The American Churchman: Christianity and Trump’s Deportation Policy

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Welcome to the American Churchman Podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with my co -host, Matthew Pearson.

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We aim to encourage men to fulfill their God -given obligations with joy, this side of heaven, in preparation for the life to come.

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I hope you're all doing well out there. I hope you're not getting tired of winning. I struggle with that. Matthew's an accountability partner, but we're going to talk about some more winning today.

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I don't know if you're excited. I'm a little excited about this. I'm very excited, John, and excited to be here as well.

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There's a lot to be excited about. Very cool. Last week, one week ago, I think it was, today, you announced that you were looking for some work.

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You just told me. I don't know if you want to let everyone know that you've found some potential. You don't have to say what, but the

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Lord's answered the prayer, right? That's the optimism here. Well, that's what it's looking like, but nothing's absolutely certain yet, but things are coming along.

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That's always encouraging for me to hear. That's good, because we hadn't discussed this, and I haven't read this, and we're probably not going to discuss it, but I just went to the

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TruthScript website, and David didn't say anything about this to us when we asked him, but a case for general optimism, that's the featured article.

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We could have done a whole podcast on that, I guess, but neither of us have read it. Yeah, that's true.

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We're optimistic. We're going to tell you about some things we're very optimistic about, but if you want to justify this, if you're having trouble being optimistic, go to TruthScript .com.

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We've got an article featured there. Let's see, what else? We have a conference coming up in Selling Grove, Pennsylvania, Christianity and the

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Founding. Go to Christianityandthefounding .com. What else? Well, there's some other articles up there that are great.

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If you want to contribute, obviously, 501C3, go to the bottom of the page, click on the Donate button.

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If you want to contribute an article, that's actually needed. I asked my brother. He said it's slowing down a little, but if you're someone who writes and you want to talk about something that's important to you and it fits with what

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TruthScript normally publishes, go to the Publish tab and you'll see our requirements. I think if you don't hear back within a week or so, you probably aren't going to be published.

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Generally, we have some volunteer editors and they're overwhelmed to an extent.

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I don't know if they get back to everyone. I don't think so, but we do publish a lot of the people who submit. Go ahead and check that out.

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We found some great authors that way. All right. Well, we're going to get into immigration today and some reactions that have gone viral online regarding deportation and whether this is

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Christian or just. Before we get into all that, though, let's talk about the attributes of God.

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Today, we have a special attribute of God. I mean, they're all special, but we're getting into some of these attributes that are maybe less abstract and more relational, personal, things that you hear brought up all the time in a church setting.

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What are we talking about today, Matthew? Well, John, today we'll be discussing divine faithfulness.

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I kind of told you this a little before we started recording, but I'm thankful that this is our attribute after divine truth because it means

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I don't have to do as much as a work because like I say, almost every week with a lot of these attributes, they're also interconnected.

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And what a surprise that God's own attributes, which do not contradict each other, connect with each other.

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So yeah, big shocker. I know. But as we always do, I will start off by reading a verse or two.

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I just have one verse, well, technically two verses, but it's from the same section, but I will just be reading to us

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Romans chapter 15 verses eight through nine. So our texts today, it says this.

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Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God to confirm the promises made unto the fathers and that the

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Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy as it is written for this cause, I will confess to thee among the

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Gentiles and sing unto thy name. Notice how in verse eight there, the apostle

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Paul writes about to confirm the promises made unto the fathers. So when we think about divine faithfulness, as I mentioned about divine truth, think of this attribute as sort of an extension, or maybe we can say an application of this attribute of divine truth, because what is divine truth?

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It's the fact that God is true because God cannot lie. Thus, when God says he is to do something or in all things that God does, he really will do them and he does not lie because he cannot lie.

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Sometimes people have this idea that God being all powerful means he can just do all things.

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And while that is true, God can do all things. He can do all things within the bounds of reason. So of course we would say

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God can't do X, because there are certain things that like the idea of, oh, can

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God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Of course not. The same way God can't light bulb, boot, barn in the ocean when it's midnight past nine.

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Like that doesn't make sense. You see, it's an unintelligible saying. And so likewise to say, can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift is unintelligible.

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So God is capable of all things. And not only that, but he is faithful when he says he will do something, he will do it because God cannot lie.

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Thus divine faithfulness is an extension of this. And essentially it's God's prerogative to be faithful to the promises he makes and faithful to the people to whom he makes these promises.

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Now, when we think of God and making promises or God and making promises to people, which he keeps, this is sort of, we're looking at the relationship that God as a creator has with his creation.

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And the primary way that God relates with his creation is in the form of a covenant.

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That is usually how God, no, that is ordinarily how God relates to his creation is through the form of covenant.

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So in Genesis, you have the covenant of works that God makes with Adam and extension makes with Eve because he,

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Adam is Eve's head and which he also makes with all of us. And because Adam failed to meet that, we as well fail to meet that standard.

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And that's why we're in need of redemption. You have the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant. Sure. There's some

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I'm leaving off and really important. We have the new covenant, but God as a creator relates with his creation in the form of covenant.

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So a covenant can be defined. And when I'm, I'm defining covenant right now, my primary source for how

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I define covenant is Richard Baxter. I'm using this may get me in trouble with some reform people, but I like Baxter shout out to Jonathan McKenzie for putting me on this particular work of Baxter, which

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I don't remember. Actually, I do remember the name, uh, an end of doctrinal controversies, which have lately troubled the churches by reconciling explication without much disputing.

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They were great at chapter titles back then, but the way in which Richard Baxter helps us think about covenant is he essentially says that a covenant can be defined principally as a mutual contract.

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There it is. A covenant is a mutual contract, essentially between two parties, which contain a benefit or reward offered a condition described as well as a means prescribed for the sake of receiving this benefit and a, and the way he words, this is a threatening in the case of ingratitude or violating the terms and conditions of this covenant.

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So as men, as fallen men, we constantly transgress, uh, the covenants that God makes with us.

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And thus we're, um, naturally deprived of the benefits of these covenants. And this is why

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God shows mercy and clemency to us by grace. So though, and notice,

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I just said, we always transgress the bounds of these covenants because we are fallen men because we sinned in our father,

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Adam. That's why we have original sin. And we commit actual sin every day, every day. We do not perfectly live up to the standard of God's law.

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We transgress his covenant. So though we transgress God's covenant and break his law daily because of God's faithfulness, remember, that's our attribute.

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We can be assured that God, unlike us, will never abandon the promises he makes to us.

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And this relates to two attributes. As I said in the beginning, this relates to, uh, the divine attribute of God as truth, as well as to immutability because, because God is without,

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God doesn't change. God doesn't, uh, you know, he's not a mutable being like us. We are capable of change.

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I can believe one thing today. And let's say in like three years or maybe even tomorrow, I'd no longer believe that.

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Um, because I am mutable God on the other hand is immutable. So because God is truth and he's incapable of lying.

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And because God is immutable, meaning he's incapable of change. We can know that when he covenants with us, he will meet the conditions of the covenants, which he sets before us.

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He will always be faithful to us. These divine attributes guarantee that the Lord keeps the promises he makes to us.

