In a WorldNetDaily column today, the site’s editor Joseph Farah adds his voice to the popular right-wing field of using the Bible to justify harsh anti-immigrant laws.
Criticizing Christian immigrants’ rights supporters for “seizing on one or two out-of-context verses in the Bible” to support their positions (something that Farah would never do!), he contends that the Bible actually supports deporting all undocumented immigrants because God wanted to prevent “global government” and that’s what immigration reform supporters want.
It’s always good when people consider the moral implications of public policy. So the Bible is a good place to start exploring the right and wrong of immigration laws. But seizing on one or two out-of-context verses in the Bible does not make for the kind of comprehensive moral case you would expect of those urging “comprehensive immigration reform.”
The Bible actually has a lot of say about national borders, foreigners, citizenship and the law.
For starters, I challenge anyone to check an exhaustive online or offline concordance for the word “border” or “borders” to get an appreciation of how many times God’s Word references these terms. While not all of them are relevant to our discussion, I count 169 references, most of them making the point that God really cares about them. Is that surprising? He cares about boundaries between nations. In fact, it is God Himself who invented nation-states back in Genesis 11.
Why did He do it?
It seems He scattered the world’s population and created the diverse languages in an effort to subvert man’s efforts to unite in a global kingdom under a false universal religion. Keep in mind, this took place before God created the nation of Israel.
Interestingly, one of the prime motivations of those behind the promotion of borderless societies is this very same notion of regional government and global government and the breakdown of nationalism.
What was wrong at the time of the Tower of Babel remains wrong today. That should be clear to anyone and everyone whose standard of morality is the Bible.
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If we want to be compassionate to the strangers and aliens of our world today, those law-abiding foreigners who desperately want to come to America and are patiently awaiting their turn, we need to be certain they don’t get squeezed out unfairly by those who break the law and push ahead of them in line. And we should expect them to fully assimilate into our national culture.
We shouldn’t be mean to those lawbreakers, either. We shouldn’t mistreat them. We should even forgive them. But they have to leave.
They haven’t been invited. They are not our guests. They are not just strangers; they are trespassers. They are victimizing others through their presence – namely American citizens and foreigners who are trying to immigrate to the U.S. legally. They need to go back home and get in line like others waiting to enter our country lawfully. They need to follow the rules.
