Bible more carefully know that the Bible is deeply political. We see the Bible’s attention to politics in books like Esther and Daniel, where the main characters are required to work against their will in the courts of the Babylonian and Persian Empires. We see it in the history books of 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings, which are preoccupied with who holds national political power and how they use it. We see it in the prophets, who constantly evaluate the performance of political leaders by how well they treat poor people, refugees, widows, and orphans. The Bible’s attention to politics is obvious in the Old Testament.