Quote Source – Dustin Arand
Every election season, the pressure builds to declare your tribe. Are you right or left? Conservative or progressive? Dustin Arand’s quote cuts through that pressure with a different set of coordinates entirely. The real question isn’t which side of the horizontal line you stand on. It’s whether you’re oriented vertically at all.
That distinction sounds simple, but it reorders everything. A horizontal orientation measures you against other people: policies won, elections lost, which party controls which chamber. A vertical orientation measures you against God. Scripture keeps pulling believers toward the second axis, even while we live out our days entangled in the first.
The Vertical Comes Before the Horizontal
Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, and He didn’t hedge. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Then He added a second: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Notice the order. Love of neighbor – the horizontal – grows out of love for God – the vertical. Reverse that sequence and something breaks. A horizontal ethic cut loose from the vertical becomes just another political program dressed in religious language.
Why Left and Right Both Fall Short
Conservatives aren’t righteous by default, and progressives aren’t compassionate by default. Both camps are made of sinners borrowing God’s categories – justice, mercy, order, freedom – and bending them toward partisan ends. Put your ultimate trust in either one and you’ve traded the vertical for the horizontal, God for government. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3).
Seeking What Is Above
Paul gives the positive version of the same instruction to the church at Colossae:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. [Colossians 3:1-2]
Paul isn’t telling believers to check out of earthly life. He’s telling them where to anchor their minds first. The vertical relationship doesn’t erase the horizontal one – it governs it. Once your mind is set above, your politics, your friendships, your work all get reordered under an authority no platform or party can claim.
Eternity Puts the Argument in Proportion
Arand’s closing move – that left and right are inconsequential next to eternity – isn’t a call to apathy. It’s a call to proportion. Policies matter, and elections carry real consequences for real people. But none of it weighs as much as the question every person eventually answers alone: where will you spend forever? Next to that question, our newsfeeds shrink down to their actual size.
This is what a Biblical Christian worldview offers that neither side of the aisle can – a fixed point outside the argument. When your identity rests in Christ rather than in a coalition, you’re free to weigh every policy and every candidate against a standard that doesn’t shift with the polls. You can hold convictions without needing a tribe to validate them, because the vertical relationship was settled before the horizontal ones started.
Forget right versus left for a minute. Look up first. The horizontal will fall into its proper, smaller size once you do.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: In a season when politics feels like the whole story, this quote resets our gaze to the one relationship that actually determines eternity.