Last week an internationally known man along with a woman, both of whom are part of what I will refer to as the prophetic sector of the Christian communion within the United States, called Christian women to a fasting and prayer event next year at the National Mall. The reason: To “save America” and “save” our children from “transgenderism” and “homosexuality.” These are my thoughts on this prophetic word, and if you are pressed for time, may I encourage you to read at least the last section.
 
The Biblical Story that Stirred the Call for the Event
 
I am all for prayer and calls to pray. I believe all that we see bears witness to an unseen and greater spiritual reality. I also believe prayer is one of the means God has sovereignly chosen to work within to bring about His purposes in time and space.
 
The biblical justification for this prophetic call is the story of Queen Esther. Esther was of Jewish lineage. A decree had gone out to kill all the Jews in the land. However, the King didn’t know his Queen was Jewish! But at risk to her life, she approached the King about the decree and disclosed the fact she was a Jew. To shorten the story, the Jews were authorized by the King to resist the decree and, on the whole, they were saved.
 
Does This Analogy Lend Itself to this Prophetic Call?
 
I get using the story to call women to pray for America because I used it to conclude that I should to run against a 26-year incumbent state Senator in 1994.
 
I won’t bore you with the details, but I thought God was using certain events in my life to draw me into running for the state Senate to fight against liberals to enact righteous laws. It was for “such a time as this,” as it is written of Queen Esther’s strategic place in the King’s court, that things had happened to me. America needed saving, and God had sovereignly brought me back to my hometown so I could help God do that.
 
But Esther’s work is not a particularly relevant analogy to how to save America, as I once thought.
 
The Jewish people, not then an independent nation but a scattered people living under a Gentile King’s authority, had to be saved as a people group because theirs was the bloodline through which God had promised Abraham the “Seed” promised in Genesis 3:15 would come. (Galatians 3) That Seed would crush the head of Satan who had animated the Serpent in the Garden to turn Adam and Eve away from their point of integration and reference, their Creator and Sustainer, God.
 
That “Seed” turned out to be Jesus, but in Esther’s day no one knew which Jewish family’s line needed to be spared. Thus, the Jewish people had to be spared or God’s promise might fail.
 
In other words, the purpose of the story is to tell us about God and, specifically, the greatness of a God who, at the beginning of human history, could make a promise about a specific person to come—Jesus—and guide history over the course of centuries toward fulfilling that promise, even when the chosen bloodline was living under a foreign King.
 
Knowing this about God changes the way Christians see everything, but my point is that Esther’s story is not one from which we should conclude that 2,600 years later women will play a unique role in saving a geo-political state from self-destruction because it has turned from God.
 
Women may play such role in our nation’s future, but the book of Esther is not a woman-saving-her-nation story as much as it is about God’s providential faithfulness to the goal latent in the promised Seed to restore and bring to a greater glory what He had made that was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
 
Moreover, America does need not to be “saved” in the way and for the same reason as was presented in Esther’s story because the promised Seed has come; that’s what Christmas is about.
 
But something about the specifics of this prophetic call to save America and our kids seemed missing to me.
 
The Prophecy I Think America and Evangelicals Need to Hear.
 
America as it now stands does not need to be “saved” if what is meant is the act of being preserved or conserved. It needs to repent. But I didn’t hear the nation or even Christians being called to the kind of humility and repentance I read about in the Bible. 
 
When we read of God’s people praying that God will save them, it is usually interwoven with a realized need to repent of something. (2 Chronicles 7:14).
 
And it’s not just crying out, “We’ve sinned!” It’s also not repenting because of what the “sinners” have been doing.
 
I’m talking about identifying the nature of the sin into which our heart motivations and thinking have fallen and how that has worked itself out in practical ways. Then, it is turning away from that to what is righteous.
 
That, to me, is true repentance. Sorrow about the state of things may prompt us cry out to God, but “godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:10).
 
I believe Christians, which includes me, need to hear a prophetic call to that kind of repenting prayer. That, to me, at this point in time, should be the telos or the “end game” of calls to fasting and prayer.
 
Repetition Seems to be the “Telos” of the Prophetic Call.
 
In this case, though, the “end game” after praying was to “take a stand,” which was said to mean Christians would need voter guides all the way down to the school board level. And they would need to use them to elect people whose values and beliefs “line up with Jesus.”
 
I’ve said and done that very thing. Nothing is per se wrong with that. But that’s the unfruitful standing Christians have engaged in since the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979. That sounds like repetition to me.
 
So, where I struggle with prophetic calls like this being joined to a need to exercise political power is that it seems to be adding a supernatural gloss to a view of the cosmos (cosmology) that I once had. My concern is that we can develop a “formulaic” form of Christianity.”
 
Perhaps the following will illustrate what I mean and how it relates to my concern about the type of prayer-stand call my ears heard.
 
Avoiding Formulaic Christian Thinking.
 
I once saw the cosmos more like a machine than an organism brimming to the full with unseen life because the Spirit of God is intimately interfacing with even the smallest and most apparently random of things for the sake of His glory like “disposing” of the “lot cast into the lap” (Proverbs 16:33).
 
When a machine is not working correctly, you simply replace or fix the part that is broken. Doing that “works” because machines operate on a strict view of the law of cause and effect—parts X, Y, and Z interface in a certain way that automatically produces the desired widget.
 
There is no need for a God to keep the parts from breaking; they break simply because of another law, that of natural wear and tear.
 
My problem was not understanding I had been so inundated with an evolutionary, naturalistic cosmology that I thought Christians could fix a broken America by replacing the parts that seem to have gone bad—exchanging certain kinds of lawmakers and laws for others.
 
This doesn’t mean Christians should disengage from the political process, but it does mean we may need to think through our motivations and objectives more deeply.
 
I see no evidence in Scripture that the kind of cosmological thinking I have described can be fixed by adding a gloss of prayer for salvation without repentance before or after our widget-fixing law-making efforts.  In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. (Isaiah 1:13-14, Amos 5:21-23).
 
Could We Be Engaged in Magical, Even Idolatrous Thinking?
 
Maybe it’s me, and I sure hope I’m wrong, but adding prayer to what may be cosmologically sinful thinking starts to sound like a formulaic kind of Christianity, and it seems akin to what God, from His perspective, might call magical thinking.
 
By that I mean thinking civil law and our manipulation of that law is what brings things into existence—righteousness—especially if we add a dose of prayer to it. If that’s somewhere underneath our thinking, I can’t help but wonder if it is a form of idolatry—giving to civic law a power and therefore, a glory, that belongs only to God.
 
Formulaic Christianity seems to put salvation in our hands and God at our fingertips to do our bidding, which may be more for our sakes than for His glory.
 
A million women may gather on the National Mall next year, but that is not proof of a prophetic call that is going to save America. If there is no repentance of the kind described at the forthcoming prayer meeting and things continue unabated, we may later need to think through these words from the prophet Isaiah: