Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. became the nation’s 110th Supreme Court justice today. This does not mean that our nation will become more Christian.

Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. became the nation’s 110th Supreme Court justice today (read a news article about the confirmation here.) This does not, however, mean that our nation will become more Christian. We as Christians cannot place our hopes for America on the political process. Yes, having Christians on the courts of America will help on occassion. A believing Congress and Executive staff would constitute a major benefit. Neither make the country Christian.

To believe that a Christian Congress allows us to be a Christian nation is a return to the early history of the Church when the Roman empire "became Christian." The lesson of history is also the lesson of Scripture. You can not place beliefs in a new law or a court decision. Morals cannot be legislated.

Christianity comes in the form of individual's accepting Jesus and then spending enough time studying God's Word to become good disciples. When this happens, we do not need the Congress to pass laws, because everyone will live their life as a good Christian.

What history demonstrates is that not enough people become Christians by faith and many of those who do, spend too little time learning about discipleship so their lives do not sufficiently change to reflect their new found faith. As a result we have "Christians" on both sides of issues. If you don't believe this just spend some time looking at the arguments for abortion, women as pastors, and, perhaps, even the issues surrounding homosexuality. There are certainly Christians on both sides of the abortion issue, albeit with varying opinions. Clearly good Christians exist on both side of the coin concerning women as pastors. There are some who claim to be Christian at the extremes of the homosexual issues.

If this is true, and I believe it is, then my reaction is that the church is already fractured. The entire church needs to spend more time on discipleship in order to arrive at a clear unifed census as to opinion on the major social issues of the day as those issues should be viewed from Scripture. Until that event occurs, it makes no difference what decision comes from the Supreme Court. There will continue to be unrest.

In fact, until the country is Christian by faith and belief, there will be unrest. So what is needed is more evangelism and less debate about Supreme Court justices.

Being politically correct, there was little web fanfare this morning about Alito's confirmation, but there were plenty of dissenting articles in the side bar. At the same time, one of the lead article on the news was a speech by Russua's President Vladimir Putin on boasting that Russia has missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system (an example is here.) Maybe the end-times battles are closer than we think.

Maybe none of this concern over the Supreme Court makes much difference and has little to do with God's plans?

Jim A