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And because of this, we can have comfort in the character of God and rest assured, knowing that he faithfully cares for and watches over us.

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Uh, if you want to read something on how God is a covenant, keeping

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God, who always keeps his promises, read through Genesis 15 about the covenant that God makes with Noah or not

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Noah with most now with Moses, either with Abraham, I'm all over the place today, uh, that God makes with Abraham.

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And after you do that, read through Galatians and you'll see the interconnectedness about how

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God keeps his promises throughout generations and about how these promises extend even to the

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Gentiles. Um, this attribute, as I said earlier, is truly comforting because we all, like I said, we always transgress the covenant that God sets before us, but God in his grace and in his mercy and his patience, he still remains faithful to us.

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And we can always rest assured as well. And Christ Jesus who, because we always screw up Christ being true

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God and true man, um, he keeps, uh, the covenant that God made with Adam.

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He fulfills the covenant of works. And in turn, the, us being a part of the covenant of grace receive these benefits.

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And this is, uh, stuff about the imputation of Christ's active obedience that he kept the law perfectly in our stead.

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And this gives us not only good legal ground to stand for before God, because we can point to Christ or advocate, but it also empowers us and enables us as well to better follow the law through the infusion of grace by the gift of the

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Holy spirit, uh, making us better and better and more Holy. And though we don't do it faithful or like perfectly, we can always rest assured that God is faithful.

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So that is divine faithfulness. Uh, as I always say in a nutshell, that's excellent,

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Matthew, you're going to be a good pastor. You're already a very, you're well -spoken on these things. And I think, uh, for that, you know, this attribute,

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I think when you're going through trials, that's the one that you pull out the most. You have to remind yourself because it's the bedrock.

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It's the, uh, I think of Psalm one and, you know, the righteous man being like a tree firmly planted.

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This is the firmly entrenched. Um, I think quality that Christians have when they understand that God's going to keep his end of the deal.

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He's not, uh, in some religions. I mean, we take it for granted, but, uh, you know, obviously Islam does not have the guarantee that all is going to necessarily keep his end of the bargain.

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Uh, when it comes, you know, they can't have assurance of going to heaven. For example, a lot of religions are like that.

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Christianity isn't. And I, and I'm grateful for that. Um, obviously I think it's true as well, but it's, uh, it's not, you know, comparing religions with each other for what kind of deal you get.

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Obviously there's only one that's true, but I think that, uh, if you were to just compare the, the nature and attributes of these other deities that are put forward as competitors, as idols, uh, they don't stand a chance.

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They're just not the same at all. So, um, certainly. Yeah. Appreciate that.

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Well, we already have people coming into the stream here, uh, to want to talk about the issue that we're going to talk about.

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Happy, happy Tuesday, gentlemen. Dr. Bob's always here on Tuesday. Hey, Dr. Bob, aliens to be sent back to the land of their fathers.

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Oh man. Turning the prodigal son on its head. I love it. I love to see it. Dr. Bob. Um, Terry strange wants us to deport

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Matt. So, all right. There's a few options you could take me to or would you like to go,

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Matt? I don't know. I'm thinking about my ancestry, Spain, Italy, or England.

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I don't know. I don't know. One of those words would be maybe like 15 years ago. I would have said

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England now. I don't know. But I mean, what's, what's the best country to bear migrant crisis that's afflicted

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Europe. I'm not sure. Spain maybe. Uh, yeah, I don't know. But then I have to learn Spanish.

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I don't want to do that. Yeah. I guess you're limited. You got to go to England. Uh, all right.

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So, uh, what else do we have here? God can do all things within the bounds of reason.

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Yeah. Cause God true sense. Absolutely. Um, let Caesar do his work and let the church do

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Christ's work. Yeah. I mean, I, I agree with a caveat, I suppose. I mean, um, you know, the work of Christ trying to think how to frame this, the work of Christ.

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So if you're a Christian in a judicial capacity or a magisterial capacity, how do you accomplish the work of Christ in your job?

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I'm not talking about in your service, in the church, but in your actual job or place of employment.

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Um, see, I think I just throws a wrench into it a little bit. The work of Christ, I think carries through institutions and social arrangements that go outside the church.

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Uh, all right, let's see what else we've got. A lot of people weighing in. I'm surprised how many people are streaming tonight. This is a big thing,

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I guess. One really quick thing before, um, God can do everything within the bounds of reason.

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Uh, that is true, but something we do have to remember is that sometimes we cannot understand

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God's reasoning. So for example, we can know what the Trinity is, but it sort of is above our pay grade of understanding how it is reasonable.

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Nevertheless, it is reasonable. Uh, so a mystery can still be reasonable. It's that sometimes our reason can't fully comprehend or understand that to its perfect degree.

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And that's why we accept it on faith. And that's why we can't get there by, by pure reason, apart from a special revelation.

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So just an important point to clarify. I've talked to atheists and just secularists and Muslims, all kinds of people who think the

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Trinity is their weak point to point out that Christians are somehow irrational. And usually, actually

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I say every time they misrepresent it, they don't understand it. They think it's either tri -theism or, uh, it's some kind of a logical contradiction.

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And, um, it's fun having those conversations because you just get to educate the people who think that they're bashing, but the truth is there, there's no logical fallacy in the hypostatic union or to the

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Trinity, or even in an eternal, these things are beyond us as far as comprehension, but they don't break the laws of logic.

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So, uh, yeah, an uncaused cause, I think that, you know, that, that, that in, in the form of a deity,

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I mean, that doesn't break the laws of logic, but if you're an atheist and you think that it's the actual laws of, uh, physical laws that are eternal,

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I think that you do actually run into problems because of the nature of those physical properties. They second law of thermodynamics does apply.

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Things do break down things. Uh, you can't get a reason from non -reason there.

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You do run up to into challenges when you don't have an, a personal animating being behind the cause of the universe.

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We're obviously way off track and I don't know why I just did this, but, um, I'm, I'm teaching on apologetics this

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Saturday night to a bunch of West point cadets. So that's fun. And it's on my mind. Nice. Uh, all right.

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So this is a great launching pad. Not that, sorry. Um, uh, that, that, that's a good, that's a good thought though.

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Hannah, that's a good thought. My thoughts are not your thoughts. The Lord, I don't want to disparage that. I accidentally clicked on it though. And I meant to click on this.

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Uh, this is from Casey Stewart, who I think I just highlighted one of his comments earlier, but he says, um,

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I think it's a, he, for Christians, the us are should refer to other Christians, whether in the U S or Mexico or wherever.

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And the, uh, and are them there should refer to unbelievers in the U S and Mexico and ever anywhere else.

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So, um, in other words, if I could summarize this and steel man it, that the in -group preference, the, uh, the, the, the preference we give to one another, the, uh, the people that we align with and think of ourselves as in communion with, and in solidarity with those should be other

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Christians too. And it doesn't really matter. The geographical boundaries have no, um, uh, you know, bearing on this and then the outsiders or the, the out group would be everyone who's not a believer.

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I think in a certain sense, that's true, but I just, I would say we're going to get an immigration. So that's why

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I think it's a good launching point. I would say that in a family unit, we don't actually believe this.

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We don't, I've never met anyone at least who says this, who doesn't practice on some level, other in -group preferences.

