The story of Jonah is included in the Minor Prophets, and it has historically been seen as a wonderful Messianic narrative about grace and redemption. However, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention – which heads up an Open Borders immigration project funded by Geroge Soros – says the story is about immigration.
In a blog post today at the ERLC website, Russell Meek asserts that the story of Jonah is about how we should be kind to the alien and the sojourner.
If you’re wondering who the immigrant is in the story of Jonah the answer is nobody. That’s actually not a part of the Old Testament tale at all. But for those hell-bent on promoting Soros’ immigration agenda, all the Bible is seen through the lens of the ‘oppressed.’ Viewing the Scripture through the lens of the oppressed, marginalized, or downtrodden is actually a tenet of Liberation Theology, founded by Jesuit Marxists in South America and tweaked in America by Black Liberation Theologian, James Cone.
Meek writes…
Jonah has taught me a lot of lessons, though, and most recently he’s been showing me God’s concern for the folks who live outside of my national borders.
Meek then extrapolates missionary zeal for foreigners outside [our] national border and baits-and-switched the topic to how we are supposed to view immigrants.
Of course, evangelicals already believe strongly in sending missionaries to people all over the world. The SBC’s International Mission Board largely withdrew from Central America (where most ‘refugees’ to America come from) in the last twenty years, but denominational leaders in the SBC seem hesitant to acknowledge their own abandonment of the region which has certainly not helped the humanitarian crisis there.
Meek continues the exegetical two-step…
The Bible is pretty clear about the importance of loving the foreigner, who is often included in lists alongside orphans and widows. The reasoning, according to God, is that “you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” I’ve understood that for a long time and nodded my head in agreement.
Keep in mind that the only sojourner in the story of Jonah was Jonah, and that’s because he was a missionary. But watch how Meek applies that eisegetically to the American illegal immigration status.
He goes on…
Welcome a stranger into your home, host a dinner for people in your neighborhood, make a friend at the grocery store and invite them to lunch, or find refugee communities in your city and get involved. It is much easier to judge, mischaracterize, and even fear people who look, think, and speak differently if we’ve never spent time with them.
There aren’t easy policy answers for the complex immigration issues we have seen in the news lately. But perhaps we could stop for a moment to reflect on Jonah’s wrong-headed application of his theology and consider whether we are similarly misapplying our theology in how we view those outside our border.
There is literally no parallel between Jonah preaching to the Ninevites in Ninevah and American immigration policy toward illegal aliens who invade our borders without documentation and, as statistics show, often with trafficked women and children or with criminal proclivities.
If anything, the story of Jonah demonstrates why we should be sending our missionaries to foreign nations. Meek’s surface level and sophomoric extrapolations imply that Jonah was somehow racially biased against the Ninevites or had irrational bigotry. In reality, Jonah’s antipathy was due to Assyria’s attempts to invade and conquer Israel. It had nothing to do with surface-level bigotry.
By the way, when Assyrians invaded Israel in 721 BC, God’s people fought back under his orders and fortified Jerusalem (these accounts are given in Chronicles, Isaiah, and II Kings). God had Israel defend itself from an Assyrian invasion, while yet evangelizing Assyrian cities, like Ninevah.
Beware of this Scripture-twisting from evangelicals who are rented by George Soros to push his open borders agenda. It’s really disgusting that people would mistreat the Bible this way.
