Understanding Immigration and Migration

Galatians 5

We are walking in today: Weekend Meditation--Understanding Immigration and Migration

Witness stranger throughout the Bible: H1616 ger--sojourner; a temporary inhabitant, a newcomer lacking inherited rights; of foreigners in Israel, though conceded rights


Gen 15:13 And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger H1616 in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;


The Torah testifies.....................
Exo 12:49 One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger H1616 that sojourneth among you.

The prophets proclaim..................
Isa 14:1 For the LORD will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers H1616 shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob.

The writings bear witness.............
Jos 8:35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the congregation of Israel, with the women, and the little ones, and the strangers H1616 that were conversant among them.

Psa 119:19 I am a stranger H1616 in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.

Chapter 8-Understanding Immigration and Migration

When I look around this country that has new people from other countries coming in, whether legal or illegal because the governmental system of their original country is not working. Of course that is not only happening here in the US but other countries also. Every week people are moving and changing countries, seeking to improve their lives. If things work out they stay and we call them immigrants.

These people are willing to leave behind their parents, aunts and uncles, their cousins and their friends; they make many sacrifices to uproot their children and adjust to a new culture and language. Emigrating gives them no guarantees of security or permanency, but they risk it anyway.

Although this country is attractive to many of these people, the system here is failing a lot of families. They live on the edge of survival, anxious and disheartened about the future.

There are so many stories of hardships you can find several new ones on the news every night. Even the best forms of government that people have decided are not working all that well. The very countries that are attracting the most immigrants have a lot of problems. For example, countries built on the ideology of free enterprise and capitalism have produced one of the highest extremes of rich and poor people, along with the problems such as crime that come with that disparity in wealth.


I believe that our system of government is one of the best, but our safety nets have a lot of holes in them. Almost everybody is living on borrowed money, and they are chasing their tails trying to pay it back. Part of the reason is that democracy itself is built on distrust. That is why we have the “separation of powers” in the branches of government and that is why almost everything turns into a power struggle. Most new laws or improvements come with a downside.


Desire For A Better Country

Sometimes I think the Most High is laughing at the governing authorities as they strive to make impossible situations better. In fact, I know He is. Look at this Psalm:

Psalm 2:1-2, 4-6 King James Version (KJV) 1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, 4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. 5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. 6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

Built into human nature is this desire for a better county. Yet no county we have ever had in the world can measure up to the King’s country.

This search for a better country is in vain if you limit your search to the countries on the face of the Earth. In fact, the national situation from country to country is so changeable these days that the sooner you shift your allegiance to the only country that will never fail you, the better. We need to follow our desire for a better country straight to the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a good thing that there is such a thing as dual citizenship, because that is what you and I are going to have to settle for as long as we are living on this planet.

As long as your citizenship is on the Earth alone, you can be only as secure as the country you belong to. Changing your immigration status and adopting Kingdom citizenship along with your earthly citizenship is the sole way to truly improve your lot. “My Most High shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory by Yahusha HaMaschiach” (Philippians 4:19), wrote the apostle Paul. The King is the richest of the rich, and the people who step under His kingship can expect nothing but the best and the most consistent provision, starting immediately.


Aliens

Immigrants are aliens. Not aliens from outer space, but rather people who came to the host country as strangers, often alone and often without many resources.

The Bible says that Abraham considered himself an alien. So did Moses. Along with him, so did Joshua and Caleb. Centuries later, Esther was an alien in the nation where she was queen. Deborah was an alien. Isaiah was an alien. What it comes down to is that we are all aliens. None of us came from here; we were sent here from someplace else.

In the letter to the Hebrews, we find a paragraph that looks back through history. It is about faith, but it is also about aliens. Look at what it says:
Hebrews 11:13-16 King James Version (KJV) 13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. 15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had the opportunity to have returned. 16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.

You and I are like them--citizens of a heavenly country, but aliens from the point of view of the Earth. We are people who happen to be located on Earth for the time being. At one time, we were separate from HaMashiach, excluded from “citizenship” and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without the Most High in the world. But now in Yahusha HaMashiach you were once far away and have been brought near by the blood of Mashiach. (Ephesians 2:12-13)

Nevermind what country you live in; none of them will be an improvement over your main country, which is Heaven. So although you may be a citizen in good standing where you live, you are also an alien there.

We need to recognize this fact before we have to find it out the hard way, migrating from place to place in search of the right one. You know as well as I do that sometimes migration does not solve a thing. One of the biggest failure stories in the Bible is the story of the Prodigal Son, told in Luke chapter 15. It is a story about a willful migration, broken hearts, regret, and repentance. Like all of Yahusha’s parables, it is ultimately a story about the Kingdom. Here’s how the story goes.