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So a family is the most basic one, but you tend to care about your children and, um, try to help your children, raise your children.

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That's where your obligations lie more than other people's children. And that may sound simple and so basic.

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Why would you bring that up? Because it, that principle, and this is the order order Amaris. I mean, this, this applies beyond the, just your home.

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This goes to your community, your society, your region, uh, and your city, whatever, wherever you live.

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Right. Um, there are demarcations that you live in and there's identities that you have that aren't, uh, in addition to being a

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Christian. And in fact, before you were a Christian, uh, you know, even if you were converted as a kid, like I was before I was a

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Christian, I did have other identities and other, uh, responsibilities and obligations and so forth.

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So I think that that captures a certain part of it. There is a preference for Christians, but there's also other groups we have to consider.

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And this is where, um, trying to evaluate and understand the responsibilities we have in different avenues,

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I think is very important. And that's what we're going to talk about. So, um, you have anything to add to that before we get into the videos?

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I have a video to play here. Yeah. Um, something I would say to that is that citizenship in any commonwealth or nation on the earth is not one of the benefits of union with Christ.

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There are many benefits we receive when we're united to Christ. There are certain relations we now have with one another being united to each other spiritually by faith.

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Uh, we're, you know, and in the sense of Christ's mystical body, we're bone of bone of bone, flesh of flesh, one with another, there's a union with each other that transcends all other unions, but that union doesn't necessitate that you can go to any commonwealth you want and become a naturalized citizen.

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That's in the realm of nature. Uh, the realm of grace deals with spiritual realities. Christ's purpose in coming to earth was not to establish a new national polity.

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This was the carnal error of the Jews who thought that Christ was coming to set up a new civic commonwealth to overthrow the

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Roman empire so that they could rule. Um, that's not the intent of Christ's first advent, at least. Uh, in the second advent that will be happened, uh, when all other nations and commonwealths will be assumed under the authority and direct rule of the

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Lord Jesus over all peoples. Um, but that is not one of the things that is guaranteed, uh, by the first advent of Christ.

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That's not the intention of the church. The church is primarily a spiritual institution, which has, uh, it has, you know, physical implications.

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Like you go to a real church, a physical church, uh, the people there vote for certain politicians and all that, but that does not necessitate that your, by virtue of union with Christ, uh, you can just abrogate all citizenship and all other, uh, loyalties in life.

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Um, that, that's not the point of the gospel. That's not like one of the benefits. The point of the gospel is the salvation of souls by being

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United to Christ and having him, uh, redeem all things. That is the point is not to grant you citizenship is not to, uh, make it to where you have to destroy your own borders or your alter your, your policies now to open borders for Christians because we're

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United to Christ that misses a point. And it's a carnal misunderstanding of mission of Christ. Yeah, no, that's well said.

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Uh, we have Lisa weighing into, I want to just highlight this. Uh, I prefer other believers over my unsafe sisters, aunts, and cousins.

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Is that wrong? No, I don't think so. And it depends what you mean by prefer, because if you think of, uh, prefer, let's say, and what did you, what did you mention?

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She's mentioned sisters, aunts, and cousins. So not children here. Uh, but you know, let's say you have a younger sister.

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Um, I'm, I'm thinking, I want to pick this example on purpose because I think it makes clearly, but there's an element of dependency.

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Let's say there, I know my wife had this with her younger sister. Um, do you have a greater obligation to your younger sister to make sure that she's well fed?

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And I, whatever it is, you know, it's pride or you're going to public school, it gets to school on time is safe.

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Uh, there's more authority there. There's more, I think there is going to be a different kind of relationship over, let's say a

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Christian that maybe you share more in common spiritually with, but you don't have those same obligations. Those natural obligations.

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Uh, so, uh, there is probably some aspects and some avenues where you will prefer the other believers.

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And then there's others where you're going to have to spend your time and invest your resources helping your sister.

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Uh, and that's, uh, we are able to do this, I think with a lot of things, but for some reason, when it comes to the political realm, people forget,

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I, I, that's what I think it happens. At least people tend to forget these, uh, other natural obligations and relationships they have.

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So it's, um, it's not about, I think as Matthew just said, like it's, it's not that when you become a

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Christian, all the ties to your kindred are severed somehow. And now you just have these new connections that your ties to your kindred aren't severed.

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Uh, and Jesus wasn't trying to imply that they should be severed by, um, you know, when he is asked about his natural brothers and saying, you know, you are my brothers, you are my mothers, you are my, you are my family member.

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He wasn't trying to say that, uh, those people were not anymore, but that there's a greater spiritual reality.

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That's now that he, he has clarified for us that he has actually brought in one for us through the gospel that connects us to each other and connects us to him.

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But it doesn't, it doesn't bring away those, like you think of him at the cross, what does he say about his mother?

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I mean, he's looking out for the welfare of his mother as he's dying. That just says something about Christ. You could say, well, she was a believer.

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And if she, well, if she wasn't, would he just not do that? I mean, uh, uh, you know, there's, there's so many things in scripture that, uh, clearly articulate.

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We have a responsibility to those who are in our household and you're worse than an unbeliever. If you don't actually take care of the people in your household.

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So, um, so we can walk and chew gum at the same time. That's what I believe. I think that's what Christians have practiced for a long time.

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And this applies, here's the transition. This applies to our country as a whole and your region.

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You want the safety of the area that you live in for the, and what's the point behind that, but for loving your neighbors, this is part of loving your neighbors.

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And we exercise our votes in order to accomplish policies that will love our neighbors better.

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And for those who voted for Donald Trump, this is one of the things I was voting for him on was he was going to clean up some of our immigration process, which is frankly has been broken for a while.

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And, uh, unfortunately people have died and taken advantage of it's drained resources that belong, not to the people coming here.

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And, uh, there's more, it could be said, but I think, uh, for me, this is a

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Christian duty in a sense. Like I am, this is my daughter's eyes. I am wanting policies that are going to be better for her, that are going to protect her from unvetted migrants and that kind of thing that potentially could cause harm.

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So, uh, so let's, so unless you have something to say, Matthew, I'm going to play a video. You have, you have anything or just one little thing, uh, your preferences does not the same thing as duty.

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So there are some Christians I prefer over my own family, their blood, but that doesn't necessarily mean

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I have the same duties to them. And that's what the discussion's about. It's not about who you prefer, cause it's very easy to prefer certain people over other, even if they're not related to you directly, it's about what is your duty?

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What are you called to do by God, uh, in the natural order? So that's all I have to say. I prefer taking on a connotation of, uh, subjectivity,

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I suppose, like your, your whims and so forth. And I was thinking of it actually in terms of duties, like, you know, you, you, your willpower also plays into this.

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Uh, let's actually play a video though. And this is a video, if you're subscribed to my channel on YouTube conversations that matter, you may have seen this, or if you're on Twitter, uh, this is a pastor named

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Matt Crawford at Trinity Baptist church in Cordova, which is in Tennessee near Memphis.

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And he goes off on president Trump's immigration policies. Uh, he is a pastor in the Southern Baptist convention.

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And, uh, here, here's the thing that made this go mini viral. Senator Brent Taylor, who is a

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Tennessee Senator was in the house of worship. And apparently he left during the sermon.

