Dear friend,
I want to talk to you tonight about the people who oppose everything you believe.
Not to attack them. Not to condemn them. Not to give you more ammunition for the arguments you are already having at family dinners and in comment sections and in the quiet of your own mind when the news gets loud.
I want to tell you something about them that I have observed across fifty years of watching human beings move through the world. Something that Scripture records with a consistency that I find remarkable. Something that the media will never tell you because it requires a framework the media does not have.
And I want to tell you that what I am about to say may surprise you. Because it is not what you might expect from a man who has spent a year writing about the forces working against this country and the people of faith in it.
Before I show you what I mean let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I have written about the opposition to this man many times. Tonight I want to write about the people doing the opposing. Not to celebrate their opposition. To understand it. Because I believe understanding it is more useful than being angry about it. You can find the guide by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me tell you what I have observed.
The first thing Scripture records about the people who oppose what God is doing.
They are afraid.
Not angry at the core. Afraid. The anger is real but it is not the root. The root is fear. The specific, documented, Biblical fear of people who sense that something is happening that they cannot control and cannot stop and cannot explain within the framework they have built their lives around.
In Acts chapter 4 the religious leaders arrested Peter and John and brought them before the Sanhedrin. And Luke records something remarkable about what happened in that room.
Verse 13. When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled ordinary men they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
Astonished. Not contemptuous. Not dismissive. Astonished. The word in the original language carries the sense of being confronted by something you cannot categorize. Something that does not fit the framework you have been using to understand the world.
And then verse 16. What are we going to do with these men? they asked. Everyone living in Jerusalem knows they have performed a notable sign and we cannot deny it.
We cannot deny it.
They could not deny what they were seeing. They simply did not know what to do with it. And people who cannot deny something and cannot categorize it and cannot control it almost always respond the same way.
They try to suppress it.
Not because they are evil at the core. Because they are frightened. The suppression is fear wearing the costume of power.
The second thing Scripture records about them.
They are not at peace.
In Esther chapter 5 Haman left the palace having been honored by the king and having been invited to a private dinner with the king and queen. By every external measure it was the best day of his life.
And then he saw Mordecai at the gate. Mordecai who would not bow. Mordecai who simply existed in his sight line as evidence that not everyone had been brought under his control.
And verse 13 records this. But all this gives me no satisfaction as long as I see that Jew Mordecai sitting at the king's gate.
All of this. The honor. The wealth. The invitation. The position. All of it gave him no satisfaction. Because one man who would not bow was enough to hollow out everything else.
That is not the description of a man who is winning. That is the description of a man who is tormented. Who has organized his entire life around the acquisition of something that keeps failing to produce what he was promised it would produce.
I have watched the people who oppose what you believe for fifty years. And what I have consistently observed — beneath the certainty and the coordination and the aggression — is the specific restlessness of people who are not at peace. Who have more than most people will ever have and cannot rest in it. Who win and feel nothing. Who suppress and are not satisfied. Who silence and still hear the voice they were trying to silence.
In Isaiah chapter 57 verse 20 God described the wicked as being like the tossing sea which cannot rest whose waves cast up mire and mud. There is no peace says my God for the wicked.
Not as a punishment pronounced from outside. As a description of an internal state. The opposition to what is good produces its own torment. And the people who have given their lives to that opposition are living inside that torment whether the cameras show it or not.
The third thing Scripture records about them.
They are being given time. And the time is not unlimited.
In Romans chapter 2 verse 4 Paul wrote this about God's patience with people who oppose Him.
Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness forbearance and patience not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
God's kindness toward the people who oppose Him is not indifference to what they are doing. It is patience. The specific, deliberate, costly patience of a God who has not finished with them yet. Who is giving them time to turn before the time runs out.
I want you to sit with what that means about the people you watch oppose everything you believe.
God is being patient with them. Not because He approves of what they are doing. Because He has not finished with them yet. Because the story of Saul of Tarsus — the most aggressive persecutor of the early Church, the man who held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen, the man who dragged Christians from their homes and threw them into prison — is still in the Book. And that story ends with Saul becoming Paul. With the chief persecutor of the Church becoming its most prolific author.
