Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them—he remains faithful forever.
He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord. - Psalm 146:1-10
Politics is a dangerous beast, especially in democracies. It was easy to place hope in kings, princes, rajahs and emperor, knowing that what was required for true change was the enlightened heart of an individual. And, if that didn't happen, then we knew exactly who to blame. But in democracies, we are taught that the future is in our hands because we can vote on it. Unlike monarchies, we can do something about our lack of hope. If the current representative doesn't fulfill our hopes then we can place our futures in the hands of the next representative. Every problem that we see, we can imagine that the solution is within our grasp, if we can only be persuasive enough. That illusion of control over our futures is the false god of democracy. If we sacrifice enough, it will reward us with control over the future, with our policies in place to ensure justice.
But ultimately, justice was not in the hands of the kings or in the hands of democratic representatives. It was in the hands of God. And those crucial issues: the poor, the oppressed, the prisoners, the ill, the foreigners, those without a family-those who traditionally are overlooked in any system of government seem very interesting to the God of the universe. Will the government really care more for them than God does? Elected officials are out of office in 2, 4 or 6 years but, "The Lord reigns forever...for all generations."
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