Will God determine who wins the Australian Election?

In Australia at the moment we are preparing to elect a new Government. The two main political parties here are called Labour and Liberal. The Labour party essentially supports the workers and the Liberal Party the middle and upper classes – to put it very simplistically. However, society has changed so much that there is very little difference between these two political parties. Whichever one of them wins office will govern pretty much the same as the other one would have. This similarity poses the problem of the basis on which to decide which of these similar parties to vote for.

The two basic differences to surface are gender and personal belief. The leader of the Labour party, and our first female Prime Minister (President) is female. The leader of the opposition is male. The female does not believe in God or go to church; the male trained for the priesthood when he was young. We could add a third issue, the female Prime Minister lives in a de facto relationship and sees no need to get married, the male is a family man, married with children.

It occurred to me the issue of belief could be pivotal in deciding who will lead our country. Would this mean that all religious people regardless of their particular beliefs would vote for the man who did not complete his training for the Catholic Priesthood? Would this be a coming together of religious ideas and ideals? From my perspective this would be a positive thing. This is what esoteric Christianity is all about. The Christ from which the word Christianity stems becomes the Christ for all people regardless of any specific beliefs.

In his lecture series on the Gospel of St Luke in 1909 Rudolf Steiner speaks about this issue in a compelling way.
“It may happen that the representative of some religious body comes to a lecture on spiritual science … what I am saying is quite understandable and is not meant as censure. He listens to a lecture let us say on the nature of Christianity, and says afterwards: ‘It all sounds very beautiful and fundamentally speaking is not at variance with what we ourselves preach. But we put it in a way that is intelligible to everyone, whereas only a few individuals can understand what is being said here.’ This statement is frequently made. But whoever says or believes that his is the only right way of presenting Christianity overlooks one essential, namely that he must judge according to facts, not according to his personal inclinations. I once had occasion to reply: ‘No doubt you believe that you are presenting the truths of Christianity in a form suitable for everyone. But beliefs prove nothing; only facts decide. Does everybody go to your Church? Thus facts prove the contrary. Spiritual Science is not there for people whose spiritual needs you are able to satisfy; it is there for people who demand something else.’ 
We are living in an age when it is becoming impossible for human hearts to accept the Bible as it has been accepted during the last four or five centuries of European civilization. Either mankind will receive spiritual science and through it learn to understand the Bible in a new way, or, as is now happening to many who are unacquainted with Anthroposophy, men will cease to listen to the Bible. In that case they would lose the Bible altogether and with it untold spiritual treasures — actually the greatest and most significant spiritual treasures of our Earth evolution! This must be realized. We are now at the point where a jump is to take place in evolution; the human heart is demanding the spiritual-scientific elucidation of the Bible. Given such elucidation, the Bible will be preserved, to the infinite blessing of mankind; without it the Bible will be lost.” 

An esoteric (beneath the surface) understanding of the Bible is urgently required if we are to make sense of the Bible and of God. Such an understanding looks at the original Greek words (and Hebrew words in the case of the Old Testament) seeking in them the truth that is already lost to many religious leaders and their followers. They all follow God, but it is their own God. Thus translators of the Bible down the ages have used words that agree with their own bias. But at least the original words can still be found, mostly. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a great help in this regard. The other great help is the knowledge of the human being as body, soul and spirit that Rudolf Steiner explained 100 years ago. Now it is up to us to explore these matters so that they become a reality in our own lives. Then we will discover the one God and his diverse work for ourselves.