Seeing Trump’s failed assassination as a sign of God’s favor is a very biblical mistake

In the wake of the attempted assassination at this Saturday’s rally, former president Donald Trump said he survived thanks to God. Or, at least he said that’s what other people are saying about the bullet that grazed his ear.

“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump said . “By luck or by God — many people are saying it’s by God — I’m still here.”

Trump’s followers immediately leapt into action to portray the incident as an act of God : ministers, congresspeople and pundits have said he wears the armor of God, is blessed by God, is God’s chosen leader, is like Lazarus rising from the dead.

This is not exactly new; Christians have been comparing Trump to biblical figures for years. Cyrus — a non-Jewish Persian king who nevertheless was guided by God to return the Jews back to Israel — has long been the go-to for Evangelicals, who use the comparison to show that, though Trump is not a picture-perfect Christian, he is still anointed by God. And plenty of other biblical figures, such as King David, have been mined over the years for Trump comparisons. One meme video that made the rounds a few months ago proclaimed that “God made Trump” to be the caretaker of the earth; others implied he is a prophet.

This kind of rhetoric has only picked up steam since the shooting. But while it is undeniably sort of incredible that a bullet could get close enough to Trump to injure him yet leave him basically untouched, it says little about God’s intentions which are, at least in the bible, extremely murky and often counterintuitive.

Why, for example, would God’s extensive punishment of Job be a sign of favor? Sure, reading the book of Job, we can see God’s entire conversation with Satan in which they basically make a bet that Job will love God even if he is punished for no reason. But if you were Job’s neighbor, you would probably not see losing his children and home and erupting in painful boils as a sign of blessing — in fact, his three friends in the biblical text accuse him of sinning because a just God would not punish an innocent man.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of instances of evil characters in the bible who survive and thrive — at least for a while. Ahab, perhaps the most famously evil of the Israelite kings, thanks to his love of idols, also won a bunch of wars. One might think he was blessed except for the fact that, when he did finally die, the bible says his body was licked by dogs and pigs to show God’s disfavor.

Or take Jacob, who becomes the father of the Jewish people; he is often held up as an ultimate example of God’s favor. But he’s also a trickster who scams his blind father, Isaac, into giving him his twin brother’s inheritance, which sure doesn’t look like the behavior of God’s chosen one. But apparently it is, since the bible tells us so.

The bible generally tells the reader which figure God favors. But in real life, we don’t have a handy-dandy omniscient voice letting us know who is godly and who isn’t. And the signs of God’s favor or disfavor often bear little connection to what everyday people might view as blessings, or the behavior of a righteous person.

Instead, we have to interpret the biblical text if we want to apply it to our everyday lives. And once you bring interpretation into the mix, basically everything goes. You could just as easily compare Trump to Ahab, the evil but very wealthy king who is more interested in wealth and power than in God, as you could to Cyrus. It depends whether you started your interpretation from a point of liking Trump or from a place of wanting to condemn him; either way, you can interpret a select piece of the biblical text to support your preferred view.

There’s nothing wrong with looking to the bible for wisdom; perhaps one of the reasons it has survived so long, and inspired so much interpretation, is because there are lasting lessons about human nature embedded into its stories. But its precise lessons are no more obvious than God’s will.

And if there’s one thing biblical stories and their centuries of interpretation have to tell us, it’s that God doesn’t like anyone to assume they know God’s desires. Remember Job’s friends who said he must have sinned to be so cursed? At the end of the story, they have to make a sacrifice to apologize for their presumption. And they got off easy — Korach, a false prophet, was swallowed whole by the earth after misinterpreting God’s desires. The most human mistake, in the bible, is thinking we know God’s will.