The Purge: Election Year—Spoiler Alert: you would be an idiot to pay hard-earned pesos for this movie.
(But if you already made that mistake, there is no condemnation for you in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1 
)
So, what links this movie with hypocrisy, much less the nature of God?
First, let’s briefly recap this illustrative film, whether you’ve seen it or not.
From Wikipedia:
From The Catholic News Service:
In the film, the “purging” is decried as ‘only serving to eliminate the lower classes of society.’ So, this very violent film hypocritically feigns an anti-violence message—which eerily puts me in mind of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
At the DNC, “heroic” Planned Parenthood was lauded by its (supposedly pro-minority) supporters. But how can all the Democratic blacks and Hispanics not realize that the founder of Planned Parenthood, a eugenicist, had wanted them purged from the population because of their perceived inferiority? (Similarly, how can gay and Jewish Democrats naïvely oppose restrictions on immigration for Shariah Law supporters—when those immigrants might later want them purged, too?)
As I contemptuously watched the (to my mind) parade of profligates at the DNC, I was convicted by the Holy Spirit that these people were not my enemies, because the real struggle is “not against flesh and blood.” He reminded me that God loves these lost sheep as much as He loves me, as much as He loves Jesus—who died for all. God IS love, and so He has only one response for everyone.
My judgmental feelings were incongruent with my present doctrine. But, after all, I have only recently escaped a conventional belief system that attempts to juggle conflicting ideas, including
- that pro-abortion sinners deserve a never-ending torture chamber hell (unless they repent and promise to be good), while also insisting that,
- aborted children go straight to heaven, and yet,
- maintaining that the vast majority of people who do manage to be born and grow up…will end up in that never-ending hell, and, in my case,
- secretly concluding that it would have been better for those folks in hell if they had never been born in the first place—or had been aborted—
- all while resolutely attempting to defend the goodness of God!
Kind of an untenable position. Definitely hypocritical. So there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around: Democrat, Republican, and Christian.
(Or perhaps “hypocritical” and “naive” aren’t the right labels I’m looking for in this discussion. I think “deceived” would probably be more à propos, don’t you?)
I recognize now that, unlike the rest of us, God is not a hypocrite: there is no infinite punishment for finite offenses.
I grasp now that GOD is only—exclusively—about LIFE, whereas it is the devil who is about death:
and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. Hebrews 2:14-15.*
And I see now that the Bible is only part of a progressive revelation of the goodness of God, who is a person, Jesus,“The Word of God” (Jn. 1:1; Rev. 19:13). Scripture is divinely inspired, of course, but it is filtered through human mediators.
But purging can be good—when it’s God doing the purging. (God is a consuming fire—of LOVE. Hebrews 12:29; 1 John 4:8, 16.)
I conclude here by asserting again that* “effective spiritual warfare must begin with purging from our understanding of God all that is angry, violent, unloving, or legalistic; in short, we must purge Satan out of our view of God.”*
Blessings.
References:
-The Truth About Margaret Sanger at BlackGenocide.org.
-Is God Violent, Or Nonviolent? at The Evangelical Universalist.
-Fighting For God’s Nonviolence at The Evangelical Universalist.
Or as I like to phrase it: Which candidate is the “least bad” 
