Consequences Teach

It is November 8th, 2024, and Trump just won the Presidency on the promises of mass deportation, pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists that stormed the capital to mitigate the certification of the 2020 election results, the enforcement of more wide-sweeping tariffs, and the possibility of dismantling equal independent branches of our government and other checks that are put in place to keep representative democracies in check. The people have spoken, and they wanted Trump. They wanted him because they value the price of eggs over the price of autocracy, the price of immigration over the price of false positives and bloodshed, the price of the imminent over the price of the future, the price of fears over the price of neutrality.

We bailed Trump out during his first term by preventing some of his worst policies. When Trump passed tariffs, our government bailed the farmers out too. Trump’s first term is tinged by the pushback of his presidency, a pushback that helped him fool the people into thinking his policies worked. We tried to protect the people, but what we did was prevent them from seeing the consequences of these bad policies. They reached for the stove, and we swatted their hand away. Now they don’t know that the stove is hot and will burn them.

As a religious person, I like to hold up the ideals of the book of Jonah. Jonah is a Jewish prophet that was commanded by God to tell Nineveh, the city of the Neo-Assyrians that persecuted Israel, that they must repent, or the city will be destroyed. Jonah ran away from this calling because he wanted to see the city destroyed. After being thrown into the depths of a fish, he was spewed out and he walked to Nineveh to tell them of God’s words. The city repented, Jonah sat outside pouting, and God chastised Jonah for rooting for the destruction of Nineveh. This story teaches us that we do not root for the destruction of others, as God so aptly puts in Jonah 4:10-11:

“You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well!

What happens when God’s words do not work on Nineveh? What happens when the city continues down its path? We cannot hold up the book of Jonah without also holding up the lessons of the rest of the Bible.

Throughout the Bible we have a consistent cycle of sin-punishment-repentance-redemption. This cycle is particularly emphasized in the Historical books of Joshua, Judges, I-II Samuel, and I-II Kings, which begins with the Israelites being led by God into the land of Israel, only to then be destroyed by the Amorites. God responds to Joshua in Joshua 7:10-13a as follows:

Arise! Why do you lie prostrate? Israel has sinned! They have broken the covenant by which I bound them. They have taken of the proscribed and put it in their vessels; they have stolen; they have broken faith! Therefore, the Israelites will not be able to hold their ground against their enemies; they will have to turn tail before their enemies, for they have become proscribed. I will not be with you anymore unless you root out from among you what is proscribed. Go and purify the people. Order them: Purify yourselves for tomorrow.

While the Bible uses frightening language to powerfully evoke a sense of right action in its readers, the spiritual significance of this text shows that God holds us to account by letting us experience the consequences of our actions. God’s people forfeited their faith in idolizing and electing Trump, much like the Israelites who often broke their faith by bringing Idols into their communities (e.g., Golden Calf) and sinning. America’s sin is not in rejecting God at the structural level, but in being complicit to immorality and idolizing flawed humans.

Fortunately, there is always a path forward toward forgiveness and redemption; God does not let us dwell in our consequences without also leading us toward a path of renewal (Deut. 5:9-10):

visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.

In I Samuel 8:10-22, God warns the people, through Samuel, of the dangers of wanting Kings:

Samuel reported all GOD’s words to the people, who were asking him for a king. He said, “This will be the practice of the king who will rule over you: He will take your sons and appoint them as his charioteers and riders, and they will serve as outrunners for his chariots. He will appoint them as his chiefs of thousands and of fifties; or they will have to plow his fields, reap his harvest, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his courtiers. He will take a tenth part of your grain and vintage and give it to his eunuchs and courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, your choice young men, and your donkeys, and put them to work for him. He will take a tenth part of your flocks, and you shall become his slaves. The day will come when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and GOD will not answer you on that day.”

This passage is the most applicable to our own times. God’s people wanted a King, God warns them of Kings, yet the people do not heed God’s warning. God’s response here is important: instead of preventing Kings from rising, he lets his people appoint them. These Kings go on to sin and abuse the people through the rest of I-II Samuel, and I-II Kings. God sends the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and Hosea, and many more, to warn the people of the path that they are falling into, and of their potential for redemption, but they do not listen. This ultimately leads to Israel’s rock bottom: the Babylonian exile.

After the Babylonian exile, Israel is reinvigorated, renewed, and redeemed. The religion changes through embracing the rock bottom as a necessary experience moving them toward redemption. Educational institutions are built, Jews become acquainted with Torah, they study and write commentaries like the Talmud and Midrashim, they refocus on helping others, and they redefine the story of repentance and redemption (Ezekiel 18:20-23):

Only the person who sins shall die. A child shall not share the burden of a parent’s guilt, nor shall a parent share the burden of a child’s guilt; The righteousness of the righteous shall be accounted to them alone, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be accounted to them alone.

It is clear more than ever that the consequences of electing Trump and all of the people surrounding him, including Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Steve Bannon, and many others, will be upon us soon. Don’t think for a second that the people who elected Trump are not going to undergo consequences like the rest of us. We all will endure a decimated economy of tariffs, the suffering of farmers and the poor, the outpour of pleadings from those being deported, and the democratic backsliding that will remove many of the foundations of our republic, leading to Kings and Oligarchs that do not represent the people of the US. Like Jonah, Trump apologists rooted for the destruction of half of the US by electing a fascist, and they will bear the consequences for this sin.

But they ultimately have a chance to repent. God does not leave us hanging. In the meantime, we must all do our part in rejecting and speaking out against the harms of the world. A period of renewal is waiting for us on the other side of rock bottom, and this period of suffering will redefine what it means to be an American, and what it means to be a follower of God.