Meditations on the divine will

As we enter the fullness of the Christmas holiday season, it is perhaps the best time of the year to contemplate the impact of our religious belief on our daily lives. Abraham Lincoln provides us with a template to follow in some thoughts he wrote down on a piece of paper in September 1862. He kept these thoughts hidden in the front drawer of his desk in the White House, never intending for it to become public but to be used for his own ruminations and meditations while the horrible ravages of the Civil War continued all around him.

The basic question he struggled with was on whose side is God with anyway in any confrontation. After all, he reasoned that there were Bible-believing Christians on both sides of the war between the states, and God couldn’t deliver both to victory.

Perhaps, Lincoln surmised, God had bigger and more complex reasons to allow the Civil War to begin and continue for so long.

“The will of God prevails,” he wrote. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war, it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.

“I am almost ready to say that this is probably true — that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

Don’t these ruminations by Abraham Lincoln ring true with us each and every day? We have contests and conflicts in our work life, family life, religious and civic life, and most definitely in our political life. “And yet, it is quite possible God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party” in each situation.

Do we yet know what that purpose is for us individually and for us collectively?

Perhaps this Christmas season and then the upcoming year, 2026, will provide more clarity to that question for each of us individually and to us as a nation, state or local community.

Sadly, Lincoln did not live long enough to see any of God’s purpose beyond the end of the war, which resulted in the Union victory and the United States remaining intact, for which we can be thankful today.

Perhaps there is a combination of surrender and reconstruction each of us can do in our own life and with our family, friends, business associates and local communities in the coming year, as well as with our political enemies and opposition.

Lincoln incorporated a lot of his private thoughts into his sublime Second Inaugural Address in the spring of 1965 when he said: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

None of us are righteous enough to cast judgment on anyone else. But each of us are human enough to realize that what Lincoln said and thought is as true today as it was 160 years ago.

Instead of asking what side God is on, perhaps the more appropriate question for each of us is, “Are we on God’s side on a daily basis?” It is a little disingenuous for us to ask God to pick a side to help any of us win any particular contest or political fight unless we are believers and on His side to start with.

Amazing things can happen if we believe God is still active and alive in our lives and that his purposes may be far different from and far exceed the purposes of any particular political party or any individual’s personal self-interest.

Let 2026 be such a year of revelation.