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Uh, he walked out. And so I don't know any more details on this, but apparently KWAM, a radio station local to that area, uh, said multiple sources confirmed this to them, that the

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Senator walked out. And of course, Senator Taylor's conservative Senator, uh, and the assumption being, and I don't know if this is true, mate, you know, he was offended by what you're about to hear, but, or, you know, whatever,

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I don't know. He didn't agree with it. So here's the, here's what was said. It's about three and a half minutes. I just want to play the whole thing for you.

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And I think that, uh, this probably explains or, uh, represents more than just this particular pastor.

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This is not just Matt Crawford. I think there's a lot of Southern Baptist and evangelicals in leadership positions who feel this way.

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And one of the reasons I say that is because for years, so many of them opposed Trump on this basis on his immigration policy.

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So, uh, let me, oh, here we go. I have it. So here, here's the, uh, let's see if I can make this bigger.

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I don't know if I can, um, Matthew, can you hear this? Okay. Before we begin our service, how is that?

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How's the volume on that? Pretty good. Sounds fine to me. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to see, I don't know if I can make this bigger.

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I don't think I can. So we're just going to play a little mini, uh, video here and just talk briefly with you, um, about something that's a little bit sensitive.

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And some of us may have different opinions on this. Some of us may have strong opinions on this.

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And I asked you to consider it with love and grace and the spirit of unity that our church has consistently been marked by.

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And it has to do with this issue of what's going on with immigration in our country right now.

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And some of the actions that are being taken. And I think we all believe in the rule of law.

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I certainly do. I don't think we should have wide open borders, but I do believe that immigration is a major part of what has made this country so great.

28:06

It's a major part of our history. We all believe that violent criminals should not be allowed to remain here and terrorize innocent people.

28:16

We can agree on that. I do think that there are many good people here who are undocumented, who would like a path to legality.

28:25

I believe it's too hard right now for good people to find that path.

28:31

That's sometimes nearly impossible. Um, I had a, when I was in Florida, we had a

28:37

Hispanic congregation there at my first church where I was a senior pastor and there was, uh, our associate pastor.

28:45

He was not on the payroll, but he served as a volunteer there as an associate pastor.

28:51

And he was not documented. And he had been here from Costa Rica for 10 or 11 years and, uh, wanted to be legal.

29:01

And it was very hard for him to, to get there. And that's unfortunate.

29:09

I think we need reform in that area. I don't know the legal status of all of our people who come to Trinity in Espanol.

29:18

I don't know the legal status of all of our people who come to ESL. I don't think we're called to police that as a church.

29:28

That's the government's job. We are called to love and to help those in need. It's been announced that now churches can be targets of raids.

29:42

No one is being sheltered or kept here, but I don't like the idea. And I think you'd probably agree that well, worship service could be disrupted by a raid.

29:54

I don't want people who come here to, to be ministered to, to, and to hear the gospel, to be afraid to come here.

30:01

So I'm, I'm disappointed by that change. I hope that we can believe both in the rule of law and feel that we don't want worship services disrupted by that.

30:11

I hope that me saying that doesn't anger you, but I wanted to address that. Hopefully we can talk about things with unity and nuance and even differences of opinion because it's on the hearts of some of our people.

30:27

Elizabeth Richards is going to pray about it during our intercessory prayer time. So I hope that we can give each other grace if we disagree on the details there, be a unified church because the unity of the church of Jesus Christ is so important.

30:49

All right. I think I was muted. I don't know if you heard me there. I did not. You were muted. Muted. We listened to Matt Crawford from Trinity Baptist Church in Cordova.

30:59

And I will note this before getting started. I'm going to, I want to hear your reaction, Matt, to this before I say anything, but, oh, maybe

31:08

I didn't, I want to stop. Oh, hold on. I need to go to my profile and find it now.

31:13

Okay. I don't have it readily available. I'm gonna have to scroll down now. I should have had this ready.

31:19

I was going to show you some stuff from Matt, the pastor that you just heard that sort of shows where he lines up in the

31:28

Southern Baptist convent. Here it is. All right. So I, and I said, company, men do company things because there were guys

31:33

I knew that I respect. You were saying, Hey, look, this guy is just kind of like, he's got good intentions.

31:40

He's just kind of ignorant. Right. And doesn't understand policies and that kind of thing. Well of course, you see,

31:46

I retweeted Megan Basham. Megan Basham got in on this. A whole bunch of people started talking about this. It sparked the whole debate. But if you look at the guys,

31:54

Matt Crawford's ex account, and these are just a few different tweets that are representative or retweets and so forth.

32:02

He is pretty, he's a company man, in my opinion. Like it's very obvious when you see all his tweets together, but he here's one, this is a retweet from Send Relief.

32:15

And this is about their sexual abuse task force reforms in 2022.

32:21

And of course, you know, this, this whole issue has been a debacle for the SBC, but these reforms are

32:27

I, I've gone through a lot of material on this, on my other podcast conversations that matter, talking about them and the people that are in favor of them are the people who are generally veering left in the

32:38

SBC. He was very against the law amendment, right? The law amendment was basically just saying, look, women can't be pastors in the

32:45

SBC. I'm obviously summarizing, but he was on the other side of that one. And, you know, retweeting

32:51

Philip Bethencourt here that in defense of Brent Leatherwood, when there was this, it is a weird ordeal in 2024 in July, but whether, you know, he had been fired or not, or he was, he's still the head of the

33:04

ERLC or not. And for a little while, people thought that he had been booted for essentially liberal posturing and that kind of thing.

33:14

And, you know, Matt Crawford's out there defending this kind of stuff. So here's another one about that. So I don't do this just, you know,

33:20

I'm not like putting this out there to be like, you know, we just got to go after this guy. Cause look at where he is politically. I'm doing it more to clarify, like, you know, this isn't a one -off.

33:28

He is someone who has lined up and as someone who went to an SBC school and is pretty familiar, spent a lot of time reading through SBC articles and so forth.

33:39

He very much lines up with the prevailing opinion in the more progressive wing of the

33:46

SBC. And I'm using an SBC standard there for progressive. So with that being said

33:51

Matthew, what's your reaction to the video that we just listened to? It of course, as always, it's just interesting to see how pastors like this will characterize that sort of thing.

34:07

I think there's some things he got right in there, like talking about how it's not really the church's job to do that sort of policy.

34:14

It's the civil government, the idea that he doesn't want like wide open borders that he believes in a rule of law.

34:20

That's all good. But of course you have to put the good stuff up front to sneak in the smelly stuff as well.

34:27

And the concern over like this idea that, you know, oh, well the church's job is to care for those people.

34:33

I think there's almost like, if he's not saying it explicitly, there's almost an implication that the ecclesiastical government cannot work with and support the civil government in carrying out certain laws because this would not be hospitable to those who need it.

34:53

When in reality, like there's a both and, you know, like a good like analogy for this is this idea of, you know, think of like the good

34:59

Samaritans say that you're walking on the side of the road or whatever, and there's an illegal immigrant who needs assistance because they're dying or whatever.

35:08

You would help and assist them, but that does not necessitate that they don't like undergo like that which the rule of law demands.

