AD on FLF Network - Immigration and Al Mohler - VIDEO Version

Hello there, this is AD Robles, and you're listening to AD on the Fight Laugh Feast Network. Alright, alright, well, today, before we get started, I just wanted to say, if you have not yet become a Fight Laugh Feast Club member, please consider doing so.

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Immigration, Deuteronomy, and the General Equity of God’s Law

Today's going to be a bit of a grab bag, but I wanted to start somewhere in Deuteronomy. I've been talking a lot about Deuteronomy lately, I've been thinking a lot about Deuteronomy lately. And I've been pretty open about some of my, how shall I put this, evolution in thought on the topic of immigration.

Now, if you are subscribed to my newsletter, you've seen some articles that I've written, and I've actually even done videos, critiquing my own articles from a number of years ago regarding immigration.

At the time, I was very pro-open borders, and I still sort of am, with some very important qualifications. But one of the arguments that I think evangelicals think is kind of dirty-sounding is the argument about demographics.

Because open immigration, and having a lot of immigrants come in from the nations and stuff like that, will change sort of the political map, essentially. I mean, a lot of the people that we're importing, let's just be honest, are not conservative.

A lot of the people we're importing do not share our traditional Christian values. In fact, many of them are quite progressive, many of them are socialists, many of them are looking to be dependent on the state, at least initially.

And to a lot of conservatives, that's a real problem. Why would you, if you're conservative in the United States, why would you import a ton of people that are against what you stand for? That doesn't make any sense.

And definitely, rationally, that doesn't make any sense. From a logic perspective, if you want to be pragmatic about things, and you truly are conservative, you would not want to make your life a lot more difficult by importing a bunch of socialists.

Obviously, that's an obvious thing. But evangelicals a lot of times feel like that's kind of like a very pragmatic argument, and it kind of feels a little icky to make an argument like that, at least to a lot of people.

It sounds xenophobic and racist and stuff like that. And as you know, I'm immune to those kind of charges. Maybe not immune, but those kind of charges have no effect on me. When you say something's a racist argument, people tweet me all the time, how could you retweet this person?

He's a racist. And honestly, that doesn't have any effect on me. If someone's a racist or not, that really doesn't have any impact on whether or not I retweet them or whether or not I listen to them or whether or not I agree with something they said.

Believe it or not, there are racist people that believe some true things. I mean, I don't know. I guess it seems pretty obvious to me. But anyway, that kind of stuff doesn't really have an impact on me.

But I am sensitive to the claim that that's really a pragmatic thing and not a principled thing. And so I've thought a lot about it, and one of the shifts that I've made over the last couple of years is that I understand that the Bible presents a situation where there's not that many immigration laws, if any.

There's a relatively open immigration policy, according to the Bible, if we're going to apply the general equity of the law. But it's not no-holds-barred. It's not chaos. It's not open immigration and just, you know, throw caution to the wind.

No, no, no. The Bible still has borders. The Bible still has walls that still charges the government, the governing authorities, to execute justice fairly. And you can't really execute justice if you have a completely porous border.

That doesn't make any sense if there's no borders. There has to be borders because you have to know where your jurisdiction is. You have to know where you can execute justice. So it's not chaos. But here's what I think is super important, and let me throw this out there.

Maybe you can think about this and throw me challenges if you want. But the demographic shift thing is actually not necessarily an unbiblical idea here because God's law, if we're applying the general equity, there's not that many immigration laws in the Bible.

But as I said, it doesn't mean chaos because here is something that is important to God. You see, God cares about the foundation, right? God cares about justice. And so you cannot support a bunch of immigrants that come in and actually have a different law that they want to follow, different ethical standards, different morality that they want to push or they want to spread in your country.

That doesn't make any sense. Here's Deuteronomy 13, okay? Here's Deuteronomy 13. He says, if your brother or the son of your mother or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly saying, let us go and serve other gods which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him, but you shall kill him.

Your hand shall be the first against him to put him to death. And afterward, the hand of all the people, you shall stone him to death with stones because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you.

So here's this idea because let's just set the scene here because obviously, like I've said, the Bible doesn't have a lot of immigration laws. If you were a sojourner and you came from a different country or you came from a different place where they worshiped other gods, you were certainly free to come to the land of Israel.

And you could come to the land of Israel, you can do business with the Israelites, you could live there and all that kind of stuff. But, and this is a very important but, you had to submit to the law of Israel.

You had to submit to God's law. That was a very important caveat. Sure, you can come here. But the minute you start, you know, disobeying or not submitting to God's law or, you know, even enticing others to obey the laws of other gods.

