Robert Jeffress is an evangelical pastor who has been a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump and even said during the election campaign that he would never support a presidential candidate who embodied Jesus’s message, saying ” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.” Now Jeffress claims that his god has given Trump the “authority to take out Kim Jong-Un” and go to war with North Korea.
In his statement, Jeffress said he believed the Bible makes clear that “God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil.” The senior pastor praised Trump for not tolerating North Korea’s threats while panning previous administrations’ “sheepish stance toward dictators and oppressors.”
…In an interview with The Washington Post, Jeffress cited biblical verses from Romans 13, saying it “gives the government to the authority to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment to quell the actions of evildoers like Kim Jong Un.”
These people seem to think that such an action by Trump will either have no cost to the US or if it does lead to mass deaths even here, that this means that Jesus’s second coming is nigh. Win-win!
Jeffress is an ‘advisor’ to Trump and influential in evangelical circles. He also boasts that he has unprecedented access to Trump which makes him more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill evangelical preacher. Note the use of the popular euphemism in mainstream discourse of ‘take out’ because they do not want to utter the more accurate but ugly word ‘murder’. I wish some reporter would feign puzzlement and ask the speaker whether he is suggesting that Trump should go on a date with Kim Jong-Un. That is the only way to stop these pretenses that what they are advocating is not barbaric. Note also the use of the Bible to justify murder and mass deaths.
These people are religious fanatics.
He needs to go back and read his Augustine.
Nice idea, but it would never work: Trump is Gemini and Kim is Capricorn, and according to astrological science:
I bet if Trump and Kim played a few rounds of golf together, they’d be best buds right away. Holy shit, did I just solve that problem, or what?
Jeffress cited biblical verses from Romans 13, saying it “gives the government to the authority to do whatever, whether it’s assassination, capital punishment or evil punishment
Didn’t Hitler claim that too?
I suspect Mr. Jeffress and most other supporters of policies likely to cause war do not live in areas likely to be devastated by said war.
Or as someone pointed out to me he is a raving, nutcase, fundamentalist so he must believe we are in the Endtimes. He may want to help it along? That thought is scary.
From my point of view we’ve been in the Endtimes since roughly 60 CE but I don’t think the fundies see it that way.