Contrary to popular belief, if you live in a country where you are allowed to vote for your leaders, your vote does not count. God is not regulated by the popular decision to place into authority individuals over us that the majority have voted for, and it is the Lord that places all those over us in these positions. (Romans 13:1) The best one might be able to do if they would decide to debate this point would be to say that the Lord then has influenced the minds of people to vote in a particular fashion, for a particular person, but if then you would take this stance, you would no longer be able to contend that all the Almighty did with Pharaoh was show him the man whom he truly was, for to say that he hardened his heart would be saying that He actually did harden his heart, that the Lord God manipulated this man’s thoughts and actions for His own purposes.
“I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” (Romans 9:15) Many do not like to think upon these lines, for it infers that God is Sovereign, that He does what He wants when He wants to whomever He wants, and it leaves little room in their minds for self, for the free will that we believe we possess. One of the most difficult verses for them to comprehend is in John 17, where the Lord, in what is truly known as the Lord’s prayer, says “Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.” (John 17:12) It begs the repeating of one of what I will call my “fancy sayings,”
“Does foreknowledge infer interdiction on the part of God.”
For our Lord to say these words to the Father infers that those whom He has given to Christ were given only by means of ownership, which, to put it bluntly, pretty much throws any of our free will out the door. To take this to the extreme, one would need to say that “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” (Romans 10:13) means that only those who are already saved, are the only ones who will call upon His name, for the Lord, although not hindered by His creation of time, does not need to wait to see who will accept the Lordship of Christ, or who by faith, such as Abraham, (James 2:23) will accept Him in faith, “but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them.” (Heb. 11:13) “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.” (Prov. 16:9) And it is only in our finite mind that we can grasp as much as we can of the words “free will.”
One cannot give what one does not own and have complete control over, and yet there are still many who believe their vote counts. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” (Prov. 29:2) If there are wicked men in the highest positions of authority in the nation that you live in, then there is no contending the point, that nation is in open rebellion against the Lord, and these individuals, the same as the Lord has done many times in the past, are there to cause the people in that land to repent. There have been times though, many times, when punishment must be enacted, for the sins and forgetting of the Lord by the people require our Holy God to take such actions, and if these sins are continuous and grievous enough, then the punishment is most severe, to say the least. Think here on the times of Jeremiah, or in 70a.d., when the sons of Jacob were cast out and spread across the entire earth.
I will not speak on any particular nation, but the truth is known by all, there is not one nation on this planet that anyone can point to and say, “That nation, as a whole, serves the Lord God.” It is not man that directs his steps my friend, it is God, and it is God that has brought us to this point, an entire planet, billions of people in open rebellion to the Sovereignty of our Holy God. You may debate all day whether or not we as a race brought ourselves to this wicked time and place, if the Lord allowed us to, or if we were led here, but that would avail you nothing. There is only one question that should concern you, you are here, so what are you going to do about it. The finite mind that we have can best say, “What am I going to allow God to do through me,” the man filled with the wisdom of God will simply say, “Thy will be done.”