Vice President Mike Pence quoted Ecclesiastes 3:3 — “A time to heal” — in his letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Tuesday, subtly reminding her that she had recently used that verse to call for an end to the country’s divisions.
Pence wrote to Pelosi to tell her that he would not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office on the grounds of incapacity to serve.
“Last week I did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond my constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election, and I will not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our Nation,” Pence said.
He added: “The Bible says that ‘for everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven . . . a time to heal, . . . and a time to build up.”
The full verse, familiar from The Byrds’ famous “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, is (Ecclesiastes 3:1-3, King James Version):
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
Pelosi cited the same verse in June, the day after President Donald Trump had walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Episcopal Church and held the Bible up as a symbol of morality, law and order.
As Breitbart News reported at the time:
“Last night when I saw the president holding up the Bible, I was thinking of so many things in the Bible that would have been appropriate in terms of the humanity of all people in our country,” Pelosi said.
“The time for every event under heaven. He talks about a time to heal — talks about embrace and time to shun embracing, how about that. … A time for peace. Let’s focus on the time to heal,” she urged, only quoting part of the scripture.
Pence’s reference to the same verse is also a throwback to Pelosi’s own call for the country to come together.
President-elect Joe Biden also cited the same verse in his victory speech in November: “The Bible tells us to everything, there’s a season, a time to build, a time to reap and a time to sow, and a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.”
Democrats are persisting with a snap impeachment of the president over last Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol,with one week left in Trump’s presidency.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.