A widower had two sons who were young men. The younger son demanded his half of his father’s estate and he took off for another country, expecting to find a better life there. Once he got there he squandered his money foolishly and brought himself to ruin. Not only that, but the country he was living in started to have a famine. He was desperate, so this Jewish boy hired himself out to a local pig farmer, who made him carry pig slop all day long. He was hungry, and that made him even more desperate. Finally, he came to his senses and realized that he would have to eat his pride and return to his father, from who he had fled.

This is a lot like the human condition, don’t you think? Starting with Adam, we have willfully removed ourselves from our Abba’s house, even though the earthly country we find ourselves in is in famine, relatively speaking. The best the world can give us is pig food, and not enough of that. We can’t trust the jobs we have or the supply of resources. No matter how wealthy the world looks on the surface, it is bankrupt.

The young man set his face toward home, rehearsing to himself what he would say when he met his father again.

“I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants’” (Luke 15:18-19)

But he never got to finish his little speech, because his father was so glad to have him back. The father quickly ordered up the best robe and new sandals for his feet and put a ring on his finger. He told the servants to kill the calf they had been fattening for slaughter and to throw a big party to welcome home the son. The father restored his younger son to full sonship status in spite of all he had done.

If you know the story, you know that the older brother did not like this at all. In fact, he was angry about it. It is similar to what happens in our churches sometimes, when hardworking, loyal church members feel unrewarded for all of their efforts and refuse to celebrate when someone they perceive as a slacker gets too much attention. This older brother was legalistic and judgemental.

He had always tried to do everything his father told him to but he never expected any party--and in his jealousy he was determined not to participate at his undeserving brother’s welcome-home party. He did not realize that he was every bit as foolish as his younger brother, but in a less obvious way. He did not know that the Most High is not impressed by his lifelong hard work, even if it was in the Most High’s (or his father’s) name.

Of course most of us do not want to identify ourselves with the older brother, but what it comes down to is that we are a lot like him after all. How does this apply to the Kingdom of the Most High? Our Father, the King, is always welcoming his sons back, and we need to get used to it. Better still, we need to become better aware of our own status as a son in the Kingdom, so we do not have to run away to find out we left something good, and so we can live to the fullest as Kingdom citizens right here and now.

Once You Were Far Away
You and I are aliens either way. I know which kind of alien I want to be, how about you? I want to be an alien in my earthly country because of my Kingdom citizenship, and not the other way around. This is a very real choice and the Bible talks about it in so many words.

As soon as you and I receive our citizenship paper from Yahusha HaMashiach, we are restored back to heavenly citizenship status. From then on we will be aliens and foreigners in our earthly country, but we do not mind.

Our objective now becomes learning a new way to live. We have been restored not only in a legal sense to full citizenship, but also, like the son in the story. To full family status as well. It takes a while to unlearn a familiar culture and to learn a new one. In our case, we need to learn to live by faith instead of by sight. All our lives, we have been conditioned to live by sight. When problems come up, we look for solutions and we worry lest we fail to find them. We lose our jobs and we panic. We get a dire medical diagnosis and we despair. It can take years to learn a new way of thinking--which is the way of thinking that we were meant for all along.

In our original state, we were not worriers. Kingdom people live by discerning and faith, not by their five human senses and their wits. Nothing could be farther from the truth, because we have come back to our family. Not only have we obtained new constitutional rights, we have got the Most High who is Echad!! He welcomes us with open arms, regardless of where we have come from, taking care of us.

Our pig-yard rags get exchanged for new garments, and --assuming we decide to stick around the abide by the rules this time--we can have everything we need, forever. We have obtained not only our legal citizenship rights but much more, because we are related to our Abba.

Once you are back in the Kingdom, you no longer have to worry about anything. Every problem will be solved by our Abba.

Once you are back in the Kingdom, you no longer have to worry about anything. Every problem will be solved by your Abba’s government. All the wealth is common. It is a great country. Oh, and I should mention that the currency in your country is love. Everything gets paid for by love. Faith works by love in Kingdom country (Galatians 5:6).


Illegal Immigrants In The Church
Now to counterbalance that good news, I have some serious news for you: not everyone who seems to be a citizen of the Kingdom is one. It can be quite a shock to discover that one place you thought Kingdom citizens would not feel like aliens, in the church. Which is not much different from everywhere else. In fact, the church is full of illegal immigrants, people who do not even know that they are only pretending to be Kingdom citizens. They carry Bibles, dress up in nice clothes, and act nice. But they are illegal because they do not have Kingdom passports.


