What the Bible Says About Borders (Part 3)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Hungary-born globalist billionaire George Soros have squared off on the issue of borders and immigration.
Orban is concerned for the spiritual and cultural survival of his nation and others in the European Union.
In a March speech, Orban decried the globalist political correctness that tries to forbid him and other European leaders from pointing out "that the masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions."
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In fact, he continued, the new arrivals "have already built up their own new, separate world for themselves, with its own laws and ideals, which is forcing apart the thousand-year-old structure of Europe."
Orban concluded his speech by calling to mind Hungary's ideals that "are the pulse driving the life force of the nation, and the intellectual and spiritual blood flow of the Hungarian people ... Let us give thanks that this may be so, let us give thanks that finally the Lord of History has led us onto this path. Soli Deo Gloria!"
George Soros sees it differently. First, because he is an atheist, there is no "Deo" — no God — to acknowledge as "Lord of History" and to glorify. Following Orban's speech, Soros emailed Bloomberg Business that Orban's plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle," while his plan "treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle."
Humanist utopianism fails to grasp that borders are essential for the preservation of spiritual, social and cultural quality that benefits refugees along with all others.
God's intentional design did not include a governing structure in which one human dominated another. Yet He gave His image-bearers freedom. Humanity chose evil over good, and human governments became necessary to keep people from destroying one another and themselves.
Government, wrote James Madison, is "the greatest of all reflections on human nature ... If men were angels, no government would be necessary ... In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." (Federalist 51)
That latter challenge is met by a spiritual "border" — Transcendence. The American founders acknowledged that fundamental human rights came from the "Creator." Therefore those who govern realize they are accountable to the transcendent Creator. In humanist globalism, this crucial border of transcendent accountability is missing.
God, as part of the world's governance, ordained that there be borders. After Cain murdered Abel, he was cast from the region of Eden, into Nod, "the land of wandering," a borderless place. Cain was terrified. God puts a "mark" — a boundary of sorts — on Cain so others cannot violate him. (Genesis 4:13-15)
The Ten Commandments establish the moral borders that make civilization possible. Winston Churchill saw the Sermon on the Mount as the foundation of ethics, and the Ten Commandments as the greatest base for the establishment of morality and law.
God also provided for geopolitical as well as spiritual, social, legal, and relational borders.
"When the Most High assigned lands to the nations, when he divided up the human race, he established the boundaries of the peoples," says Deuteronomy 32:8.
"Do not move the ancient boundary stones which your fathers have set," says Proverbs 22:28.
St. Paul tells Athenian philosophers that God Himself "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God ..." (Acts 17:26-27)
But boundaries were for inclusion as well as exclusion. "Strangers and aliens" were to be received in Israel, and were to be treated with fairness and justice. But they were also to be taught the values and worldview on which the civilization and nation rested.
Borders in the chaotic world are a matter of common sense. Why, then, the globalist urge to make the world borderless? The answer may lie in a deeply spiritual context.
Those who view history through the Bible know the spirit of antichrist is already at work in the world. (1 John 4:3). "Anti" in biblical Greek not only means "against," but "in the place of." The spirit of antichrist is opposition and imposition. The last thing the antichrist wants is borders because he desires to establish his tyranny over the whole. A borderless world facilitates that aim.
God's design of the world is that The Christ would be, in Orban's words, "the Lord of history." He brings the highest form of civilization, characterized by righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Christ does not seek a tyrannically imposed uniformity, but a splendid display of diversity, cultivated in bordered places.
The antichrist spirit is the driver of anticivilization: in the place of righteousness, injustice and evil; rather than peace, fragmentation, division, conflict; rather than joy in the Holy Spirit, human-contrived "happiness" that soon becomes self-absorbed.
The Christ is as the conductor of a great orchestra. He wants to be freely chosen, not force Himself onto the podium. He wants to pull all the diversity of the human symphony into one glorious strain under His baton. Strings are bordered from wind, and wind from percussion, but it is the harmonization and syncopation arising from each that forms the music of the whole.
Borders are as necessary for that harmony as the bars in a musical score separating one measure from another. Remove them, and there is cacophony. Make the world borderless and there is chaos, conducted, not by The Christ that Viktor Orban calls "the Lord of History," but by the "Man of Lawlessness." (2 Thessalonians 2)
This is why we must take the theology of borders seriously before we consider abolishing the boundaries.
