How important is this election?

It’s been a pretty unsettling week for conservatives.

First, the Israeli election left Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents struggling to form a majority with the result still in the balance as I write. In the United States, Republicans have suffered a crushing midterm defeat, losing control of both houses of Congress. And here in New Zealand, we’re heading into Saturday’s election facing the very real possibility of a Labour-led coalition of the most left wing parties in our nation’s history being able to form a government..

I can’t recall another New Zealand election in my lifetime that’s generated quite so much apprehension and fear among conservatives. And I understand why.

There’s genuine concern about what this particular collection of left-wing parties might mean for our nation. The end of freedom of speech, a nation divided on race, economic ‘redistribution’ on an unimaginable scale, and the enforcement of extreme ideological beliefs through legislation.

But are our fears valid?

I’ve followed politics for most of my life, and I’ve lost count of the elections where I was convinced that a particular outcome would be disastrous. Yet looking back, most of those disasters never happened.

Take Helen Clark’s Labour government between 1999 and 2008. I opposed much of what Clark and Michael Cullen stood for, and certainly some of their policies contributed to changes which damaged New Zealand. But the country didn’t collapse under their leadership. We remained relatively prosperous, government debt fell significantly, and our democracy continued to function.

Indeed, I’ve suggested recently that the 18 years between 1999 and 2017, spanning nine years of Labour and nine years of National, may eventually be regarded as something of an economic golden era for modern New Zealand.

So why should this election be regarded differently?

The answer lies in the extraordinary changes we’ve witnessed since 2017. The Ardern-Hipkins government between 2017 and 2023 accelerated a decades-long erosion of traditional values through sweeping social and ideological reforms, an increasingly authoritarian approach to government and a determination to reshape New Zealand society.

And now we face the prospect of four left-wing parties telling us that even those changes haven’t gone far enough. That’s what makes this election different. We’re already well down the road towards a fundamentally different society, and the parties seeking power on Saturday are proposing to take us considerably further.

We’re not unique in this, of course. Over the past 50 or 60 years, Western civilisation as a whole has progressively abandoned the Christian values that underpinned it for centuries. And while the left has generally led that process, the right has also contributed to it. John Keys government may have managed the economy well – but they presided over policies and initiatives which contributed to our moral decline – a trend which has continued under Luxon as National abandons the very values upon which it was founded.

Nor does the growing success of conservative movements in Hungary, Italy, Argentina and elsewhere necessarily represent a moral revival. A political right divorced from Christianity can become every bit as authoritarian and intolerant as the left, particularly when it replaces compassion, humility and love with nationalism and the exercise of power.

So the great struggle taking place across Western civilisation isn’t between left and right. It’s between a society that once recognised God’s authority and one that increasingly believes it has no need of Him.

Christianity shaped our understanding of human dignity, personal responsibility, justice, family and the sanctity of life. Those values helped create the extraordinary prosperity and freedoms that Western nations have enjoyed. As we’ve abandoned them, we’ve increasingly replaced enduring moral standards with personal preference, group identity and state authority.

In fact, there’s a very simple test which allows us to recognise where a nation sits in respect of acknowledgement of God: Its attitude to Israel and the Jewish people.

As I recently wrote in an article about the demise of the British Empire (https://tinyurl.com/befeymh4),, the attitude a nation adopts towards Israel and the Jewish people has profound consequences for its future

History provides some remarkable examples of this. Nations that have supported and protected the Jewish people have generally prospered, enjoyed political stability and developed strong economies, often out of proportion to their size and resources. Those that have persecuted, undermined or sought to destroy them have ultimately suffered consequences of their own.

The collapse of the British Empire, following Britain’s betrayal of its commitments to the Jewish people in the years preceding Israel’s restoration in 1948, is a particularly striking example. And there are plenty of others.

The reason is found in a promise God made to Abraham thousands of years ago, recorded in Genesis 12:3: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”

It’s a promise that has never been withdrawn, and one that should concern any nation increasingly aligning itself against Israel. That includes New Zealand, where the parties of the left are universally antisemitic – and in the United States, where antisemitism and hostility towards Israel have gained an increasingly prominent foothold within the Democratic Party.

And this is where the current political upheaval takes on a much greater significance. As much as I love politics, my understanding of world events is ultimately shaped by my Christian faith. And the extraordinary thing is that the direction in which our world is travelling was foretold in Scripture thousands of years ago.

The progressive abandonment of God, the growing hostility towards Israel and the eventual destruction of the established world order are all part of that prophetic picture.

But there’s a significant problem with what most Christians have been taught to expect. For decades, popular premillennial teaching has promoted the idea of a coming Antichrist, a mark that Christians will be required to receive, and a three-and-a-half or seven-year tribulation ‘preceding’ the return of Christ.

Those expectations are all based on serious misunderstandings of the original Scriptures. As I demonstrate in Prophecy Shock, the time-defined prophecies of Daniel and Revelation have already been fulfilled. There is no future prophetic countdown, no coming individual Antichrist and no seven-year tribulation awaiting the Church.

What remains will come suddenly, catastrophically, without advance warning, and as a direct consequence of our own actions as nations and individuals.

At some point, whether this year, next year, or ten years from now, Western civilisation, or a substantial part of it, will suffer a destruction so complete that the great powers we currently depend upon will disappear from the world stage.

What remains will be a concentration of power in the Middle East, where Israel will find itself isolated and confronting the gathered might of hostile Islamic nations.

And here’s the extraordinary irony.

The tiny Jewish nation that much of the world has spent decades condemning and undermining will still be standing when the great Western powers have fallen.

But it will face a battle that, by every conventional measure, it cannot possibly win.

And it’s at that moment that an extraordinary act of biblical prophecy will unfold.

Israel will appear to be standing entirely alone, but it will have an ally that its enemies have failed to take into account.

The God who created the universe.

Which brings me back to Saturday’s election.

I care enormously about the result, and I’ll be deeply concerned if New Zealand elects a government that takes us further down a path of moral and economic decline. But there may be many more elections, changes of government and even periods of renewed prosperity before these events reach their conclusion.

And – either way – the outcome of these elections cannot change what’s coming.

Ultimately, the answer to the dangers ahead isn’t found in electing the right government. It’s found in something infinitely more important: Turning our lives over to Jesus Christ.