November 11, 2020, 2:53 pm
First Baptist Church senior pastor and avid Trump supporter Robert Jeffress is a surprising addition to the ranks of right-wing figures who have reluctantly accepted that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. In an op-ed for Fox News, he wrote on what Christians should do now that Biden has won the election.
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“When Joe Biden becomes president, we should commend him for the things he does right. We should condemn the things he does wrong. And above all, we must pray fervently for our president,” Jeffress wrote in his concluding paragraph.
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“If President Biden succeeds, we all succeed. May God bless Joe Biden, and may God bless the United States of America.”
Jeffress did include a disclaimer that his advice only applies “unless President Trump succeeds in legal challenges to the counting of votes in several states” at the beginning of the article. However, this still seems to represent something much closer to a concession than many Trump supporters, or Trump himself, have been willing to express.
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The Baptist pastor has been a Trump supporter since before he became president, landing a spot on Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board and White House Faith Initiative in June 2016. In his article, he tells the story of how he told Donald that he believed he would become the next president because “God has a great plan.”
He also, however, said that he believed former president Barack Obama was also chosen by God to lead the nation.
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“Daniel 2:21 says that ‘It is God who changes the times and the epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings,'” he said.
Taking this even further, he wrote that to obey God means obeying the government, regardless of who is president, and urged Christians to prove they’re not hypocrites by accepting the results of the election.
“Now, it’s always easier to submit and to pray for someone when he was our preferred candidate,” he said. “But the rubber really meets the road when the person who takes office is not the one we supported. Paul didn’t give us any wiggle room — his command applies all the same, whether the emperor was the faith-friendly Constantine or the evil emperor Nero.”
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We’ll have to take his word on that.
Don’t welcome Jeffress to the resistance just yet, however, as he tweeted today that he is still a supporter of Donald Trump, even if he’s not going to be president anymore in a couple of months. He even denied accepting the projected election results.
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“Don’t believe some false media reports that I have ‘broken’ with our great [email protected] I support him completely,” he wrote. “We do NOT have a ‘president-elect’ until electoral college votes December 14.”
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Jeffress is technically correct.
*First Published: November 11, 2020, 2:53 pm
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