Special Edition: God’s Sovereignty, Moral Evil, and the Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump: The Theological, Historical, and Political Issues

Part I

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God’s Sovereignty, Moral Evil, and the Attempted Assassination of Former President Trump: The Theological, Historical, and Political Issues

Human history sometimes turns on a single date. Sometimes it seems to turn in a matter of seconds. That’s exactly how history looked on Saturday when there was an assassination attempt upon the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, as he was campaigning in rural Pennsylvania.

As a matter of fact, Americans, and then others around the world, watched transfixed to the video in which the former president, and the man just about to pick up the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, when he reached suddenly in the middle of a rally for his ear and obviously then understood that he had been shot, falling to the ground, and immediately covered by American Secret Service agents. The rest of the story began to unfold as America and as the world watched.

But the bottom line became very clear. This was an assassination attempt upon Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, and it was one that was undertaken in such a way that it raises huge questions about the security detail around the former president and current presidential candidate, about to be nominee, huge questions, of course, that lead to massive worldview questions. And so, let’s turn to those.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump represents one of those moments when the issues, when the truths, fundamentally are absolutely clarified. Saturday’s attack at President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania shocked the nation and the watching world. It instantly revealed so many massive theological, moral, essential truths, worldview dimensions.

First of all, if nothing else, it demonstrated to us immediately that life and death can come down to the matter of seconds and to a matter of a millimeter, and that is one of the most striking realizations when you consider this assassination attempt upon the former president of the United States.

Clearly a man was able to get on the roof of a neighboring building, that raises itself so many questions, was able to have a direct line of fire at the former president of the United States, was able to discharge several rounds, one of them grazed the president’s ear. Even as the president grabbed his right ear and even as blood began to flow, and as those now iconic photographs began to emerge, it was very clear that had that round, had that bullet just moved slightly, ever so slightly, in the direction of the president, it would’ve not hit his ear. It would have ended his life.

And so, there’s a sobering realization and it points to something, and that something has to be explained. It has to be explained in worldview terms. Was this just an accident? Was it luck? Was it fate?

Here’s where Christians understand that we have nowhere to go, but the Doctrine of Providence, and that’s because it is a part of the theological house that we occupy. It is a part of biblical Christianity. It is essential to our Christian understanding of the world. Our understanding of the world begins with a self-existent, sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient God who created the entire cosmos and fills it with his glory and rules over it as sovereign Lord.

You either believe that or you don’t. But if you do believe it, then you have nowhere to go in this theological house other than the affirmation of the providence of God. That is not to say, by the way, that there’s no distinction between good and evil, because God himself makes that very clear, and he is the author of good. He knows no evil.

But in his providential care over the entire universe, he rules through all of these things in such a way that we are left with a worldview that tells us nothing happens by accident, nothing is mere luck, nothing is mere chance. The universe is not an accident. We are not just animated dust. At the end of the day, the ultimate explanation for why things happen as they happen includes an approximate sense, oftentimes recourse to natural law, recourse to material objects, recourse to human moral activity and responsibility, but ultimately it is within the context, in the biblical worldview, of the sovereignty of God and the operations of God’s providence.

Just the slightest deviation in that ammunition round and we wouldn’t be talking about the bleeding ear of a former president. We would be talking about a dead former president, and that would take place even as Donald Trump is just days from his official nomination as the Republican candidate for the upcoming election for the office of president of the United States. The stakes in this sense could not be higher.

How can human life be so fragile as that? But it is. The fragility of life is essential to our understanding of the gift of life. In a world of sin and in a world of evil, a world of assassins, and a world of pathogens, every breath we take is a gift and, at some point, a single breath will be our last.

What we must recognize is that on Saturday, that final breath was very, very close for the former president of the United States or Donald Trump, and it was videocast, broadcast to the entire world. Now I’m very thankful that was not the case, but that means if we’re thankful, that we are thankful to God in terms of the operation of his providence.

Those who hold to a purely materialistic and naturalistic worldview have no answer but luck, which is a major doctrine of the secular worldview. But Donald Trump, and the watching world as well, must surely know in his heart that something greater than luck preserved his life. I found it very interesting that speaking to the press on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, acknowledged that hairline distance that separated life and death in the assassination attempt, and he stated, just very simply, fate stepped in. Though we understand what he means, but we also understand as Christians, we have no recourse to fate.

Interestingly, I think very significantly, it was President Trump himself who clarified the issue, rightly posting on Truth Social, that it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. Indeed, it was God and God alone, for God alone is the sovereign ruler of the cosmos.

