Trump Like Samson, God's Chosen Strongman, Awakening Will Come if Christians Support: Lance Wallnau
WASHINGTON — Comparing President Donald Trump to Samson, Noah and Elijah, Lance Wallnau believes a cultural "awakening" is afoot if Christians back Trump and vote Republican in the midterms.
In a presentation Friday afternoon at the Values Voter Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Wallnau, author of God's Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling, urged everyone to back Trump and conservatives at the ballot box in November.
"This president needs to have us now more than ever. If we get behind him we will see an awakening," he said to hundreds of social conservatives gathered, who applauded him enthusiastically.
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Wallnau has famously likened Trump to King Cyrus, the Persian King whom God anointed in Isaiah 45 to bring deliverance to the Israelites who were captive in Babylon, but he also considers him a Samson-like figure.
"This isn't an ordinary period of time," Wallnau told The Christian Post in an interview Friday following his remarks.
"The challenge is that anyone who understands the trajectory of where the United States was going when the last presidential election happened can understand that the SAGE Cons, this mysterious group of spiritually active governmentally engaged conservatives who came out of the woodwork, 88 percent of them moving in unity and alignment behind Trump because of the anxiety and fear — you could say as Noah was moved with fear prepared the ark — that there was a sense of dread over the direction the United States was moving in."
Whether they were enthusiasts for Donald Trump or not, the SAGE Cons — a term coined by researcher George Barna — believed a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been the final nail in the coffin of U.S. decline, he continued. Wallnau believes that the U.S. is now back at that moment of crisis with the upcoming midterm elections. So many Christians drift off, he told CP, and they do not stay engaged because they do not know how to steward history while the left is motivated and mobilized.
"I think America deserves judgement. I can think of nothing more characteristic of the narcissism of our nation than believers themselves offended at the nature of the ark that God designs for a flood," he said, when asked what he makes of Christians who find Trump's Twitter habits and other antics boorish.
"It's as though they are complaining that it doesn't meet their cruise line specification for the kind of Christian character and civility that they long for in political discourse. God sends them an Elijah, who is a coarse, hairy man who evidently that isn't very sociable. The only person he has an ongoing conversation with is his apprentice he gives his mantle to."
The church in the United States needs to toughen up and stop thinking that they are going to have a "Christian champion" who will fight their battles, he went to say, and realize that their absence of engagement on the front lines of major battle zones has cost them so much that God has displayed mercy by "giving us a Samson" in Trump.
"What does he have? A torrid history with Philistine babes and he's piling up people that he's clubbing with the jawbone of an ass. And we're saying 'oh no, this is not what we want, we want a more eloquent deliverer?' I have a problem with the church, frankly, because I see what Trump has done. I see the fruit. So I say, where is the discerning? I don't care about the rough package God delivers the results in, I care about whether or not we can preserve the strength of this guy in his office while he is like Samson, keeping the gates open," Wallnau said.
During his presentation Friday, Wallnau taught and drew on a whiteboard, urging those in attendance to reconsider the old way to doing church. The current approach of growing larger churches is ineffective; he favors a more apostolic model where believers are sent out to be influencers in every realm of culture and transform society from the top-down.
At present, "the church is not motivated to decentralize and diffuse and send its people out. It is motivated to gather people in. And when you add to that the paradigm assumption that the bigger the church, the stronger the church, the more territorial and authoritative the church, the more the city and nation is affected ... but the assumption was wrong, and was never corrected," he told CP.
"Pastors are rewarded for church growth. Therefore, their focus is on gathering and growing like an entrepreneur, not in planting and maturing and taking territory."
"Christians are now the missionaries going into the hostile pagan culture. And from my perspective we have to go around the church to the Body of Christ, not look at the leaders and court them into it."
