Latest / Relish: a Christian podcast / Does the Bible Support Open Borders? A Christian Look at Immigration

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Does the Bible Support Open Borders? A Christian Look at Immigration · Relish: a Christian podcast

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Relish, pleasing or zestful flavor, a quantity just sufficient to flavor,
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to be pleased or gratified by, enjoy.
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We are hoping that what we bring to your table today might add some spice to your life.
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Welcome back to another episode of Relish. I am Rowan Miller,
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and this is Pastor Don Patterson. Don, how are we doing today?
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Yeah, we're doing good. Doing good, yeah.
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Nice and energized. oh yeah yeah yeah we're nice and energized and refreshed
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by all the activities going on in the world right yeah getting closer to easter
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week by week flowers are starting to sprout maybe hope so yeah i've got a question for you.
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What is the single biggest time waster in your life and what can you do about it?
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Single biggest time waster. I've actually been more aware of this,
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but it is, it's been YouTube for me probably.
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I mean, some of it is for the like watching, re-watching Relish episodes or
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more topics like that, or just watching golf or some comedy thing, whatever.
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But i at least you can choose what i'll waste some time in there yeah at least
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you can choose what you watch and if you're not watching just whatever's on
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the channel right yeah yeah mine is that blasted phone oh yeah just that's what
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i usually watch it on is my phone but,
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but there's so many things on there that right want to get our attention and
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and are striving to get our attention yeah yeah time waster yeah leave that
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booger in the house next time you go outside.
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I'm thankful for my, that my, looking back on it now, I'm thankful that my parents
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withheld social media from me when I was, when I had first gotten a phone.
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Cause wise folks. Yeah. Realize the benefits of not having that.
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I have YouTube, but yeah. It's not like everything else that's on social media.
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So yeah, like Facebook, Facebook. Yeah.
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My destination it's Instagram I don't have Instagram,
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Oh, man. Yeah, bad enough the way it is.
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So Facebook is for old people. I didn't, yeah. Okay.
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All right. Today we're... Anybody feel dated out there? Yeah.
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Yeah, who are we with? Instagram or Facebook? Which one?
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All right. So how should Christians approach the topic of immigration? Oh, wow.
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And that is big, big news, though.
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Well, I've been really silent on this an awful long time because I'm not sure
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anybody's listening to what the Bible says about immigration.
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I know a lot of people want to say, you know, we need to be kind to those.
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And they go out to Old Testament passages that say that we should treat the
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immigrant like we treat ourselves.
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And what I find interesting is they must not be looking at the same Bible I am.
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So when I look at that, it's also taking in consideration the fact that,
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well, now, if you're doing that, then you also need to have the same ability.
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Same regard that the immigrant and the citizen have to toe the same line.
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What's interesting is we often think, oh, there are visitors in our country.
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And so we bring that Semitic welcome of the visitor into the conversation.
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And that's really not, But it's really not the case.
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So we are thinking of immigration as a nation with borders, you know, around the outside.
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And the Old Testament is written with a city-state concept.
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In other words, there were not borders between nations as much as there were walled cities.
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And so if you were an immigrant, if you were a sojourner or alien,
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you could be allowed inside the wall or not.
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So a little more kind of like Europe where they can travel between countries.
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Right. But the cities are still set apart. Cities are still set apart.
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And it would even be tweaked a little higher than that. Because in order to
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get inside the wall, inside safety, you would have to meet the criteria of the
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people inside that city.
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And so when Lot went to Sodom and
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he would have had to, he couldn't really challenge the city because they,
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he was a soldier. He was a foreigner.
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So for him to stand up against the others would not have worked well because
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he needed to reflect the values of that city that were already established.
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And I'm looking for Leviticus 23, Genesis.
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And so you go into that city knowing that you would reflect the values of that city.
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There it is. It's Leviticus 24. So, in other words, they could actually expel
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you from the city if you didn't reflect those values.
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Okay and one of the stories that reflects this is the fact that when you get to leviticus 24,
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verses 10 through 23 uh now a son of a israelite mother and an egyptian father
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which would make him a foreigner went out among the israelites and he broke
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out a fight broke out in camp between him and an israelite the son of the israelite
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woman blasphemed the name of with a curse,
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the name of God, that's capital N,
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so that they brought him to Moses.
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His mother's name was Sibbath Shelometh, the daughter of Debre the Danite.
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They put him in custody until the will of the Lord should be made clear to them.
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And the Lord said to Moses, take the blasphemer outside the camp.
