I AM grateful to our Editor at TCW for highlighting the ongoing crisis of immigration into the UK, which remains at alarmingly high levels. We continue to be faced with the complete and irreversible transformation of our national character and identity.
As a Christian pastor, it has much disturbed me over the years how the churches have failed to provide vital Biblical insight into this matter. They have generally emulated the doctrines of atheistic cultural Marxism in arguing that large-scale influxes into Britain can only be positive and enhancing. How vital is the need, therefore, for some Bible-based input.
Unapologetically adhering to, and seeking to retain, one’s distinctive national identity is not remotely ‘un-Christian’. For example, after his conversion to Christ, the apostle Paul never lost his profound sense of identity with his own people. He remained a Jew through and through. He declared: ‘I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart . . . for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh’ (Romans 9:1-4).
So Paul poured out his heart to God in concern for his own countrymen. How Britain today needs Christians with a similar Spirit-given burden for their nation and people.
The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, wrote: ‘We feel in ourselves a strong . . . kind of natural affection for our country, which we apprehend Christianity was never designed either to root out or to impair.’ In other words, the Christian faith was never designed to destroy national identity.
John Knox famously prayed: ‘Lord, give me Scotland or I die.’ He was being Biblical. He had a profound concern that his own people might be delivered from spiritual darkness, and in this he was emulating, for example, the prophet Jeremiah in his special burden for the people of Judah.
One of the ways in which the teachings of Scripture have been misapplied in the churches to condone large-scale migration are the references relating to Israel and ‘strangers’ or foreigners. In these it is clearly taught that the strangers must be treated well. For example we read in Jeremiah: ‘Do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place’ (Jeremiah 22:3).
The point of injunctions like these is that the strangers are seen as vulnerable individuals, often being listed alongside the fatherless and widows. Indeed, in no fewer than 18 Old Testament verses the stranger, the fatherless and the widow are referred to in the same breath. Any nation in any age will always find small numbers of foreign people in its midst, and such should be afforded courtesy, respect and equal treatment under the law.
To argue from these ‘stranger’ passages, however, that it is immoral so much as to question the arrival of whole communities of incomers, comprising tens and hundreds of thousands, is a conclusion without any contextual warrant.
Furthermore, one cannot claim from Scripture that a nation’s existence being primarily defined by the particular people historically inhabiting it is intrinsically sinful. If it were so, then the Lord would not have used the distinctive people group which constituted the descendants of Abraham to form the nation of Israel as an aspect of His purposes of redemption for the world.
It is also not legitimate to use ‘Gentile-inclusive’ texts such as Galatians 3:28 to justify the obliteration of national identity. When the apostle Paul says: ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek’, he is stating that men of every nation may be partakers of the covenant of grace, and belong to Christ’s spiritual kingdom, not that nationhood upon earth should be abolished.
There is absolutely no suggestion by Paul in the New Testament that nations should never have existed in the first place, or that with the coming of Christ they have become defunct, or that they are ethically dubious when compared with an open borders/one world togetherness arrangement. This has to be emphasised, because the power of secular, liberal, ‘progressive’ thinking has greatly influenced the mindset of the churches, whereby it is imagined that there is something ‘un-Christian’ about distinctive nationhood and patriotism, as opposed to the intermingling of diverse peoples.
In Numbers 20 and 21 we read of the Israelites travelling from the wilderness to the Promised Land. They needed to pass through the territory belonging to the Edomites and the Amorites, so they asked the kings of these two nations for permission to travel through their lands. Moses, led by the Holy Spirit, told the kings that his people would not stray from the main highway, nor touch any crops, because they did not belong to Israel. Moses even offered to pay for any water that Israel’s cattle consumed in transit. He thus carefully observed the Edomites’ and Amorites’ boundaries as being ordained of God, and worthy of all respect.
For example,when speaking to the king of Edom, Moses, led by the Holy Spirit, uses the expressions ‘thy country’ and ‘thy borders’ (Numbers 20:17). He assures the king that the Israelites will behave with a particular deference until such time as they ‘have passed his borders’.
Applying this principle to our own day, we learn that to control a nation’s borders, and to respect the borders of other nations, is righteous behaviour in the sight of God. This means that illegal entry into this country, such as is happening virtually every day via the English Channel, is sinful and contrary to God’s purposes. It demonstrates a lack of respect for the borders which God has ordained, and Christians should not even begin to condone such premeditated law-breaking.
To conclude, we see the God-ordained nature of nationhood clearly stated in Deuteronomy 32:8, and this has relevance to both legal and illegal immigration: ‘The most High divided to the nations their inheritance . . . He separated the sons of Adam; He set the bounds of the people.’