35:16

In the same way, like, you know, of course not all illegal aliens are necessarily murderers, but if you see a murderer on the side of the road who is like, needs help, is it in pain or whatever, you can help them while at the same time being like, okay, we're calling the police and taking the necessary precautions to defend yourself.

35:33

Maybe that illustration falls a little short, but you understand the principle behind it. But there almost seems to be this understanding that the ecclesiastical government cannot work with the civil government to enact this policy.

35:44

And he prefaces it by like saying, oh, I believe in rule of law and things like that. And of course, you know, if the government has an unjust law, there is a right to resistance.

35:57

You know, we obey God rather than man. And ideally if there's another unjust law which the state is imposing on you, you would ideally under the authority of a lesser civil magistrate be able to resist that.

36:09

There's a longstanding tradition of resistance theory in the reform tradition, so there's room for that.

36:15

But you would need to, if you feel this idea that you're scared of raids or whatever on illegals and you don't want that to happen, you need to demonstrate why these immigration laws may be unjust.

36:31

You need to demonstrate that part of part of like an illegal migrant receiving that which is their due, that due being citizenship and the ability to live comfortably within the

36:41

United States, you need to demonstrate that. You need to say this is why this is the right thing to do, and this is why we therefore by virtue of our conscience being bound need to resist governing authorities.

36:50

But he doesn't really say that. It sort of is like this understanding of like he's, it almost seems like he's playing off of like, you know, how the media releases all of these pictures or videos of migrants crying and being sad and not putting forth an argument, but simply being like, look how sad they are.

37:06

Let them become citizens. You know, like that's essentially what they do. He's almost operating under that pretext or that sort of context, assuming that these people like are familiar with that kind of thing.

37:18

So it's a bit frustrating to see though. And I do think that he's being a bit silly and saying a lot of this.

37:25

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that people freak out about or are concerned about is what he said at the end there about could ice come into a church, just like almost like disruptive service.

37:36

You get right. That is the sense that I conjured up and take the illegal migrants out and question them.

37:43

And these, of course, he frames it as these are very well -meaning people who just want a path to citizenship, and it's not afforded them.

37:49

They don't have the the opportunity. And almost like this is something that's owed to them.

37:55

This is something they should have. It's unreasonable. It's unjust that they don't. And so can you believe it?

38:00

It's already a bad situation, but then ice is going to come and yank him out of a church. So it's a violation of the holy.

38:06

And this really references Trump's. The Trump administration has done a lot in a very short period of time when it comes to executive orders and border policy.

38:15

They move very fast. One of the things that they've done is they've revoked some of the

38:22

Biden administration's safe spaces, if you want to call it that. But these areas where migrants who are illegal could go and ICE agents could not enter churches was just one of those there, you know,

38:36

I think like homeless shelters. And there was a number of other things that public spaces that they places that they could go in and they would not be molested by ICE.

38:47

ICE wasn't allowed to go in there. Really, I think what the Trump administration has done is just revoked some of that and said

38:53

ICE can go into public places. They can't go into private places. We need a warrant for that.

38:58

They can go into public places. Now, there's some there seems to be in my reading on this, that there is some like local policies and stuff that would have to be that.

39:09

So so there is an interpretation of Trump's revocation of these that says that they would still need to in some local areas, depending on local ordinances, get warrants to go into a church and that kind of thing.

39:25

I haven't seen any examples of this, but I can understand why Trump would do this.

39:31

And that is because there are very left leaning churches that just like sanctuary cities could make their building a sanctuary building.

39:41

And I know there's a story that I know about from down in Wake Forest where there is this church that was basically giving aid and shelter to illegal migrants.

39:50

And this was something that even out of the offering plate at the church, this was like a ministry expense.

39:56

Their 501C3 status was even being used to offer this charity to an illegal migrant.

40:04

But it went beyond just like here's some food. It was and you can stay here and work here and we're going to protect you from possibly getting deported.

40:11

And I don't know how many churches out there are like this, but I'm assuming there's quite a bit. You go through any of the local college towns and I see rainbow flags and all the churches and stuff.

40:21

So I would assume that there's probably quite a few that wouldn't mind doing this kind of thing.

40:26

So that makes sense to me from that standpoint. But the way the whole thing's framed,

40:32

I just think is odd because he's saying, yeah, you know, for years I was at a church and we we had an associate pastor who was an illegal migrant.

40:39

And by the way, there's no illegal migrants here. So don't come here. Like it's attracting all this attention.

40:46

People with illegal migrants at our church, you're fine with that apparently. But don't come here,

40:51

Ice. It's the dumbest thing in my opinion you could do because you literally are putting a big target.

40:56

If you don't want Ice to come there, you shouldn't have said anything because now you're signaling that you're the kind of pastor who might do this.

41:04

But I think so behind all of this, though, is this assumption that. You can just go park anywhere and it's your space like you don't need the handicap sign, you don't need the permit, it's you can go into any country,

41:17

I guess, or at least in the United States, you just come here and you're here. And so you just have a right to remain here while you, you know, take, you know, take advantage,

41:30

I guess, is the word, but, you know, I don't I want to use a different word. You, you, you use you.

41:36

I mean, that is the word you take advantage of the resources and the benefits that come with being an American citizen. Those aren't yours.

41:42

They don't belong to you. So there's a stealing going on here. And and that has to be rectified.

41:49

It's great that if you have an intention of becoming a citizen, that's great. But you don't get to create those rules if you're not an

41:55

American citizen. That's something for the American people to decide. And they decided to elect

42:01

Donald Trump. And so this is where we're at. And I think it's a good thing that Trump's getting aggressive on this stuff.

42:08

But I think that this is this is where the battle lines really wind up. There's these assumptions.

42:15

You and I are coming at this with the assumption that you can't just enter a country and expect to live there and reap the benefits of that country.

42:22

But there's a liberal wing of evangelicalism that says, yeah, sure, that's fine. That's just that's right.

42:28

And the church, you know, church implying, I guess, that churches could even be safe havens for this kind of thing.

42:35

That doesn't sit well with me. And maybe we can get into some Bible verses on that. But any thoughts before we dive into this deeper and look at some biblical principles?

42:46

Not too many thoughts, but I did have one that crossed my mind. Let's just say if I was a civil magistrate and I see any church with a rainbow flag or a trune flag or like a

43:01

BLM flag, to me, that's no longer just an ecclesiastical institution. That is a that's a political activist institution.

43:10

And to me, that would signal. I don't know that that looks like something I want to sniff out a little bit.

43:16

That's that's all I'll say. When you put yourself out there like that, I just, you know, it's just people talk about how conservative evangelicals idolize politics so much.

43:28

And in reality, it's like when most of the people who say that they're encouraging like one of two things, arguably the latter more so than the former.

43:36

But they either they either encouraging like political inactivism or just not voting like at all or being involved, or they're just trying to give you a free pass to vote for the left.

43:47

And, you know, there is Christian, believe it or not, there is Christian liberty in politics. We can disagree on certain economic practices.

43:55

We can even disagree on like a host of other issues. But when it comes to like where we are currently, you can't just think of this as good old fashioned classical liberal politics where there's two parties that are slightly different.