A second realization comes down to the reality of moral evil and the necessity of moral responsibility. Those were instantly clarified on Saturday. No one observing these events could say that there is no objective moral order.

The entire viewership, basically all sane people, responded to the situation Saturday in the language of right and wrong, the language of good and evil. Why? Because it’s indispensable. Now as Christians, we also want to say it’s because we are made in the image of God, and one dimension of the imago dei is a moral consciousness, a moral knowledge that we cannot not know.

But we are living in a time when so many people, especially on the ideological left, have tried to argue that morality is nothing more than a social convention. It’s nothing more than the product of social construction. Or you even have people who say that moral language is just a way of imposing our preferences upon the range of human behavior.

All of us know that none of that fits the situation on Saturday. None of it fits a shooter going on a roof attempting to kill a former president of the United States. Nothing like that fits when at least one of the participants in that rally, not intended as the target but nonetheless who became the target, was a man who gave his life protecting his family.

And so, this was not only an attack that was potentially deadly, this was an attack that was deadly. And the media tell us there are two others who remain in critical condition. And so, even as we pray for them, we realize we have a grieving family here.

The Trump family is not grieving the loss of Donald Trump by death to an assassin’s bullet, but there is a family in Pennsylvania that is suffering greatly, and that’s the family of Corey Comperatore. That’s the man who protected his family. When the shots rang out, he went over his family to protect them, and it was discovered pretty quickly in the moments immediately after the attack, that it was Corey himself who had died.

This was an evil act. There’s no other word for it. There’s no sane person arguing otherwise, and that tells us something very important. This was an attempt to assassinate a former president of the United States, a current leading candidate for the White House who is headed to accept the nomination of his party even now. This was an attempt to abandon politics and embrace violence. This was, let’s not forget, a premeditated attempt to undermine an entire civilization, as well as to kill a human being.

But we also have to recognize that there’s something particularly important here when it comes to politics, and what’s underlined is that as a dimension of human activity, politics can bring out the best and the worst in human beings. And very often, in the range of politics, it’s the worst.

This is especially true when, politically speaking, the stakes are as high as we see in the 2024 election. Donald Trump and Joe Biden, along with their two parties, they don’t merely represent two different plans for America. In reality, these two parties and the two presidents now represent two different visions of America. The distinction is far more basic than many people realize, or at least perhaps as they rationalize. Maybe they do, by intuition, understand what is at stake.

President Biden rightly called President Trump to speak very thankfully of his preservation and to acknowledge the evil of violence. Every single politician on the Sunday news program spoke to the same conviction, that violence is a threat to our entire constitutional order and that violent acts like what happened yesterday are never acceptable. No doubt they mean it when they say it. President Biden, speaking from the Oval Office last night, spoke of the fact that we need to settle our arguments. He meant to say at the ballot box, not with violence, and that is profoundly true.

But we also need to recognize something else, and this just gets to how difficult the political process, how contested that process can often become. Even in the calmest of times, military metaphors abound in political campaigns. The path to victory requires rendering your opponent as a threat to the very existence of the nation.

We also as Christians understand that language matters. It always matters. While both sides are quite capable and sometimes often guilty of using overheated and violent language, it’s the political left in the United States that in recent weeks and months has particularly demonized Donald Trump, and has fueled the atmosphere of violent language and imagery. President Biden’s use of the word “bullseye” with reference to President Trump is not aging well.

There are so many dimensions to the story. For one thing, another factor that is explained by the Christian worldview is why we as rational creatures have an insatiable necessity, an insatiable need to try to understand and rationally apprehend what has taken place here. We want to know the details. We want to know the motivation. We want to know the circumstances. We want to know the status of the investigation.

Even as we’re thinking about this, we recognize that to be human is to demand answers, and the urgent demand for those answers is yet another testimony to the fact that God made us as moral creatures. This isn’t just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It’s not just a matter of criminology. It is a matter of trying to understand why a human being, in this case a 20-year-old young man, would walk into the proximity of a rally being held for a campaign for the office of US president, get himself to the roof of a building with a line of fire to the presidential candidate, and then discharge his weapon with murderous intent and, as we now know, with murderous effect, just not murderous effect when it came to his primary target.

Once again, this underlines the reality of evil. It underlines the reality of the moral universe that God has made with human beings as the creatures made in his image who are fitted for that moral universe as moral creatures. But here’s where we also need to understand, the perplexity of sin, the reality of moral evil is such that one of the old theological words for it is surd as in absurd, that is to say it’s actually irrational.