God was patient with Saul. And the patience produced something that no amount of opposition could have produced.
I am not saying that everyone who opposes what you believe will turn. Scripture does not promise that. But it does record that God's patience toward them is real. And that the patience is an invitation. And that some of the people who are most aggressively opposing what God is doing right now are people that God has not finished with yet.
That is not a comfortable thought. It is a Biblical one.
The fourth thing Scripture records about them.
They will not ultimately succeed.
Not because the good guys always win in the short term. They do not always win in the short term. The short term is full of losses that are real and painful and should not be minimized.
But in the long term Scripture has one consistent record.
In Acts chapter 5 a Pharisee named Gamaliel stood up in the Sanhedrin when the council was debating what to do with the apostles. And he said something that I have returned to more times than I can count.
He said leave these men alone. Let them go. For if their purpose or activity is of human origin it will fail. But if it is from God you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God.
You will only find yourselves fighting against God.
Gamaliel was not a follower of Jesus. He was a respected Pharisee speaking from the wisdom of a man who had watched enough religious movements rise and fall to know the pattern. And the pattern was this.
Human opposition cannot stop what God has decided will happen. It can delay. It can make things harder. It can cost the faithful things that are real and painful and should not be minimized.
But it cannot stop what God has decided will happen.
I believe that with everything in me. Not as a political hope. As a theological conviction grounded in fifty years of reading the only Book that has never once been wrong about the outcome of the conflict between the purposes of God and the purposes of the people opposing Him.
I want to tell you what I think this means for how you live this week.
It means you can stop hating them.
Not because they do not deserve your anger. Some of what they are doing deserves anger. Righteous anger. The kind that produces action rather than bitterness.
But the consuming, exhausting, all-absorbing hatred that the media is designed to produce in you — the kind that makes you lie awake rehearsing arguments and nursing grievances and treating every news cycle as a personal attack on your dignity — that is costing you something you cannot afford to lose.
Your peace.
In Matthew chapter 5 verse 44 Jesus said love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Not because they deserve it. Because you need it. Because the person who spends their life hating their enemies has given their enemies the most important thing they can take — the ability to determine your internal state from a distance.
Pray for them. Not performatively. Specifically. The ones you can name. The ones whose faces appear in your mind when you read the news. Pray for them the way God is being patient with them. Not because you expect to see the results. Because it is the only response to opposition that does not hollow you out from the inside.
I want to close with something that connects to everything I have been writing to you about this year.
The people who oppose the man at the centre of this political moment are not unique in history. They are not uniquely evil or uniquely powerful or uniquely certain of their victory.
They are Haman. They are the Sanhedrin. They are Pharaoh's court. They are every coordinated, certain, escalating, ultimately unsuccessful opposition that Scripture has ever recorded.
And they share something else with all of those Biblical opponents.
They are being watched by the same God who watched all the others. Who was patient with them. Who gave them time. Who recorded every act of opposition in a Book that outlasted every empire that produced it.
I wrote about this pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Not to celebrate the opposition. To understand it. And to show that the God who has always been more patient with His enemies than His enemies deserved is the same God who is watching what is happening right now.
Read it this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I think after tonight it will land differently than it would have before.
Pray for them tonight, friend. Specifically. By name if you can manage it.
Not because they deserve it. Because you were prayed for when you did not deserve it. And because the God who was patient enough to wait for you is patient enough to wait for them.
That is not weakness. That is the most powerful thing you can do with what you are feeling right now.
God bless you. More than I can say tonight.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Acts chapter 5 verses 33 through 39 this week. Gamaliel's speech to the Sanhedrin. Read it slowly. Pay attention to the logic of it. Let the most unlikely voice in the room say the most important thing in the room. Let it settle something in you about the ultimate outcome of what you are watching.
Two. Pick one specific person who has been in your mind as an enemy of the things you believe. Pray for them by name this week. Not for them to lose. For them to find what Saul found on the road to Damascus. Do it once. See what it does to the way you carry them.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
The people opposing this man are in the Book. Their pattern is documented. Their outcome is recorded. Read it and see if you can watch the news differently afterward.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.