The biggest illegal immigrant that Yahusha ever met was Nicodemus, the Pharisee. (John 3:1-21) If you will remember, Pharisees were religious specialists. They dressed right for the job; they prayed many times a day; organized services. But when Nicodemus met Yahusha, he had one question: “How do I enter your country?” He knew he was missing something.


Yahusha told him about being born again, and we will talk more about that in the next chapter. But for now I just want to point out how many Nicodemuses we have in our churches. They perform their religious duties well, but they have no relationship with Abba. They talk the talk, but they have not switched their citizenship to the Kingdom.

They are a little bit like people who go to the Bahamas and try to act like the local people to fit in. They walk down Bay Street in front of the government buildings. They buy something from a shop. They eat some Bahamian food. They try to talk like a Bahamian, ‘yeah mon…’ but none of that brings them even close to being a Bahamian citizen.

Some of these church people have been religious for a long time, but they have not changed kingdoms yet. Others may have been born again at some point, but they have not moved into thinking like citizens of their new country. They need to investigate what it means to become legal immigrants in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is never too late but the sooner they do it, the better.

This King Wants You
The King does not sit idly while illegal immigrants erode the integrity for His realm. In fact, He does not hesitate to display the power of His Kingdom when necessary.

The apostle Paul, whose name used to be Saul, was an “illegal immigrant” at first, someone who was zealous in the extreme for his religion but who did not understand that he was fighting against the Kingdom of the Most High. Having been a student of the Rabbi Gamaliel, who was considered one of the top pharisaical scholars of the day, Saul was well-educated and motivated to make his fellow Jews follow every last one of the Hebrew laws. As a native of Tarsus, which was not a Jewish city, he seems to have been more determined than others to be the best Jew possible, and he was also a Roman citizen.

Saul could quote Greek and Roman and poets. He had been exposed to a broader culture than many other Pharisees, but he was very narrow-minded when it came to the followers of “the Way,” the name the early believers were known by. In fact, he hated the Way with a passion. He felt it was distorting and perverting Judaism, and he was determined to defend his faith from what he considered a dangerous sect.

Using his influence in high circles, he obtained permission to hunt down followers of the Way. He wants to destroy them before they become too influential. He knew he needed to hurry. The original band of eleven men had grown to a hundred and twenty people in the upper room that claimed to have had an encounter with this so-called Mashiach Yahusha after He rose from the dead. Then it had grown to five thousand and it was spreading faster than anybody had expected. The “cult” was infiltrating the synagogues and people talked about miracles. Somebody had to stop them, and Saul wanted to be part of that effort.


He joined forces with others who were persecuting the Way and they killed some of Yahusha’s followers. They drove other followers out of Jerusalem and nearby cities and scattered them across the Roman Empire. To hunt them down, Saul went to the high priest, “breathing out murderous threats against the Most High’s diciples” (Acts 9:1), in order to get a letter of permission to travel to the great trade city of Damascus northeast of Jerusalem.

He and his companions made it into the city, but not as they had expected to. Before they arrived, this is what happened to Saul:
Acts 9:3-9 King James Version (KJV) 3 And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: 4 And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? 5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. 6 And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. 7 And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. 8 And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. 9 And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.

While he was there, the Most High spoke to one of the disciples who lived in the city, an ordinary man named Ananias. He told him to go to a certain street and to ask for

Saul of Tarsus, who would be expecting him. Ananias was fully aware of how dangerous Saul was, but he obeyed:
Acts 9:17-18 King James Version (KJV) 17 And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. 18 And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

Saul’s baptism signaled his switch to the Kingdom of the Most High. His miraculous conversion changed him from being a legalistic, angry, defensive Pharisee into a tireless evangelist for the Way. He had an assignment to fulfill for the King. He was humble and contrite about his past. Soon he became to be known by a different name, Paul, which means “small” or “little.”

He never looked back toward his former status as a leader of the Jews. He had become as much a full citizen of the Kingdom as those who had walked with the Yahusha in person before His crucifixion.

Your Own Immigration
Although you and I will probably not experience such a dramatic conversion, we are no less called to an assignment in the Kingdom. We are called to become Kingdom immigrants.

It is my prayer that every leader who hears this teaching would be able to capture the spirit of the Kingdom and understand its culture and benefits more than ever before. May nothing stop you in your search of full citizenship. May you be eager to leave behind your old loyalties and seek adoption into the only country that can guarantee both your present and your future.

May nothing get in the way of its life-changing impact. May you attract others to it. (When people ask why you are different, you will have to confess that you are from a different country, because it shows in your actions and your lifestyle that is so high and so unique that people will want to join you in citizenship in your new country. May they ask you how to get in--which is the topic of the next session in this series.
Shema selah no longer walk in an alien or stranger status, return to your inheritance from the Kingdom of Heaven!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lHC_612b5Y