Trump has God’s blessing, or is he cursed? – The Forward

Many saw Trump’s failure as a sign of God’s favor. It’s a very human conclusion. Courtesy of Getty Images

By Mira Fox
July 15, 2024

Following the assassination attempt at a rally on Saturday, former President Donald Trump said he survived thanks to God. Or at least that’s what other people are saying about the bullet that grazed his ear.

“The doctor at the hospital said he had never seen anything like it, he called it a miracle,” Trump said. “By luck or by God, a lot of people say it’s by God, I’m still here.”

Trump supporters immediately sprang into action to capture the incident. as an act of GodMinisters, congressmen and experts have said that he wears the armor of God, he is blessed by God, he is the leader chosen by God, he is like Lazarus rising from the dead.

This isn’t exactly new; Christians have been comparing Trump to biblical figures for years. Cyrus, a non-Jewish Persian king who was nonetheless guided by God to return the Jews to Israel, has long been the touchstone for evangelicals, who use the comparison to show that while Trump is not a perfect Christian, he is still anointed by God. And many other biblical figures, like King David, Over the years, many memes have been used to compare him to Trump. One video meme that circulated a few months ago proclaimed that “God created Trump” to be the caretaker of the Earth; others suggested he was a prophet.

This kind of rhetoric has gained traction since the shooting, but while it’s undeniable that a bullet could come close enough to Trump to wound him and leave him basically untouched, it says little about God’s intentions, which are, at least in the Bible, extremely murky and often counterintuitive.

Why, for example, would God’s extensive punishment of Job be a sign of favor? Sure, reading the book of Job, we can see God’s entire conversation with Satan, in which they basically make a bet that Job will love God even if he is punished for no reason. But if you were Job’s neighbor, you probably wouldn’t see losing his children and home and breaking out in painful sores as a sign of blessing—in fact, his three friends in the biblical text accuse him of sinning because a just God wouldn’t punish an innocent man.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of evil characters in the Bible who survive and thrive, at least for a while. Ahab, perhaps the most evil Israelite king, thanks to his love of idols, also won a bunch of wars. You might think he was blessed except for the fact that, when he finally died, the Bible says his body was licked by dogs and pigs to show God’s disapproval.

Or take the case of Jacob, who becomes the father of the Jewish people; he is often held up as the ultimate example of God’s favor. But he is also a con man who tricks his blind father, Isaac, into giving him his twin brother’s inheritance, which certainly doesn’t sound like the behavior of God’s chosen one. But apparently it is, as the Bible tells us.

The Bible usually tells the reader which character God favors, but in real life we ​​don’t have an omniscient voice telling us who is godly and who is not. And the signs of God’s favor or disfavor often have little to do with what ordinary people might consider blessings or with the behavior of a righteous person.

Instead, if we want to apply the biblical text to our everyday lives, we have to interpret it. And once you throw interpretation into the mix, basically anything goes. You could compare Trump to Ahab, the evil but very rich king who is more interested in wealth and power than in God, or to Cyrus. It depends on whether you started your interpretation from a standpoint of sympathy for Trump or from a standpoint of wanting to condemn him; either way, you can interpret a select portion of the biblical text to support whichever view you prefer.

There is nothing wrong with seeking wisdom from the Bible; perhaps one of the reasons it has survived so long and inspired so much interpretation is because its stories contain enduring lessons about human nature, but its precise lessons are no more obvious than the will of God.

And if there’s one thing the Bible stories and their centuries of interpretation have to tell us, it’s that God doesn’t like anyone to assume they know his desires. Remember Job’s friends who said that he must have sinned to be so cursed? At the end of the story, they have to make a sacrifice to apologize for their presumption. And they get off scot-free: Korach, a false prophet, was swallowed up by the earth after misinterpreting God’s desires. The most human error, in the Bible, is to think that we know God’s will.