Hobby Lobby Defies Obama, Risks Mega-Fine

by Steve Eastman, Faith Issues

The Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain is offering its employees insurance, just not the kind that covers the morning-after pill and related abortion-inducing drugs.  

Hobby Lobby is the classic case of putting your money where your mouth is.  This act of conscience comes with a big price tag — a threatened $1.3 million dollar daily fine.  To put that in perspective, Hobby Lobby’s revenue last year is reported at $2.28 billion dollars.

If the name of the company sounds familiar, it may be because the family behind the enterprise — the Greens —bailed out Oral Roberts University a few years ago when it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.

Now consider this.  Not many CEOs would issue a statement like the one David Green recently did — “It is by God’s grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured.”  

It makes a lot of spiritual sense.  If God’s grace has blessed a company, throwing away inconvenient convictions might cut off that blessing and be a slap in the face of the One Who gave it.  The apostle Peter put it this way in Acts 4:18 (NKJV), “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than God, you judge.”  Peter issued his challenge to the Jewish leaders.  Hobby Lobby is challenging Barack Obama and his obsessive Obamacare.

The company had hoped an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court would stop, or at least delay, the effects of the January 1st required coverage deadline.  But like Pontius Pilate, the justices washed their hands of the matter. The case remains to be settled in a lower court but might eventually find its way back to the Supreme Court.

Now here’s what’s really happening.  The administration is trying to force its religious interpretation upon the whole country — that business is business and church is church and never the twain shall meet.  That flies in the face of the concept of marketplace ministry, whose practitioners believe you don’t have to be a non-profit to represent God in the culture.

If we make our decisions according to whether or not we are persecuted, we will sell out the truth, unless like Hobby Lobby, we’re willing to face the persecution and serve our Lord in the hard times.

© 2012 Faith Issues

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