Well, the Democratic District Attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, has convinced a majority of the grand jury pool he convened to bring an indictment of Donald Trump. Tomorrow Mr. Trump will be arraigned, with a spectacle that will take us to a new low in politics. You don’t need BATG to do analysis on this; it’s been discussed for weeks very ably in press reports. It’s true we don’t know what will be in the indictment, but does that mean we don’t know anything? In a nice post over at National Review this morning, Dan Mclaughlin notes the irony of the NYT rebuking Republicans for speaking out against the indictment when they haven’t read it, even while the NYT helped create the broad understanding of what is in the indictment in their numerous articles with inside sources. But the sheer fact that a presidential candidate and former President is indicted by a local DA has opened Pandora’s box. Everyone agrees that no one is above the law– even former presidents–but especially given the history and current division in the country, no indictment should have been issued without an extremely strong case of serious wrongdoing. Yet all published reports that I’ve seen suggest this is an extremely weak case that has little chance of standing up in court. Yet it’s true: we don’t know what’s in the indictment.

But let’s just believe that it might have something to do with a payout to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence for an alleged affair. Conservatives will argue that this should not have been charged, and that the case has now turned us into a banana republic. They’ll call the Democrats hypocrites after their unwillingness to convict Bill Clinton for perjuring himself under oath (and they’ll be right). Even Democrats will have some concerns–especially if the press reports of today as to the nature of the indictment turn out accurate. Yet I think we need to take a step back and think about this from an eternal perspective. The only reason Mr. Bragg apparently is able to charge Mr. Trump is because he violated his sacred pledge of fidelity to his wife. Indictment by a local DA has no comparison to what Donald Trump will face when he is before a Holy God if he has not repented of his sins. So that should be our hope–God has a history of taking evils of this world and turning them into good, and taking our hard circumstances into a deeper level of dependence upon Him. And even if conservatives worst suspicions are true–that a Soros-backed DA is indicting Trump to either take him down or make him the nominee they believe is their best hope for a Biden repeat, and that the non-stop coverage of this will drown out any press discussion of Biden’s manifest failures–our biggest hope is that Donald Trump will feel conviction for his sin and repent. Maybe he has privately to God and his wife–I certainly hope so. Yet given his public stature I think it is appropriate for some sort of remorse to be public as well. In God’s wonderful sovereignty, He often will allow hidden sins to come to light, to reveal our need to repent and turn to him. God cares much more about our eternal destiny than what we are concerned about here temporally. What if instead of inciting his supporters to protest, Mr. Trump expressed open remorse and repentance? What if his public pronouncements sounded a bit more like Psalm 51? Could that happen? We can certainly pray to that end.