It’s God Wot Won It
From Franklin Graham on Facebook:
Many thought the Trump/Pence ticket didn’t have a chance. None of them understand the God-factor.
Hundreds of thousands of Christians from across the United States have been praying. This year they came out to every state capitol to pray for this election and for the future of America. Prayer groups were started. Families prayed. Churches prayed. Then Christians went to the polls, and God showed up.
While the media scratches their heads and tries to understand how this happened, I believe that God’s hand intervened Tuesday night to stop the godless, atheistic progressive agenda from taking control of our country.
Graham here infers a general spiritual atmosphere that inspired the faithful to vote for Trump; in contrast, Michele Bachmann has a rather more mechanistic view of spiritual causality in which (rather narcissistically) she was at ground zero of a cosmic drama. WND has the details:
…A large prayer group had gathered in Dallas, hosted by Ken Copeland ministries… Presenters David Barton and former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., invited viewers to join in prayer… As they prayed, something began to stir.
“At the precise moment we began broadcasting on Daystar,” Bachmann told WND, “as the polls were still open, and a national audience of believers joined together and prayed in concert, we literally saw the race break in favor of Trump.”
“The Times put out a timeline tracking the election results as they broke for Trump last night,” Bachmann continued. “We went wild in the Dallas studio last night when David Barton, Ken and Terri Copeland, and various pastors saw that the victory for Trump began exactly at the precise moment believers corporately, over national television, sought the Lord for His favor upon our nation.”
At the neo-Pentecostal end of Evangelicalism, the contours of God’s intervention are explained in rather more elaborate detail. As Jennifer LeClaire writes in Charisma News:
In the 1990s, a Jezebel curse was released over our nation. Today, it is broken.
…An evil, unseen kingdom was toppled in the wee hours of Nov. 9. As the ekklesia—the governing church—continues rising in the years ahead, we’ll see the manifestation of this divine toppling in both the spirit and the natural. A demonic throne was overturned today and more demonic thrones will be toppled as the violent governing intercessors, emboldened by the Spirit of God, take them down by force in prayer in the name of Jesus (Matt. 11:12).
LeClaire explains that Jezebel refers to “ever-increasing manifestations of immorality and idolatry” since 1993, presumably coinciding with the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House.
Somewhat Delphically, God told LeClaire the day before the election that “on Election Day, a Kingdom Will Be Toppled”, but although she understood this to mean that Trump would win, she judged it prudent to avoid “prophetic presumption” by clarifying this point before the results were in.
More details of the “Heavenly War Over the Election” were provided just before election day by Frank Amedia, who warned of “the SPIRITUAL WAR that is being waged by the Lord Jesus Christ and His Body here on earth against the diabolical forces of the spiritual fortress alliance of satan, Jezebel, Ahab and Abaddon.“
The “Jezebel Spirit” was also linked to Clinton by Pastor Saeed Abedin, who complained that Clinton had not done enough to free him from imprisonment in Iran. Just before the election, Abedin also revealed that God had shown him the face of the next US president while he was in prison in Iran, and he later realised that this was Trump.
Prophets of Trump
Ahead of the election, a number of individuals claimed that God had given them insight into how Trump would win. A firefighter named Mark Taylor apparently got the word from God in 2011, while watching Trump being interviewed on TV, and he wrote down what God told him:
The Spirit of God says, I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America! For I will use this man to bring honor, respect and restoration to America. America will be respected once again as the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, (other than Israel). The dollar will be the strongest it has ever been in the history of the United States, and will once again be the currency by which all others are judged…
More recently, Charisma‘s Michael Brown relates the story of Pastor Jeremiah Johnson, who received a punning communication from God in July 2015:
Jeremiah knew very little about Trump when he wrote these words: “I was in a time of prayer several weeks ago when God began to speak to me concerning the destiny of Donald Trump in America. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, ‘Trump shall become My trumpet to the American people, for he possesses qualities that are even hard to find in My people these days… I will use the wealth that I have given him to expose and launch investigations searching for the truth. Just as I raised up Cyrus to fulfill My purposes and plans, so have I raised up Trump to fulfill my purposes and plans prior to the 2016 election… Though many see the outward pride and arrogance, I have given him the tender heart of a father that wants to lend a helping hand to the poor and the needy, to the foreigner and the stranger.'”
Trump as Cyrus became the most popular evangelical rationalization for embracing Trump; the alternative was to accept James Dobson’s dubious claim that Trump had suddenly found Jesus but was still a “baby Christian” from who we shouldn’t expect much evidence of religious conversion.
Another early believer was Lance Wallnau; as Charisma‘s CEO Stephen Strang wrote in October:
Lance Wallnau believes God is raising up Donald Trump like he did King Cyrus in Isaiah 45. When the charismatic speaker/business consultant first said this long before the billionaire businessman received the Republican nomination, nearly everyone thought he was nuts.
Now, Wallnau’s analysis is ringing true with many Christians who are looking to make sense spiritually of this very strange election season.
Wallnau also believes God gives leaders “common grace” to be instruments of His purposes—ones like Lincoln or Churchill or Thatcher.
Wallnau also thinks that Trump himself has prophetic powers, pointing to a 2015 Tweet by Trump that Anthony Weiner would “tell the world” about Clinton’s emails as evidence that Trump had foreseen Mark Comey’s October Surprise announcement. Wallnau’s own powers, though, are fallible – and he got tied up in knots as he attempted to discern how God was sending messages about the election via the World Series.
But Christians didn’t have a monopoly on Trump prophecies: a few days before the election there was interest in Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, who claimed to have found confirmation that Trump would win via codes in the Bibles, while Hindu Sena, a Trump-supporting Hindu group in India, now say they were certain Trump would win because “Hillary’s stars did not reflect the presidency but Mr. Trump’s did”.
I wrote about how evangelical leaders have been supporting Trump here.
Prophets of Dud
Alas, a few people somehow got their spiritual wires crossed, perhaps due to spiritual interference from the mass of secular election bloviators. In Nigeria, TV evangelist T.B. Joshua has been widely mocked for deleting a Facebook post from 6 November in which he had declared that God had shown him a woman winning the election (he’s since restored the item); while back in Israel a rival Bible code expert, Kikar Hashabbat, saw Clinton’s name among the Torah’s Hebrew and a kabbalist by the name of Netanel Shriki had confidently predicted a win for Clinton at 55%. Shriki went astray despite having the power to destroy Hamas tunnels by the power of prayer.
Peruvian shamans also failed to call it right, predicting in December that “The US will band together so that Trump does not become the United States Republican Candidate”; a more recent attempt to get the gods to punish him so that his bid would fail didn’t work out either.
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