Many of us find ourselves in situations at times in which we do not have detailed instructions on how to approach an issue we feel the need to resolve or at least address. This dilemma is particularly important to the Christian who would like to stay on the right side of his/her spiritual pursuit while facing an issue in which they are involved, but are unable to find specific scriptural guidance. This happens to us often, and when we get into a situation where we have to make the right decision, take the right action, or support the right policy we must sometimes infer from our Spiritual foundation and knowledge what we should do absent the specific situation being addressed in the Bible.

For instance, say you find a wallet on the sidewalk with some money in it. We live in a “finders keepers” world, so for most people, the wallet is fair game, but to the Christian who wants to do the right thing there’s much underlying information we have to draw on. The bible doesn’t specifically address finding a wallet, so the finder has to infer from “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and “Thou shalt not steal” in order to determine the right course of action, which of course would be to try and determine whose wallet it is and get it back to the owner with his money still in it. I knew one particularly generous man to whom this happened and in his quest to find information that would lead him to the rightful owner he saw family photos in the wallet that indicated the owner had children and there was sadly very little money in it, so in addition to taking the effort to find the owner, he slipped some bills of his own into it before giving it back to the man.

That event was a little walk into the woods, but the point is that we sometimes encounter situations in which we have to depend on whatever spiritual resources to which we have access in order to take the right action, action which demonstrates our desire to please God and thereby live up to His expectations. In our society our people have a tendency to conflate nationalism or patriotism with Godliness, so on issues like immigration, some of us equate immigration laws with a righteous need to support abominations like this ICE army which takes people from their families and incarcerates them in horrid conditions. The ICE agents have unnecessarily killed US citizens and for all practical purposes have the complete support of a large segment of American society. In situations such as these, if one were to stand back and look at the entirety of the operation, there can be nothing remotely resembling Christianity in what the ICE goons are doing. Again we can infer from our instruction to love our neighbor that this persecution of human beings is not right. Laws against aliens for simply being aliens are not of God.

This ICE travesty just happens to be the extreme end of racist laws of men, but in the case of “illegal” aliens, the Bible spells this one out, alleviating the requirement to infer how we should treat foreigners in our country:

[Malachi 3:5]:

“And I will come near you for judgment;
I will be a swift witness
Against sorcerers,
Against adulterers,
Against perjurers,
Against those who exploit wage earners and widows and orphans,
And against those who turn away an alien—
Because they do not fear Me,”
Says the Lord of hosts.

In this passage the Scripture clearly states that we should not round up those who are strangers in our land and persecute them. If a person is sufficiently racist to go against the Holy Scriptures in order to satisfy his/her racist inclinations, they should at least be aware that is precisely what they are doing. A lot of Americans make the mistake of trying to infer from the laws of man how to deal with a policy that God explicitly addresses. Please do not “infer” from what this post is trying to say that this writer does not recognize the complicated problems of immigration, just that we are not using our God-given judgement and are allowing racist inclinations to dictate how we approach it.

We have a tendency to lay claim here on the earth to things that belong to God. [Psalm 24:1]: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein. A careful reading of this scripture reveals that everything, including the people of the earth, belong to God. The land of the nation that is America does not belong to any race or tribe of people, as the land of all nations, it belongs to God and we who (temporarily) possess land or other things here are simply serving as stewards of God’s property – nothing more. As responsible stewards we need to be careful to obey the requirements that God lays on us, such as sharing the parts of earth we possess with others of God’s people.

It is extremely important to be responsible to heed the commandments of our Lord instead of allowing our preconceived prejudices to influence how we set about following our spirituality. There is a tendency to try and infer from laws of man what God intends for us to think and do. We have no right to do so, it is reckless and irresponsible to presume that just because there are (presently and temporarily) some (usually racist) man-made rules that govern who are allowed into – or turned away from – this land, that somehow there is Godly support for persecuting them. God says in the above verse that turning away an alien is an indication that those who do so do not fear Him, and if that is so, someone is in for a rude awakening.

We live in an age in which politicians are elected precisely because of their positions on these kinds of issues and it speaks volumes about the public who elects them as to the effort they make to obey God. People actually vote for politicians who promise to turn away the alien – a direct violation of God’s commandment, so they have no excuse. Jesus even warned the Pharisees about substituting commandments of men for God’s commandments: [Matthew 15:9]: “And in vain they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

There are instances in our lives where an issue isn’t specifically spelled out and in those we must rely on our spiritual guidance, our spiritual bearing, so to speak in order to infer from what we do know from the scripture and base our course of action on such knowledge. I feel comfortable in saying that we all know there are times when we have to consult with that law God has written on our hearts, or even with a preacher for spiritual guidance for those times. We must, however, abstain from the tendency to attempt to infer God’s will from the laws of men. As this age winds down, we find that more and more the laws of men are at odds with God’s commandments and we must trust the Spirit of God to guide us, but when the scriptures plainly state what we should or should not do as in the above Malachi verse we see a situation where man’s law and God’s law conflict – in such cases, if one chooses to follow and support man’s law, then he finds himself at odds with God’s, and this threatens to put Christians in a precarious situation as it relates to our faith. It has happened before and is certain to happen again. Someday there will be a law (of man) that will require us to take a mark and worship a man who will claim to be God – and it might not be that far away…

May the blessings of the Almighty Father find and keep us.

MK