OPINION: 'Biblical' candidates don't exist on earth

It's Wednesday morning, about 5:30, on the day after Election Day.

My phone has alerted me a couple of times with push notices from New York Times and Associated Press that Donald Trump is projected to be the next President of the United States.

When I check Facebook to grab photos to use in this week's edition of The Post, before I type in the search bar, I see some of my friends who have either been up all night watching returns or waking up early reacting to the news.

Some are happy. Some are frustrated.

And if Vice-President Kamala Harris had won, the roles would've been reverse, but the reaction would've been the same.

Some would've been happy. Some would've been frustrated.

I'm sure I'll see posts in the coming days with the hashtag #NotMyPresident or a new version of that since it was used in 2016 when Trump was first elected and some who didn't vote for President Joe Biden did the same thing in 2020.

But this is how elections go. Sometimes your candidate wins. Sometimes he doesn't.

In my own place where I live, the one I voted for Mayor didn't win, and out of three candidates for Alderman, I wasn't happy with one of the two who won.

But I'm going to hope and pray my Mayor makes the correct choices in what's best for my town. The same for the Board of Aldermen.

And as long as he doesn't make any outrageous moves in the town, I'll support him.

Because that's how our Democratic Republic was designed to work.

Candidates made their case to the voters, we voted, someone would win and everyone would hopefully support him or her.

I've listened to enough arguments from my Democratic friends why they're not happy with a Trump presidency, and they make a lot of sense.

Honestly, some of my friends who are good church-attending Christians have frustrated me in the last few days when they've used their Facebook page to encourage their friends to vote for the "Biblical" candidate for President.

That made me think for a couple days what would the definition of a "Biblical" candidate be. Then I thought about times in the Bible where a vote was taken in the form of a Democratic Republic vote.

I could only think of one definite and one similar. The similar one was in the Old Testament when the Israelites told the prophet Samuel they wanted to be like the other nations around them and have a human king.

That didn't go so well because the first king wound up disobeying God and having a seance to bring Samuel's spirit from the dead for advice because God had abandoned him. The second king had one of his top military leaders killed after the king got his wife pregnant, so that was a national security threat. The third king, though he was apparently wise, made some foolish decisions at times, including having hundreds of wives and hundreds more concubines. Then it went downhill from there.

The second public vote that I could think of happened in the New Testament when an almost unanimous chant broke out during an official governmental proceeding: "Crucify Him!"

The fact that both of those examples of the democratic process had negative consequences that could've been avoided had overwhelming human preferences not taken over shows that maybe there's no such thing as a Biblical candidate, unless we were to become a theocracy.

And as much as I'd personally like that idea, assuming we as a nation made the law that all 330 million of us would try to follow Jesus Christ, that goes against our Constitution in its current form.

So for the next election, people, support your candidate, let us know why you're voting for him or her, but let's try to leave "Biblical" out of it since there's no such person on earth.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Reach him through e-mail at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X.com @JSEditorBrandon. Follow him on Instagram @EditorBrandon.