Executive Order Citizenship

With Obama’s Executive Order this week, the immigration and citizenship questions are back in the news – that is, if they left the news. We have been hearing about these problems for decades with no solution forthcoming. Now our Beloved Leader has decided to simply go around Congress and try to resolve the issue on His god-like own. Estimates are running to around 1.4 million foreign nationals that have been given a reprieve, as long as they obtain an easily-gotten work permit. That is not much of a standard. There are a couple of other qualifications like, they cannot be convicted criminals and they have to fit a specific, but large, age profile. Beyond these however, they can renew their work permits forever, or until the earth falls into the sun, whichever comes first. The next step will be to make them voters, thus sealing their status as a new block of supporters for…Hmmm.

 I find it difficult to write any Biblically based commentary on the citizenship issue. This is not because there is nothing to say. It is because there is so much thought, much of it contrary to current American beliefs, that it is daunting to know where to start. Biblical ideals on citizenship are so distant from our normal minds’ conceiving that we would literally have to throw out almost everything we believe if we were to agree with God’s word in perceiving the situation.

 Our forefathers, specifically the pilgrims settling Massachusetts, arriving in 1620, understood that they should not attempt their enterprise without an agreement for, “a civil Body Politick “, so they referred. Their agreement for self-governance was composed of exactly 202 words, which were sufficient to govern a nation as they arrived on a raw continent. They wrote that they had taken their voyage, “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country.” Just those words alone are spilling an abundance of thoughtful ideals as they define the establishment of our nation. They further wrote that, “…in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid.” Hence they established the nation as a group of people covenanted together under the Christian God to further their Biblically-based ideals.

 All of this is patterned after the renewing of Godly government found in 2 Kings 11:17, “Then Jehoiada (The High Priest) made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people, that they should be the Lord’s people, also between the king and the people.” So this is the pattern for righteous civil rule. The people covenant together with God and their rulers to obey Him and live together as covenant people. The end goal is to glorify God. God’s law is the law of the nation which is why the pilgrims could simply agree to live in submission to God and their leaders without writing out every statute in their compact.

 It may seem I have gotten astray here but I have not. I brought all this up because we are now a people with no sufficient, nor binding purpose, and no covenant. We have abandoned those early commitments and gone searching for something better. As a nation we have been on that search for perhaps 200 plus years. We left behind not only our understanding of Godly morals and salvation, but our former grasp of what it means to be a, “body politick.” We have sojourned through a humanist desert of independence from both our God and His available wisdom. As a nation we accept as food any rubbish they choose to feed us. Somebody preached the idea of the melting pot thinking that new-comers should slowly become like us and we could have a great nation. One big problem however, was that at the same time, the nation was forgetting its Biblical roots. They became like us as we became Godless. There is no good future in this. We became covenant breakers, worshipping a foolish dream of individualized man, who could also make his own laws- unbiblical laws that is. We slowly quit the covenant and journeyed into the nether land of humanist libertarianism. Libertarianism can never work because society needs to be based on Godly law, Biblical truth, and Christian community. Without these anchors no group of people can be blessed, prosperous, and at peace with one another. This is why non-Christian nations are universally oppressive and so often in turmoil. The Apostle James wrote, “You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. And you are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel.”

 Our nation no longer thinks of itself as a Christian people covenanted together for civil government and traveling together as a community. We are instead a radically disassociated conglomerate. We are essentially at war with one another and have no common purpose. We cannot answer the questions about citizenship because we have quit every meaningful definition of it. Now our political leaders seem to believe we can be a nation that rejects the melting aspect and be intermingled with anybody and everybody. This is a formula for the death of our nation. We are already directionless, becoming cursed, and living in rebellion to our God. We cannot rightly measure who may stay and who must leave, because we no longer know who we are or where we are going. We have been propagandized into believing that Christian society and government are unjust and cruel. Yet we gloss over the fact that the last century was the bloodiest century in human history. It was the century of humanist dominion. It was the death of millions.Why then are we afraid to assert Christian civilization as the answer to our many troubles, including immigration questions?

 As a body, we Christians are a fearful people. We fear man but do not fear God. We do not believe our God nor His word as it applies to nations. The road back is to begin learning the grand principles of Godly government found in His Old and New Testaments. We can recovenant with God and He will restore our nation. When we redirect our faith and obedience these issues about citizenship will be much more easily resolved.

For Christian Culture,

 Don Schanzenbach  6-23-12