See, because that's the thing. When you serve gods, you actually serve that God's law system as well. So the idols of the lands, the pagan idols had their own law. And so that's what this is talking about.

What's of concern here is serving those gods. In other words, doing their law instead of God's law. And so this is an enticement to rebellion. This is an enticement to breaking down the hierarchies, replacing it with something else, something ungodly.

And so God says here, you know, those sojourners, you should treat them with equity. Same law for you, same law for the sojourners, all that kind of stuff. Yes, absolutely, compassion, all that kind of stuff, yes.

But the minute they start to subvert God's law system, right? The minute they start to subvert the law that God gave to us, there's no mercy. There's no mercy. It doesn't matter if you're a relative or just a friend or just a random person.

Your hand shall be the first against him to put him to death. No mercy. That's a pretty important but. That's a pretty important but. And so this idea that we should import immigrants, give them the right to vote and give them all of these things, give them welfare and stuff that we've taken from other citizens and stuff like that, by force, by the way, by force.

That's not how it works. That's not how it works at all. Sure, a sojourner can come here, yeah. But the minute they start to subvert our law system, we are certainly within our rights to say, no, get out.

If in God's time, again, I'm not saying this applies one-to-one directly. I'm not saying that this is something that you just apply to the letter today. I'm not saying that. What we do instead is we find what the general equity of this law in Deuteronomy 13 is.

We find the general equity of the law of Deuteronomy 13 and we apply it today. So here's the thing. If in Israel, they would not tolerate, there was no toleration for someone trying to entice you away from God's law system to another law system.

There was no toleration, no mercy. Then why in the world would we import socialists? Here's something that you need to understand. Socialism is a pagan ideology, a pagan law system. Socialism is pagan.

It's not up for debate. It's not, well, we can agree to disagree. Christians can be socialists too. No, you can't. Christians cannot follow a pagan law system. That shouldn't be controversial, right? That shouldn't be controversial.

And so, yeah, sojourners, fine. If you're escaping tyranny and stuff like that, yeah, sure, you can be here. No problem. But you must submit. You must submit to our law system insofar as it's godly, right?

Insofar as it's godly. You don't get welfare programs from us. You don't get it. Charity, absolutely, you can get charity. Go to the church. Churches will be charitable to you. At least they should. But you don't get to take from our people by force and vote for more taking from our people by force.

You see, here's the reality. The progressives want this because they want to cast off the burden. They see God's law as a burden. They see Western civilization and the attempt. I'm not saying it's perfect.

The attempt to follow God's law. The attempt. They hate that. They want to cast off all of the bonds. They want rebellion. And they've found a really good way to rebel is to import other rebels to join them in their rebellion.

They want to crash the hierarchies, subvert things. If we're applying the general equity of God's law, we don't have to tolerate that. Okay? We don't have to tolerate that plan to subvert things in our country.

We don't have to tolerate the idea that we should topple the hierarchy set up by Western civilization. We don't have to tolerate it. In fact, I think you could apply the general equity of Deuteronomy 13 and say we must not tolerate it.

Reformation, yes, we should continue to reform our society until it more closely matches what God says we should do, more closely matches the general equity of God's law. Yes, reformation, but we do not submit to any kind of idea that says that we should topple this hierarchy.

I think there are multiple commandment violations in play with people who say we should be toppling all the hierarchies, multiple. Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. Listen, one of the things I'm trying to do in 2020 is to provide a lot of my friends and evangelicals and listeners that believe these things already.

I'm trying to provide you a little bit of cover because you know what? Reasonable people believe that we should not tolerate this demographic shift in the United States, and I'm not talking about skin color and race.

What I'm talking about is ideologies, the way you think, who you serve, the gods you serve. There is no toleration in the Bible for alternative cultures. That's not what God says. That's not what God says.

If people come here and they have a different idea of ethics, a different idea of morality, a different idea of culture besides God's culture, they have a different plan. We're commanded not to tolerate that, and that's that.

Reasonable people can believe that. There's nothing dirty about that, nothing. And so sure, sojourners, absolutely, but you don't get to change our systems. You don't get to change our institutions insofar as they match the general equity of God's law.

Anyway, I talked about that a little bit longer than I wanted to, but I think it's important, and hopefully I'll talk more about that in the future. Let's take a little trip through my timeline here. Let's take a little trip through my timeline.

Critical Race Theory, Resolution 9, and Al Mohler’s Posturing

Now, one of the most interesting things that's been happening in the last couple of weeks is that we've seen a lot of people seemingly come out strong against critical race theory, which is very interesting, which is very interesting.

