This is one of those heated issues of which I’m a bit timid to enter the fray. And truthfully I’m not really interested in putting out my opinion on whether or not Christians should be encouraged to arm themselves. My goal instead is to wrestle with something I see creeping up in my heart.
With the civil unrest going on in our nation and the mass shootings happening almost daily, the issue of whether or not Christians should bear arms continues to come up in discussion. In the communities where I’ve lived most of my life this is a non-issue. Our second amendment gives us the right to bear arms. We are called to be protectors of our families. One way to do this is to own a firearm. Case closed.
And so I read with great interest John Piper’s answer to this very question. Piper summarizes his argument thus:
It is an argument that the overwhelming focus and thrust of the New Testament is that Christians are sent into the world — religious and non-religious — “as lambs in the midst of wolves” (Luke 10:3). And that exhorting the lambs to carry concealed weapons with which to shoot the wolves does not advance the counter-cultural, self-sacrificing, soul-saving cause of Christ.
He is saying that our answer to this question might show us something about our hearts. According to Piper the thrust of the New Testament is to show how believers have a heart which “longs to show Jesus to be more satisfying than life, trusts in the help of God in every situation, and desires the salvation of our enemies.”
At the end of the day I will confess that I am not completely sold on Piper’s argument. I lean towards the views expressed by Bob Thune, Doug Wilson, and Steven Wedgeworth (as summarized here). But as I read through Piper’s article I found myself a bit uncomfortable. I kept asking, “If citizens aren’t allowed to protect themselves then who will protect them?”
This way of thinking flies in the face of Psalm 20:7. You could modernize this and say, “Some trust in tanks and guns, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God”. I realize that this isn’t a one-to-one comparison. David isn’t here talking about having a firearm on his night stand. He is talking about the nation of Israel trusting in the Lord instead of trusting in their military prowess. But isn’t there something askew in my heart when I feel safer with a gun at my bedside than I do trusting in the sovereign Lord to protect our family? (Granted your pistol might be the means God uses to protect your family).
As I said earlier this article really isn’t meant to be about gun control. I’m only wanting to wrestle with that fear and lack of trust that I see creeping up in my own heart. If the government takes away our firearms we aren’t without protection. We might feel naked and bare and vulnerable. But isn’t this the place where David so often found himself in the Psalms? And wasn’t it in these very moments when David learned that his soul’s protection wasn’t in anything other than the name of the Lord?
I’m forced to ask myself whether at the end of the day I trust in God or Smith & Wesson. Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I’m not so naïve to think we aren’t constantly in danger of bowing a knee to a modern day Baal to protect us from harm. Perhaps our idols just take a different shape and come with built-in sights.
Again I’m not saying we need to abandon our firearms or that this isn’t the means God might use to protect our families. But what I am saying is that the imagined protection the handgun in your nightstand promises might be more dangerous to your soul than any intruder.