So even as there may be some rational factors, reason alone would not explain, even fallen human reason, why a murderous intention like this would crystallize in one 20-year-old young man in such a horrifying way. You look at that and you recognize, we will never fully understand his mind. Since he was killed by law enforcement in the attack, we’ll never have the opportunity even to interrogate him.

But it’s not just the why question, it’s also the how question. The how question looms large and it’s likely to become a matter of ongoing political and governmental controversy in the United States. It seems impossible that given the security envelope around a president or a former president, with the particular responsibility of the Secret Service, that anyone would have the accessibility to get on the roof of a building with a line of fire so close to the candidate appearing in a public event.

To make the matter very clear, it just makes no sense. This is one of the first things that people are now grasping upon, especially those in political and government responsibility, trying to figure out how could this have happened.

The how questions also turn into very practical questions. How will all of this impact the coming election? How will it impact the coming meeting of the Republican National Convention? How will it impact our understanding of the course of presidential history in the 2024 election?

This is where the historical knowledge of American history becomes very, very important, because no less than four presidents of the United States have been assassinated while in office. That would mean President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, President James Garfield in 1881, President William McKinley in 1901, and President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

In 1981, the then president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, was shot as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel, and that led to vast changes in terms of the Secret Service, its policies, the protection envelope around the president of the United States. Something similar is likely to happen after we add the year 2024 to that lamentable list.

There can be no doubt that America faces big questions. Clearly our political system is not well, but it hasn’t been well for a long time. The stakes in the coming election are genuinely high. Both sides know it, and Saturday’s events will not bring about a new kindler and gentler political culture in the United States.

The 2024 election looms so large as we consider the future of our nation. Those who see no higher plane than politics are increasingly desperate. Christians cannot share that kind of desperation.

Part II

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Is Human Responsibility Real? (Yes) Is God Truly Sovereign? (Yes) — When Theology Hits Headlines

That takes us back to theology, because the Christian faith underlines the two realities of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Both are absolutely necessary to biblical Christianity and both are absolutely necessary to the Christian worldview in every respect. But though both are necessary, they’re not equal.

Human responsibility is real, but it exists only within the transcendent reality of God and within the context of his unconditional providence. The reality of God’s providence is something many Americans, and no doubt many Christians, think about with far too little seriousness. But we have to think about it seriously.

When it comes to the consideration of the providence of God, we have two big questions. Number one, does God exist? Because that’s a crucial category. If we are lost in the cosmos and there is no sovereign Lord over the entire creation, then we need to stop talking about divine providence and just recognize we’re living in a contingent, accidental universe with absolutely no fixed meaning and, frankly, with no promising future.

Furthermore, we can impute no purpose to the creation, no meaning to the creation, and fundamentally no objective, no absolute morality whatsoever to an accidental cosmos. So that’s the first question, and Christians obviously answer that question with the bold affirmation not only of the existence of a God, but the existence of the Creator God revealed in Holy Scripture.

But then there’s a second question and that is, well, then how does God relate to world occurrence, to world history, to events in the cosmos itself? The answer to that is we have only three options, and let’s just be intellectually honest because this is a rare honesty these days. The only three options are that God has nothing to do with his creation or that God has something to do with his creation or God rules over his creation. Those are really the only three logical, alternative, legitimate options.

Number one basically comes down to something like deism, the argument that God created the world, but then he set it according to natural laws and has no ongoing relationship or rule over world occurrence. So that means that the world is just running like a clock, the deists famously said, that was created and wound up. The watchmaker then just leaves it alone.

Now if you believe that, then you’re going to have to be consistent. There’s also no salvation. There’s no gospel. There’s no Jesus Christ. There’s no divine revelation. You’re just a part of a great cosmic clock. One day that clock is going to wind down.

The other alternative in the middle is saying that God has some operation of providence. That is to say he is somehow engaged with world occurrence and what takes place in his creation, but he doesn’t take total responsibility. He just, say, intervenes when he wants to in special occasions or he sets some moral laws in place and basically rules merely through those laws, but not according to any particularity. That is to say not intervening in any situation or in any life, but just relating through moral laws in a certain ongoing, generally, we just have to assume, benevolent way.

That’s much of modern theology or at least much of modern piety. It just comes down to some mush of divine providence that fits neither the evidence of scripture nor the logic of Christian theism.

The last option is that God is actually the sovereign Lord, the Creator God of the universe, and that he exercises his sovereignty over all the world, all the cosmos, all the time. Now I’m going to state that that is exactly what I believe the Bible teaches. That is exactly, I believe, what the Psalmist affirms. That is exactly what gives meaning to life, and it is precisely what gives us hope.