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All those who heard him are to lay hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him.
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And what's being said here is the same rules that applied to everybody within
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the covenant of God applied to the people who were coming with the Jews.
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So in other words, instead of getting a free, okay, this guy just didn't know,
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but he doesn't get a get out of jail free card. Right.
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And I think what's happening with immigration today is we're taking the Old
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Testament passages that say you're supposed to treat the stranger,
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the foreigner one way, and we're reading a 21st century context back into it.
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And we're not realizing that there's a context in which it's written.
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Um,
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if anyone curses God, yeah, it here, the entire assembly must stone him,
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whether alien or native born.
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When he blasphemes the name, he must be put to death.
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Notice that the entire assembly must stone him, whether alien or native born.
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Interesting. Which is a passage I think people are passing over a little too fast.
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So when we read an Old Testament passage that gives welcome to the foreigner or an alien,
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it's with that construct that if you come within the city state,
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then you come and honor the rules of that city, that city state.
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And otherwise you're expelled.
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And we get visions of that with the city-state thing is Boaz.
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Boaz goes to the gate where the elders assemble.
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And that's where he talks about whether Ruth should be his wife or the cousin.
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And so it's a different thing than saying that we've got a border way out in the.
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And how do we then screen that on the other side?
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Oh, does that mean that we're extra mean to everybody who's a foreigner? No.
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But the expectation of the foreigner to carry the values of the state, the city,
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the nation that they're coming into, I think it's expected by any other nation.
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I think there needs to be some expectation of that here.
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The reason being is we don't have an identity other than our corporate identity.
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And our corporate identity has been formed over 250 years and even pre-revolution.
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So then why are we letting people mess that up now?
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I mean, my German ancestors, we don't speak German anymore.
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My Irish ancestors, we don't speak Gaelic anymore.
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It's just not, yeah, it's just not what you do. Right.
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So I think we as Christians should probably, my feeling is, with this nonsense
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going on both sides, Christians should be the ones in the middle making sense of things.
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Because we have the Bible, we have the Word, and it basically is not going to the extremes.
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It's paving a new way. Right. And it's not being listened to right now,
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partly because the people who are thinking in the middle aren't speaking.
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They're silent, you know. It's the extremes on both ends that are getting the
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extra screen time, if you will. Yeah.
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And, oh, it's sort of like where we started.
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These lovely little things are ruling our lives. Yeah. And what we get through media that way. Yeah.
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That's where I'm coming on immigration. I think we've sort of lost sight of all that.
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I mean, anybody who comes within the nation without a legal moving legally is
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breaking the law. Right.
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Well, that's the first thing to deal with.
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And then if we are the community of faith and we have compassion towards these
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people, we should be less changing our government and more saying,
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OK, let's raise the funds to make sure they get naturalized.
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And what I'm not, I'm not hearing that.
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I'm hearing a lot of Christian groups singing hymns and saying the government
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has to change rather than, okay, let's obey the law.
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Let's make sure all the documents are formed and put in place so that this person
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that we care for is naturalized and doesn't, is no longer illegal, but legal. Right.
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And, yeah, there's a lot of sad stories out there right now.
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And it just bothers me that there are not more Christian groups working at solid answers,
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rescues for the people we know are all right and go from there.
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Instead, we'd rather argue about it. Right.
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It's also tough because a lot of politicians are Christians,
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but to like their job is being a politician and to be elected as a politician
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nowadays, you have to be so poor opposite and so split apart from the middle.
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And if you're too close from the middle, then you don't get your nomination.
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So yeah and so part of
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our system is actually polarizing us
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right what's happened in the past is even
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if there were polar opposites of view there was a place congress where the conversation
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could be had in a civil tone and the case could be made for both sides and then
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you could decide what is best for this nation and we're not there anymore.
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There's rhetoric on one side and rhetoric on the other side.
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Nobody's listening in the middle.
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I don't have solid pictures of it, but I'm hearing that, well,
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when one side's talking, the other side is gone, not even in the room at the time.
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And then the other side comes in and make their case and the other side's gone.
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And I thought, wait a minute, what, what has happened to civil discourse where
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we could respect each other's opinion and why they brought it and also say,
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okay, in the middle of this,
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what are the tag points we want to say is important and, and important,
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not only to me because of my constituency, but important moreover to our nation
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and the future and the nation,
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us old farts are going to hand down to the younger ones.
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So we've lost sight. We've lost sight of the vision for which this nation was
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put together to be a Christian nation where solid sanity comes out in the middle.