44:09

Like, no, you have to realize like one side is straight up for like depravity in every sense of the word, be it in the sexual realm, be it in the realm of murder, be it in the realm like, you know, it's not just like two guys sitting and chatting and they're just differences.

44:26

This is this is like, okay, ish versus like straight up evil. So if it's up to me,

44:32

I'm going to side with okay ish over straight up evil. I think that's pretty clear.

44:38

When you look at the direction things are heading, especially with this one political party, I'm thinking of.

44:44

So, yeah, there's a verse I'm looking for it right now. I had it queued up and then I had to restart my computer, but it's in Deuteronomy 28.

44:51

And it's the consequences of disobeying God, right? This is Israel. Obviously, we're talking about here.

44:58

And, you know, it talks about how you're going to be defeated before your enemies, like horrible things that are going to happen to Israel.

45:05

But one of the things that it talks about is that if I could find the actual verse here, it's such a big chapter and I'm scanning it and not not coming up with it for some reason.

45:15

But was it the part about foreigners? Yeah, where they're going to rise above you. They're going to be the head.

45:21

You'll be the tail. And like this is a curse. This is a really bad thing for Israel.

45:27

It's not a good thing. You shouldn't want this kind of thing. It's assumed that Israel for the

45:34

Israelis, Israel for the Israelis and the Israelis are going to have the dominant position as far as setting the tone.

45:42

Yeah, I think you're thinking of a verse 13 and the Lord shall make thee the head and not the tail.

45:48

And thou shalt be above above only. And thou shalt not be beneath if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the

45:54

Lord thy God, which I command thee to this day to observe and do them. So there's a condition of being like in your land and elevated on the condition of obedience to the precepts of God.

46:07

Yeah. And then there's conversely, I know he says later in the passage that this, yeah, the opposite of this, that if you disobey that the foreigners among you are going to rule over you essentially.

46:19

And you see in the case law of the Old Testament Israel, I've pointed this out. I know a number of times on my other podcasts that there is a distinction and people always like to run to passages where it says that you shall treat them the same.

46:31

You shall give them equality before the law. And that's true. If they murder someone, they get the penalty if just, and you shouldn't withhold the penalty because someone that's a countryman murders someone right there.

46:41

So there is this equality law, but there are different rules for the foreigners or the strangers that come into the land of Israel.

46:50

It's a very different time period too. So we should probably take that into account. And they didn't have mass transit.

46:56

They didn't have some of the mass communication and travel technology that we have today that make this more of a challenge.

47:06

But if they had the scope of, or the scale of immigration that we have now,

47:13

I think back then it would have been called an invasion. It wouldn't have been immigration policy. It would have been more of a military thing. They did have walls around their cities.

47:20

So where they actually did live in concentrated areas, they did protect themselves. They did put walls up. They did have rules like you could not purchase property, land property.

47:33

If you were a foreigner, I think there you could purchase a land or sorry, you could purchase property within a city's walls.

47:42

I think that was the only place you could purchase property, but you couldn't actually own the land. If you were a foreigner, it belonged and it reverted to at the year of Jubilee, those who actually lived in the land.

47:52

I mean, if you want to talk about biblical principles and you want to really apply, like we should be compassionate because we were strangers in Egypt.

47:57

Okay, sure. So let's make sure all the land reverts to the American citizens.

48:03

And there was a distinction. They obviously used the phrase stranger to designate a difference.

48:09

There was only so far that they could go and even worshiping the true God. There was a court of the

48:14

Gentiles. So they were blocked off from some of the, those would have also been civic rituals, civic religious rituals in that society.

48:26

Their perpetual slavery could happen if you're a foreigner. It couldn't happen if you were an Israeli. I mean, these things seem so bigoted and unjust today, but that's, that's how it was in the old

48:35

Testament. So there was this preference, this in -group preference for Israelis. And I bring that up, not to say that we have to apply everything in old,

48:43

I'm not a theonomist in that sense where there's a parallel. I'm looking at the principles here and I'm saying, why did

48:50

God have these rules in place? I think he had these rules in place because he wanted Israel for the Israelis and he wanted them to be a light to the nations as Isaiah says, be an example in wisdom so that they would show the world the truth, how to live.

49:06

And then of course, the Messiah, Messiah coming and being not just the savior of Israel, but the savior of the world.

49:14

This is why Israel was set up. So to put a cap on that, I think that if you're going to try to bring biblical principles into this discussion, which we should, you're going to have to look at some problems.

49:26

And this is why I wanted to highlight an article that's on TrueScript. This is not a new article.

49:32

It is an article that we've actually, I think we might've talked about this before Matthew by Jamie Bainbrick, but it's case against mass immigration.

49:41

And he goes through some principles here that immigration stats say very little about individual immigrants.

49:47

For example, I could just take you through all these different examples of illegal migrants committing crimes in this child rape.

49:56

You have, you know, the Lake and Riley situation. You have the woman who was burned on a subway not too long ago.

50:02

That was just last December. You know, there there's all kinds of these examples out there, but you, you know, that doesn't mean that every illegal migrant is doing crimes like this, but we, the problem is we don't know.

50:14

We really don't know who is and who isn't like we edited these people. And so this makes it much more, much more difficult.

50:21

The order of Morris. Of course, we've talked about this, the loves that we should have for our fellow countrymen which is different.

50:29

And there's more of a responsibility there. Mass immigration has significant downsides that damage society.

50:35

So we should look at the consequences of this and what does this do economically? What does this do socially to your country?

50:41

If you want to go to certain parts of London that you don't even feel like you're in London, you feel like you're in somewhere like Pakistan.

50:47

And that means there's a difference. Go to Dearborn, Michigan. There's a huge difference there. You're, you're, it's not like being in the

50:54

United States and it is actually, I've talked to Christians there. It is more difficult to evangelize. It is, there are consequences for raising a family there and so forth.

51:04

And then lastly, when migration becomes a threat, the biblical response is to stop it. So I think this really comes down to some basic things in both sides.

51:12

This is the interesting part of saying love your neighbor. We're saying love your neighbor. They're saying love their neighbor.

51:18

Who's right though? Who's actually practicing loving your neighbor? Well, I believe that I was going to say there's no, no, nothing much more to add on to that, but you ended with a question.

51:30

So it's kind of perfect. No, I would, I would argue that we, our side of things, the right wing, we are the most concerned about loving neighbor because we understand that again, like you mentioned in the article,

51:44

Ordo Amoris, that there are certain duties that we have to those that are naturally ours.

51:51

And that grace does not abrogate those. That's why the Apostle Paul in Romans 9 and Romans 11 speaks about his great love for his kinsmen according to the flesh.

52:02

And you understand that this principle is not just, like, he doesn't just have these affections by virtue of his past religious tie to them.

52:10

And some people may want to say, but there's something that is real here that he has a real relation to them.

52:18

And you read any commentary on these chapters, but I would particularly commend Matthew Henry's commentary.

52:25

And he even says this principle that the Apostle Paul has, we ought to emulate. You ought to love your kinsmen.

52:32

And so part of loving your neighbor is it extends towards degrees of duty and who do you owe this love to and what degree of love do you owe this to?

