John Hagee and Sandy Hagee Parker. When the Righteous Rule. Second ed., Inprov, 2020.
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. The Gathering Storm. Nelson, 2020.
When the Righteous Rule and The Gathering Storm are very similar. We happened to have received copies of both around the same time. While it is an oversimplification to say that if you have read one, you have read the other, most readers could probably get by with reading just one.
Both writers are in ministries that keep up to some degree with current events. We have reviewed other books by Hagee on these pages. Hagee is mostly interested in Bible prophecy. His attention is often on Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East because these appear in biblical prophecies that have not been fulfilled yet. When the Righteous Rule is a bit different.
When the Righteous Rule gets its title from Proverbs 29:2 (KJV), “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” So Hagee observes some current trends in the American government that he would say were unrighteous.
This was written before the Covid remote learning experience where many families were upset and even appalled at things their children were being taught in schools. His greatest concern was probably on not just the breakdown but attacks on the family. This, of course, included the need to promote a mother and father raising their children together. While Christians have no one to blame but themselves for their own divorce rate, current emphases dismissing and downplaying parenthood and the family are of concern.
Hagee points out the well-documented statistics about children, especially boys, raised in single parent households. Yet our welfare system discourages marriage, abortion encourages promiscuity, and the general culture often treats children as a nuisance or afterthought and men as simply ridiculous, if not predators. He goes back to Marx, quoting him about the necessity for breaking up the family so the “dictatorship of the proletariat” can control things.
Other issues he deals with are abortion, work, justice, and Israel. He notes that justice is judicial. When people speak of social or economic injustice, they are dealing with something beyond government. He quotes Thomas Sowell:
Slippery use of the word “privilege” is part of a vogue of calling achievements “privileges”—a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life. (48)
A lot of Hagee’s book deals with questions of language: What people are saying, and how they are using words to hide the effects of their practices.
Hagee probably is most comfortable when he is writing about Israel and the surprising growing anti-Semitism in the world. American members of Congress are saying things about Jews that a mere twenty years ago would have brought down censure and media outrage—if they had even been able to get elected in the first place.
We are observing right now people of all persuasions upset for one reason or another at our governments, especially our Federal leadership. Hagee does look to the Bible for commentary on these different issues. God’s righteousness is not necessarily the same as man’s understanding, but the Bible is clear about what God says. Hagee encourages his readers to pray, vote, and take action as the Lord leads. It is possible to have the Lord change things if His people act.
In the other book we are reviewing, Mohler deliberately takes his title from the first volume of Winston Churchill’s history of World War II. Churchill’s The Gathering Storm is about the rise of Fascism and Communism in the 1930s and how few in Europe were concerned about it. Churchill himself was out of power most of that decade in spite of his experience as a high naval official because no one wanted to pay attention to him. Interestingly, just this week I saw a political cartoon comparing an American leader to Prime Minister Chamberlain.
Many things in the “storm” are things that Hagee also brings up. Mohler is a seminary president and keeps a blog on current events. Occasionally I hear him quoted in the news. Generally, Mohler’s book is a little more direct and current in its use of sources. He is not just presenting a principle, he is demonstrating what different political and cultural leaders and ”influencers” actually believe and are promoting. This was written during the 2020 primaries and before the general election, so there is no indication of Vice President Biden either being nominated or winning the election.
Mohler speaks of some of the same issues as Hagee: life, marriage, the family, the culture. He also notes that those Americans under 35 or so tend to have a much greater faith in government and more radical policies to solve problems. This, he suggests, is cultural, especially for those influenced by the educational system and the media.
He also goes into more detail about issues of gender and religious liberty. We recall that in one of his most famous speeches, Abraham Lincoln noted that the pro-slavery side did not want to debate the issue. Slavery was part of the government and culture and was “settled.” They wanted abolitionists to shut up and to agree with them. We see the same thing happening today on any number of issues such as the family, gender, abortion.
I recall having a conversation in 2015 with a person who was living in Brazil. I expressed concern about the Supreme Court ruling legalizing so-called gay marriage. The person in Brazil assured me it was no big deal. They had had it in Brazil for about ten years and people have agreed to disagree. Both sides understand that not everyone recognizes it, but there is tolerance. Alas, that has not been the case in the United States. People have been sued and even arrested for saying that they did not believe in gay marriage. We often seen activists putting the terms Freedom of Speech and Religious Liberty in scare quotes, illustrating that they indeed do not understand the concept of tolerance which was so important to the founding of our country.
This week, as I was reading these two books, I read a couple of secular editorials dealing with similar issues. Both quoted a pundit in 1950 who said back then that the culture war was over and the left wing had won. Even in the 1930s, Ken Burns relates that Ernest Hemingway told John Dos Passos not to write anything critical of the Communists or he would be blacklisted by the publishing industry. Dos Passos did, and he was.
One of the editorials quoted a well-known pundit today who said that the left assumes it will always win. Part of that may come from Marxist theory that Communism is inevitable according to the dialectic. I wonder, though, if part of it comes from that theological position, common in the West, which the author of the last book we reviewed criticized: Not that atheism and totalitarianism would triumph, but that the world would just get worse and worse as God’s power was dispensed.
The other editorial noted, though, that it is possible to turn things around. The American Left is agitated because of the Supreme Court. It just assumed that the court would always take their side as they have done since the mid-sixties, yet a few recent cases suggest otherwise. God calls all of us to repent. Why can’t government officials? Why can’t courts? Why can’t media moguls?
Yes, there may be a storm coming. In some ways it has been on us since at least the 1930s. But God is not finished with His creation yet. Jesus still has the authority to say to the storm, “Peace! Be still!” (See Mark 4:39) True justice and righteousness come from him anyhow. Why base our thinking or our system on anyone else?