What Is God Trying to Accomplish Through Impeachment?

History was made this week, beginning with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) rebuking the FBI for providing false and misleading information in applications to wiretap Donald Trump’s campaign—something that resulted in a two-year investigation into possible collusion between President Trump and Russia—and concluding tonight with the U.S. House of Representatives voting to impeach President Trump. Regardless of where one stands on the matter of the FBI making 17 errors in its application for a FISA warrant or the legitimacy of the president’s impeachment, it reveals how deeply divided we are as a nation and how corrupt our leadership has become.

Whether it is the FBI, the House Majority, the former vice president, or the president, our leadership has shown serious lapses of judgment at best, and outright criminal behavior at worst. It feels as though the last several years have been an endless process of chasing corruption at the highest levels of government without dispensing true justice or accomplishing much more than increasing our country’s partisan divide. Now it appears that the House may not even send to the Senate the articles of impeachment that it just passed. Could these ineffectual actions be because we are experiencing a form of divine national judgment? In Job 12:23–25, we read that God judges nations by depriving their leaders of wisdom, causing them to wander in a trackless wasteland, groping in the dark while staggering like a drunken man.

It may be that the seemingly endless Congressional investigations, Inspector General reports, and now a Senate Impeachment trial are symptoms of something far more serious than a corrupt government. They may be symptoms of a nation that has invoked God’s judgment by failing to fulfill its Acts 17 divine mandate of drawing people back to God and by ignoring God’s moral commands. It may be that these impeachment hearings have been intended, in part, to identify not just the president’s wrong-doing, but our wrong-doing as a nation before God.

Before we become overly cynical regarding the drama unfolding in Washington D.C., perhaps we should ask the Lord whether there is a reason for our leadership’s apparent lack of wisdom and failure to provide justice and meaningful solutions to the mistakes uncovered. It could be that we ourselves are the root of the problem—not our government leaders. It may be that God is attempting to grab our attention and alert us to our own failures as citizens of this great country. It may be that before allowing cable news pundits and talk radio hosts to dictate how we react, we should first ask the Lord what He is endeavoring to accomplish through this impeachment saga.