52:43

Now, of course, there's a sense in which we want to make sure, and sometimes I do see this happen where people get so deeply involved in some of the

52:52

Christian nationalism conversations or these sorts of things that what ends up happening is like, you hear any sense of like someone saying, oh, well, you know, everyone in some sense is our neighbor, which like, you know, you can be someone who's more right wing and you can still agree with that because someone like Calvin would say that every man to a certain extent is our neighbor by virtue of circumstance or providence, even that person who is not your kinsmen according to the flesh, if they're within your vicinity.

53:20

And like I said, like they're dying, like think of the, you know, the good Samaritan, like it is your duty by virtue of them being your neighbor by circumstance to assist them.

53:29

You know, there's a sense in which you can hold to that, but there's still a sense in which that doesn't destroy the order of Morris.

53:35

And so there's a sense in which you can care for the migrant while at the same time caring for those who are close to you.

53:42

And by saying, yes, assist the migrant if they need help, but that does not mean you can't call ice in the process.

53:49

People think that, oh, true love is extending to them. Good comfort here. You know, like if somebody shows up harmed at your door, you can help them.

53:58

Does that mean they now have a right to live in your house the rest of your life? No, because that is not their do.

54:05

People just don't understand this sort of thing. And that's the thing though, is there still a duty there to help them?

54:11

Sure. Does that mean they live in your house the rest of their life? No. Like these things are not that difficult to understand.

54:17

The problem is some people, I'm being so Tim Keller -ish right now. I'm very winsome because I'm being third way right now.

54:24

Both sides can think in too simplistic of terms, but I, the transcended Tim Keller disciple, say that again?

54:31

I was agreeing. I'd say, yeah, we transcend these. We're not the midwits.

54:38

We're not the... I was thinking of a different scale there. You're on the wise people on the right end of the scale.

54:45

Yeah. I'm so smart. I'm so much smarter than everyone, obviously. No, I'm kidding. But no, no, no.

54:51

All jokes aside, there's a sense in which you can go to both extremes and not be balanced and realize that you can afford someone the help they need while still remaining like obeying the law and doing your duty.

55:05

So yeah. Yeah. No, I think what you just said is really important. These two things can happen at the same time.

55:12

You can say, I'm going to help this person and ICE hasn't rounded them up yet.

55:18

Maybe you've even made the call and notified ICE. I'm still going to help them. I'm still going to give them the gospel. They're here, but I'm not going to condone their behavior.

55:29

And it's frustrating. This whole thing is frustrating mostly for the legal migrants

55:34

I know, to be honest with you. I don't want to use them as the wedge to say, but I do know some legal migrants who have come to this country and have waited for years.

55:42

And it just frustrates them to no end that others and cut in line and so forth.

55:48

Man, there's so much to talk about, but we're actually like four minutes less in four minutes, it's going to be an hour.

55:55

So we got to land the plane and we have questions coming in. Man, I had a thought and I just lost it, but that's okay.

56:01

Let's get some of these questions in and maybe it'll come back raids. Is this really happening? Not to my knowledge, like in churches, if that's what you mean.

56:10

As far as, yes, raids happening out there in people's homes where they have warrants on the street and so forth.

56:19

Yeah. I don't know if you saw, Matthew, the Fox News report a few days ago where it had the

56:24

Haitian migrants who had committed crimes, all of these guys committed crimes. We even got, what's his name from Dateline?

56:33

Is this the pedo catcher? Yeah. He was in on it. I was like, wow, they got

56:39

Chris Hansen, I think is his name. Oh, Chris Hansen. Yeah. Great show. Yeah, he is. I know. I used to watch that.

56:45

So he's on it. And they had a Spanish translation on his phone.

56:50

He was talking to this guy who was trying to meet up with a minor and then ICE got him. But anyway, this one guy,

56:58

I remember the Haitian migrant, you remember what he said when they were putting him into the ICE vehicle? Something about how he likes

57:04

Biden and Obama or something. Yeah. He said, basically,

57:11

I think he said, hail Biden or God bless Biden. And Obama did so much for me.

57:19

It's perfect. Yeah, exactly. All right. So let's go to the next question. It says, if I was a pastor that knew someone broke the law,

57:25

I would be encouraging them to turn themselves in. That's right. I think, you know, if it's a just law and that's this is not an unjust law.

57:32

This is there's actually rationale behind laws that make sure that the land that the citizens who actually own and operate and live within the land, that they're the ones reaping the rewards and the benefits from that land.

57:48

We see that in Israel, obviously, they need help. The psalmist says where that's the name of the avatar for people listening, psalmist, where they are instead of them all coming here and turning our country into a third world country, import the third world and become the third world.

58:01

That will be forever true. Good point. You can only put water into a boat before it sinks. Right. Maybe they should go back to their country and trust the

58:09

Lord. Michael says, what do you think about Trump's refusing to take the oath of office on a holy Bible?

58:15

That's kind of unrelated, but he did not refuse to take the oath of office. I think he just didn't see it because Melania had come in kind of late.

58:22

And I think he just didn't notice. But yeah, people ask me about that. And I was like, I don't think that was purposeful.

58:29

John lefties would say the land belongs to the peace pipe natives, though. Yes. Right. The land claims and all of that kind of thing.

58:36

And, man, can we have a discussion in the first minute and a half here? I don't think so. But that's a complicated discussion.

58:43

But I think that you have to recognize a few distinctions. One is that the you have settlers who came here.

58:50

That's a lot different than migrants coming into an established country. When you have settlers coming into a howling wilderness,

58:57

I think is who was it that John Winthrop said when they came to Massachusetts and so forth.

59:04

So there is, I think, a difference. One of the things people don't realize, too, because I don't think a lot of people study history, is there's a lot of losing that a lot of the native populations went through because they kept taking sides and losing sides in European wars.

59:19

And so you have the French and Indian War where, I mean, it's literally called that because so many of the natives or Indians, they call them would side with the

59:27

French and obviously who won that, the British. And then the next time there, a lot of these tribes are like, you know what?

59:33

We're not going to make that mistake again. Let's side with the English and then guess who loses the English. And then, you know, the last

59:40

Confederate general to surrender was Stan Wadey, a Native American. So there's a lot of Native American tribes, especially out in Oklahoma, that knew what would happen if the

59:50

Republican Party won that conflict. And guess who won? The Republican Party. So there has been just a lot of losing.

59:58

And you could look at that and say historical tragedy and so forth. But it doesn't change the fact that where we are now is we have an established society with rules, with customs, with laws and people who want to integrate themselves into it, which is the intention of the people coming here.

01:00:12

Very different from settlers who don't have that intention. These are migrants who do have the intention of integrating themselves in at least economically.

01:00:19

They view it as an economic zone. They want to take advantage of the economics and the milk and honey here. Very different scenario.

01:00:26

They have to be, you know, vetted in some way. There has to be a at least an agreement that they're not going to do harm to the population that does live here.

01:00:37

And they're the kind of people you want taking advantage of the systems and so forth that we've set up.

01:00:42

So how was that, Matthew? I know that was a packed a lot into that, but no, that's good. I have nothing further to add.

