Posts Tagged: foreigners

“Fair Distribution of the Land and ‘Those People’ ”

On May 13, 2019 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

The Old Testament has a lot to say about “foreigners.”  (Where I grew up, in Adams County, Ohio, we called them “foregners.”  This word referred to anyone from the next county over.)  But, however you spell and pronounce word, the Old Testament has a lot to say about “those people.”

And often, it is “those people,” with the emphasis on the word “those.”  They are the others, the ones not like us, the outsiders.

I have been something of an outsider all my life.  When I was in grade school, my fellow students would ask me, “Where you from?!” in a tone of voice that was more an accusation than it was a question.  The truth was that I lived on a farm, about four miles outside of town.  Apparently, this was far enough to make me one of those people.

So, the Bible warns against intermarrying with foreigners.  Even the great (and wise?) King Solomon married a bunch of foreigners, and started worshiping his wives’ gods.  He went so far as to sacrifice some of his children to these gods.  We need to acknowledge that relationships with outsiders can be quite problematic.  This was known long before “those people” began flying airplanes into skyscrapers.

However, the Bible has other, more positive things to say about foreigners, too.  I stumbled across one a couple of days ago when I was listening through the book of Ezekiel.  I thought that I had heard it wrong, but I went back for another look (including in Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament), and it was absolutely unequivocal.

It is in a vision that Ezekiel had of the restored boundaries of the land of Israel.  Many folks from Judah were in exile in Babylon.  Israel (which was what the Northern Kingdom was called after it had split off from Judah in 930 B.C.) had been gone for 150 years.

And yet, from the exile in Babylon—which Ezekiel shared with his people—Ezekiel looked forward to a restored Israel and Judah.

“So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. 22 You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the sojourners who reside among you and have had children among you. They shall be to you as native-born children of Israel. With you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. 23 In whatever tribe the sojourner resides, there you shall assign him his inheritance, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 47:21-23, English Standard Version).

What?!  The foreigner is supposed to get an inheritance, just like the Israelites?!  You’ve got to be kidding me!

Nope.  That is what it says.

Now admittedly, this is a vision, not a description of immediate reality.  But before anything can become a reality, it has to be a vision.  And to become reality, I must act on the vision.

I’m not quite ready for completely open borders.  In any case, it is not likely, with our current anti-immigrant mindset, that I will have a huge impact on national policy.  But I can begin where I am.  I can begin by sharing the little inheritance that I call “mine”.  I can be generous with my wife’s and my house.  I can share the produce from my garden—assuming that it actually produces some.

Visions are big.  Beginnings are small.  But we all have to begin somewhere.

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“UNSWERVING LOVE”

On September 21, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“ ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.’ 18 And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.” (Ruth 1:16-18)

These words frequently used to be spoken in weddings—and rightly so!  They represent the best mindset for beginning and continuing a good, loving, committed relationship.  The fact that such solemn words often prove to be a hollow promise does not indicate their hollowness, but our own hollowness.

Of course, the words were not originally written for a wedding.  They were spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law.  And they were spoken by the daughter-in-law after her husband was dead!

This makes the words even more striking.  After her husband is dead, and when Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, is on her way back to her homeland, her foreign, Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, utters these words of unswerving love.

Now, Ruth was a Moabitess, a fact that the narrator of this story hammers into our ears and brains.  In the four short chapters of this book, we are told again and again that Ruth was a Moabitess.

How’s come?

If you do even a brief study of the relationship between Moab and Israel/Judah in the Old Testament, you will quickly discover that, as a general rule, these two neighboring countries did not get along with one another.  That is an understatement.  They hated one another would be closer to the truth.

And yet, there is Ruth, and her unswerving love.  As it turns out, she is a great grandmother of King David.

The words of Ruth are a wonderful expression of her unswerving love for Naomi.  Ruth’s words were backed up by a wonderfully unswerving life.  These words are a wonderful challenge and example for us all.

And yet, I heard something this morning in this ancient story, something that was not explicitly said.  I heard God speaking, not only about one human’s unswerving love for another human being, but also about God’s unswerving love for us all.

You can read the long and haunting poem by Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” to know one man’s struggle to evade the unswerving love of God.  Or you can read the Old Testament, concerning God’s unswerving love for the people of Israel.

Or you can read the New Testament concerning God’s unswerving love for all mankind.  Apparently, even death by crucifixion cannot cause God’s love to swerve.

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