Biblically minded Christians affirm human moral responsibility within that context of divine sovereignty. There’s a reason why we discipline children. There’s a reason why we hold people accountable. There’s a reason why we have an FBI and a Secret Service and a court system and all the rest. But even within the context of that affirmation of human responsibility, there’s the larger reality that what explains all things in the beginning and in the end and, yes, in the middle is the absolute sovereignty of our omnipotent, omniscient God.

Part III

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Limited Options on the Question of Providence: Understanding What’s at Stake

Now one final thought. When we know the answer is God’s providence, that doesn’t mean that we can always make an assumption that we know what God is doing in any situation. We do know as Christians, the New Testament tells us that God is working for our good in all things. That doesn’t mean that all things are good.

Certainly what happened to that family in Pennsylvania is absolutely tragic. What that young man did in taking that semi-automatic weapon onto the roof of a building is absolutely reprehensible, and we understand that every single human being involved in that situation, every single human being hearing my voice right now, is a moral creature making moral decisions and bearing moral responsibility, this very moment.

But this special edition of The Briefing also leads me to say even as we should pray for our nation, we pray for the families grieving in Pennsylvania, we pray for righteousness to prevail, we pray for all of our leaders to be protected by divine providence. We pray for the rightful operation of our government, and we certainly pray for the election that is coming.

Part IV

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The RNC Faces a Big Moment of Moral Decision on the Abortion Issue: Let There Be No Retreat on Pro-Life Conviction

We also recognize that starting today, the Republican National Convention is meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I just want to remind Christians that so much is at stake in this nominating convention. We know who the nominee is going to be. That’s going to be Donald Trump. We know so much of the platform that the former president is going to be rolling out for the 2024 campaign.

I want to point out that the platform to be adopted by the party comes with a very big challenge to pro-life Christians, and that is that the current proposed form of the platform, and this is according to the intention of the former president and his instructions to the platform committee, it significantly clouds, minimizes, compromises the party’s historic stance on the sanctity of human life and particularly on the issue of abortion.

The word abortion doesn’t appear. There is an affirmation of the right of states to protect human life, and that certainly includes anti-abortion laws, restrictions on abortion. But what took place beginning in 1976, with the platform supporting a human life amendment to the Constitution, that’s gone, ending an explicit commitment for the Republican Party to prevent taxpayer funding for abortion. That’s out.

Beginning In 1996, the Republican platform condemned partial birth abortion, no mention. Additional language was added in 2004 and 2012 and 2016. In 2016, there was an affirmation of the moral importance of the human embryo. In other words, a growing comprehensiveness in the affirmation of human dignity and the sanctity of human life.

I just want to say a very clear word, a retreat on the abortion issue, a retreat by the Republican Party on the sanctity of human life, a retreat from a willingness to publicly state, clear pro-life positions, that will eventually lead to what I can only believe will be the weakening of the Republican Party and, frankly, the loosening of ties between evangelical Christians and others who have very strong pro-life positions and convictions with a political party that basically now refuses even to articulate the historic positions it has articulated and affirmed in the past.

President Trump has stated that you have to win elections, and evidently he believes that soft-pedaling the issue of abortion is one of the ways to win the election. I’m not saying that that political calculation’s entirely wrong. I am saying the moral calculation is absolutely catastrophic.

Now I want to be intellectually honest. There will still be a great distance between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party on the issue of abortion, because the Democratic Party is pressing for taxpayer funding of abortion, basically the removal of all restrictions on abortion. What the current President Joe Biden, the Democratic standard bearer, claims is the re-imposition of Roe v. Wade. It will actually be far to the left even of Roe v. Wade.

And so, we are going to be looking at a distinction here and we’re going to be looking at a distinction, if nothing else the question as to whether or not there should be national legislation legalizing abortion, that is forcing an abortion regime upon the entire nation. That is the plan of the Democratic Party.

President Trump and his preferred version of the Republican platform deny any role for the federal government in legislating the issue of abortion. I think that’s naive. I don’t think it’s realistic. I think the very fact that the Democrats are going to press this issue at the federal level means that any significant defense of the unborn is not going to have the option of avoiding federal legislation.

I still hold some hope that there can be a recovery on this issue, but we’re about to find out as the Republicans meet in Milwaukee. Of course, the Republican National Convention now takes place against a far more dramatic background or backdrop than even was the case a matter of a few days ago.

All this comes together to remind us, as if we needed the reminder, of how much is at stake. Many Americans may miss much of what’s at stake. Christians can’t afford to. This is our stewardship. This is our responsibility.