I'm going to give the credit to this in many ways, to Tom Askell and Founders Ministry. They are forcing this conversation to happen, forcing it. The powers that be would just as soon not want to have this conversation happen, but Founders Ministry is pushing the issue, and they are forced to respond to this now.

And what you're going to find is we've got Al Mohler here sharing something about Resolution 9, which claims to say that critical race theory is not, we're not pushing it. We understand it comes from bad places and stuff like that and all this kind of stuff.

And you're like, well, what's going on here? Are we winning? Are we winning the battle? Well, I'll say this, we got them on the ropes. We are starting to win this battle. But this kind of stuff retweeted by Al Mohler, this is not Al Mohler changing his mind.

This is not the resolutions committee changing their mind about critical race theory. This is them trying to distract. This is them trying to distract. Now I'm going to go into this in a video in a little bit more depth, but here's Al Mohler.

Southern Baptists are up to the challenge of talking to one another about difficult questions. I appreciate the Baptist Press and members of the 2019 resolutions committee talking here about Resolution 9.

This is the right tone. I'm sure it is released in good faith. Now, what's interesting about this is this article, which I'm going to go over it a little bit more depth later. It talks about, you know, well, we agree.

We're concerned about the origins of critical theory and stuff like that. It's just an analytical tool that people use and stuff like that. And the reality is that that's obvious. You know, obviously that's true.

But they still wanted to push this idea that critical race theory can be legitimately used. Because here's the thing. This is Chocolate Knox's response. And this is a very important response because Chocolate Knox was on the ground.

He saw this stuff happen. He says, what's funny about this comment is that it was Al Mohler in the wings talking to Tom Askell and helping craft the friendly amendment because he thought the resolution was a mistake and insufficient.

Didn't he even do a podcast speaking against the passing of Resolution 9 the next day? Both of those things are true. And if you remember, the amendment that Tom Askell offered was a very, it wasn't very harsh.

It was basically like, we want to make sure we acknowledge the sources of these, the pagan sources of these ideas. And he wanted it to be a friendly amendment, a friendly amendment to the resolution. And the resolution committee said, no.

That's a hostile amendment. And here we've got them saying, oh, we're concerned too. We're super concerned. If you were so concerned, why did you reject that? We saw, it's on audio, it's on video. We saw what happened.

We're not idiots. You see, what we have here is a bunch of posturing. A bunch of posturing. Al Mohler gets his street cred, oh, I'm against critical theory. Fine, you can be against critical theory all day long.

But if you're not gonna do anything about it, it means nothing. It's just role playing. I've been talking about this. Al Mohler, why are you just role playing? Dude, you've been a hero before. Why are you pretending to be a hero now?

Makes me wonder what's going on. It really does make me wonder what's going on. And you see this, this is, this resolution's committee. They're doing the same thing. Look, they think we're stupid, guys.

You realize that, right? The SBC resolutions committee here, the Baptist Press, Al Mohler, they think you're stupid. They think, they're like a wizard who they know you can see and hear with your own ears and eyes.

You can watch the video that Founders Ministry put out where this exact stuff was rejected by the committee because they were ramrodding this resolution through. And now here they're saying, well, we're concerned about it too.

Where was your concern when it mattered? Where was your concern when it mattered? I mean, there's a couple options here. These people are either very forgetful or they're posturing and lying on top of it.

Because if you are so concerned about the origins of these pagan ideologies, these analytical tools, you would have accepted the amendment that Tom Askell offered as a friendly amendment. But you didn't.

When it mattered, you didn't. See, here's the reality. Al Mohler, he's like what they talked about in Jeremiah when the priests and prophets were saying, peace, peace, but there was no peace. There is no peace here.

Al Mohler is trying to say that there is. Oh yeah, we can talk about this. Notice the emphasis on the right tone. The right tone matters to Al Mohler more than the truthfulness of the statements. Al Mohler intimately knows that his amendment was rejected.

His amendment was rejected. Tom Askell's amendment, partially crafted by Al Mohler, was rejected. Here he is saying, this is the right tone. When they pretend to agree with the friendly amendment that they actually rejected.

When it mattered. When they had to put their name to paper. We think we're stupid. But we're not stupid. This kind of wizardry might have worked before. You know, like before there was like a lot of internet where people could just rewind the tape and see how it all actually went down instead of this spin that you're putting forward.

This kind of wizardry might have been easier to pull back in the day. But Al, you think we're stupid. But we're not stupid. What are you up to? What are you up to? Anyway, I hope this video, this podcast, I hope this podcast was helpful.

God bless. Don't forget to tune in next week on Thursday for AD on the Fight, Laugh, Feast Network.