01:00:49

That's good. I'm glad to hear that. That means I was pretty thorough. Okay, man, there's a lot more questions coming in, but I think we need to probably get to just one or two more.

01:00:58

So here's one. Understanding that the president needs to uphold the law and serve the interests of the country does not mean we should be gleeful about deportation.

01:01:05

Too many Christians are enjoying this wrongly. Matthew, he's talking about you, man.

01:01:13

He's talking about you and that smile on your face when you realize Trump is actually getting rid of some bad guys.

01:01:19

I mean, I don't know what to say about that. I mean, it's vague. I could probably think of some examples, but.

01:01:27

When justice happens, when you have been screwed by an establishment that doesn't care about you or your interests for years and years on end, they completely abandoned the interests of the

01:01:37

Native population to import foreign workers, to completely alter and change the demographics of this country and to change the voting patterns and all these things, and you're getting completely screwed over and your entire inheritance is going down the drain,

01:01:49

I'm going to be happy about deportations. I couldn't say it better.

01:01:55

Being from Los Angeles originally and having family there and seeing what's happened to that great city,

01:02:01

I am very happy that there's some, a little measure of justice happening. I don't think it's going to be near what we need, but I'm glad that someone's trying to move the ball in the right direction.

01:02:12

And yeah, I love my fellow Americans and I hate to see what's happened. So question, how come diversity isn't a strength for Israel, but only for all the other white nations and how has diversity ever been a strength?

01:02:24

I don't know if that's actually true. I'm not certain about that. I mean, Israel, because we focus on the conflict that's happening in the

01:02:30

Gaza Strip with the Palestinians and so forth. But actually I do think that Israel does, obviously it's much more easy if you're an ethnic

01:02:39

Jew to gain Israel citizenship. And then of course, America does this crazy thing of allowing dual citizenship, which that shouldn't happen.

01:02:47

But I do think that you can become, I think there is a process where you can become an

01:02:52

Israel citizen and not be an ethnic Israeli. I think that does exist. I know, yeah,

01:02:57

I might get shot at for this one. I'm not entirely sure about that. I don't know. I haven't looked into it, but I do know that there are different Jewish populations there.

01:03:06

Like you have the Ashkenazis, the Sephardic, you have the Mizrahis and there is some conflict between them.

01:03:12

So I'm sure that there's a lot of Ashkenazis that may want to go the, you know how there's

01:03:18

Ausländer Raus, Germany for Germans, they may go the Israel for the Ashkenazis or whatever other ones you could do.

01:03:25

I don't know. I could totally see ethnic conflict happening in Israel between Jews at some point in the future, if they finally defeat the

01:03:31

Palestinians. So that can be interesting to look out for. So I just asked an

01:03:36

AI bot about this, because, you know, that's the only place you can get quick answers. And so who knows if it's accurate, but they say this is

01:03:45

GPT, by the way, that there's a law of return. Any Jew or someone with Jewish ancestry is eligible. So there is a preference there.

01:03:52

Non -Jews can apply for citizenship through a naturalization process, but they have to demonstrate certain things like a knowledge of Hebrew.

01:03:59

Hey, this is smart. We should do this kind of thing, right? Residing in Israel for at least three years out of the five years preceding the application and showing an intention to settle in Israel.

01:04:09

So that's interesting. So there is a process, but I don't know. I mean, I'm not familiar enough. If you go to Israel, do they have, you know, diversity is our strength mottos and slogans?

01:04:18

I have no clue. Probably not. I tend to think we know, we know why the question is being asked too, but we do.

01:04:24

I know I'm not naive to this. We're going to know we should feed the, we should feed it, John. Just kidding. We should have

01:04:30

Poland policies. That's what we should do. The Polish people have no immigrants and immigrants period, or just maybe it's no migrants and they are, they're doing pretty well, especially with not having terrorist attacks.

01:04:45

There's a, I don't know if you saw, there's a map I saw going around and it went viral where it showed like all the terrorist attacks in the last 10 years in Europe, Poland's this one area of the safe zone.

01:04:55

It's pretty funny. So anyway, to put a cap on the whole podcast though, we didn't get into the issue of legal migration and standards for legal migration, which

01:05:04

I was hoping maybe we'll save that. I think that the main takeaway here is that pastors who promote this kind of,

01:05:12

I think misplaced sympathy for those who are breaking the law, who are taking resources from American citizens and so forth, who don't actually have a quote unquote right to be here, who are breaking the laws.

01:05:26

I think that they should probably think about their fellow Americans and what is, what would be right for them?

01:05:34

What would be beneficial for them? And where does your allegiance actually lie? That's really the question. Where does your allegiance actually lie?

01:05:41

So you have a Christian allegiance for sure, but does that Christian allegiance require you to support other

01:05:48

Christians breaking laws? No, obviously not. And these are just laws. And I don't think there's much more to say than that, but I just,

01:05:57

I don't, I think what happens is there's just an emotional appeal and you get whipped up into a frenzy about ICE is going to come in and do something terrible and make your life, people's lives worse.

01:06:07

And we don't want that. If you think that that's the case, if that's where your sympathies lie, then the question should be how to, do you minimize or reduce or eliminate the damages to actual

01:06:22

Americans because of these policies? Because it's not just one person. It's not just one friend that you have.

01:06:27

This is a massive issue. We have millions and millions of people that have come across the border over a period of decades who have,

01:06:35

I mean, California is bankrupt. It's not all because of illegal migration, but that is a contributing factor quite a bit.

01:06:42

And the places where they've come in large numbers, it has changed. Near me, it's changed. I have sanctuary city just North of me.

01:06:47

It's changed that place. I can't really enjoy or go to places that even 10 years ago, I used to go to and enjoy quite a bit.

01:06:53

I can't go there anymore. It's not safe. It's trashy. The people there are, you know, engaged in noise pollution and sketchy just looks.

01:07:04

And my wife doesn't feel like it's, it's just a different place than the place that she grew up and that I grew up.

01:07:09

So this has a real impact and we should think through that. What's the impact to the real on the ground people who actually have lived there and want to pass it down and steward it for their children.

01:07:22

So I've said my piece, any icing on the cake to add to that or, or no more icing, just bear cake for this episode.

01:07:32

All right. Bear cake guys. You heard it from Matthew. Hey, keep praying for our country.

01:07:39

And just as a reminder, if you enjoy the podcast, please consider donating a true script.

01:07:46

They sponsor this podcast, go to true script .com and check out the conferences. We have this great conference coming up,

01:07:51

Christianity and the founding. We also, I just actually had the website. I got to just put it up. So hopefully later this week, we do have the men's retreat scheduled again for this year.

01:08:03

Uh, uh, well, yeah, I think it's the third weekend of, um, of actually, you know what,

01:08:08

I'm not even gonna cause I'm unsure now what weekend it is. I'm not going to give you a date, but it'll be live.

01:08:14

Hopefully at the end of this week and I will have a date, but, um, I'm going to give you the title though. The men's retreat for this year, true script sponsored men's retreat in the

01:08:21

Adirondack mountains is music and masculinity. And I'll flesh that out in a later episode, music and masculinity.

01:08:27

So there you go. All right. Well, God bless everyone. It was good being here for the American church and we'll talk to you later for Christ in his kingdom.