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And we can not only be a healing for our own people, but a place of healing
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for other peoples. and we can actually speak into conflicts around the world in a positive way.
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And there's no speaking positively to anything these days. I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry. I got on my soapbox. I should not have done it, but...
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Oh, well. We'll let Alex edit it if he wants to. No.
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I just... I'm weeping for our nation and the good people that are part of it. And yeah.
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Right.
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You were looking at me. Is he done yet? Is that topic covered?
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I think I covered it all. I'm willing to cover it right now.
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But you can always ask questions, you know?
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This is a good time you could submit a question if you'd like and say,
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Don, talk more about that.
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Yeah. I think we'll just close that with one more question here.
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What does the Bible say about farming? Does how we farm today reflect what the Bible says?
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Okay it has a lot to say about farming in
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fact many of our illustrations uh about what
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happened in the world was farming related uh and a lot of the parables that
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jesus used has a farming agricultural base to it and part of my concern is will
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the next generation understand because A lot of my generation still were close enough to the farm,
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had grown up on the farm, that they understand those things.
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But I'm not sure. Rural areas are becoming even less populated.
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Right. And people aren't even planting gardens anymore.
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Right. Uh, so then we come to that last part where do our farming practices reflect the Bible?
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Is that sort of where I hit it? And, uh, uh, yes and no.
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Um, I think there's an understanding among people who are farmers that you have
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to give the ground to rest in order for it to build on a molecular level to better produce.
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But what I feel among my farmers that I know is the fact that they can't afford it.
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Almost every economy that's reflected has an agricultural base to it. Right.
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But in very few countries, these.
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Is the farmer rich even though everybody everybody uh needs the farmer to feed themselves,
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in very few countries does a farmer ever get rich and
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we're coming to that same spot in the united states that you cannot let a acre
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of ground go fallow uh without it somehow bringing some income in because every
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acre is needed to keep the bottom line going. Right.
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And so our farmers are at a tremendous, uh.
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The Old Testament talks about leaving ground fallow. And in the seventh year,
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you leave all ground fallow.
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Don't plant any crops. And so in the 50th year, the year of Jubilee,
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there's no crops planted anywhere, period.
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And you basically make your living off of what you stored up in the seven years
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before and what grows up volunteer in the fields.
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And you can harvest that in the year of Jubilee.
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But you don't go out and plant.
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It's like a Sunday, Sabbath day.
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You give it to the ground. I don't know a farmer that can afford to let 80 acres go fallow. Right.
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I mean, I think even the guys who have had grounded CRP have taken it out of
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CRP because that just doesn't make the bottom line.
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And so the push on our farmers today is just amazing.
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I don't think anybody in town realizes that the farmer who's getting ready to
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go to the field and plant actually has, I think I may be wrong, 13, $1,400.
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An acre investment in this part of the year that they will carry until harvest.
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And you think about $1,400, $1,500 an acre for every acre you've got out there,
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they're taking a tremendous risk to feed us.
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I don't see that spoken to in the Bible.
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Uh, Jesus talked about the guy who made, made it so good farming that he had
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to buy it, build a new barn.
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You know, I remember that, but, uh, not, I remember my grandpa thinking about
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that story when he wanted to put up a new shed and he wasn't sure if he wanted
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the new shed or not. Right. Yeah.
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For this very night, your life will be asked of you. Oh, interesting.
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So, uh, the push in agriculture today, uh, uh, is not like anything that would
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have been happening at Jesus' time.
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Yeah. And or before.
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Yeah, or before. Yeah. So it's really hard.
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I really feel for our farmers. Mm-hmm. It's praise the Lord for every one of them.
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Yeah, definitely. Because otherwise we wouldn't have any pickles on our table.
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Are fueling our cars. Just the farms are blessing our nation so much at such a high risk. Yeah. Yeah.
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All righty. Well, thank you, Don, for maybe stepping out on a limb today. I think so, yeah.
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Alex will test this one. Alex will test this episode a little extra.
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Yeah. I don't know what I want. Go for it, Alex.
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Thank you guys for joining us today. Share it with a friend maybe that has been
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talking about this subject.
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But yeah, I hope you guys learned something today. I know I did.
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And thank you again as always, Don.
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Glad to see you guys next time. Lord willing. Thank you for joining us for this podcast.
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Feel free to become part of this ministry by sharing it with others.
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Our goal is to help each other grow deeper in our understanding of who God is
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and is calling to us in our daily lives. Thank you again for joining us and may God bless your day.