This should be short; for some of you it may even be sweet.
I’ll try to avoid propaganda terms and stick with moral truth: Everything we discuss has to stand before God, which is the same as saying it has to come from God and reflect His moral character. Western Civilization rejects virtually everything necessary to understand God, and presumes a range of notions about God that are ludicrous perversions of what He revealed. There are a lot of false gods in Western thinking.
You’ll notice the Bible says nothing that supports modern discussions of racism, for example. Most people who talk about that word think the Bible is racist itself, or they ignore large chunks of revelation so they can cherry pick the words they like to support their particular bogus ideas.
With God, the issue is unjustified animosity.
Wariness is not a sin; we are hard-wired to be wary of folks we don’t know. We are hard-wired to be even more wary of folks who come across as different, particularly when those differences represent something that has hurt us in the past. Granted, it’s easy to twist these natural inclinations, but the wariness is human nature that can’t be trained out of us. It’s a sin to suggest wariness is somehow evil.
I’ve already hammered home repeatedly that there is not a single morally just society in our world, nor can there be until we go back to the ANE feudal society. That was God’s design and any other idea is sin — period. So if you want to talk about reducing the wariness, it has to rest first and foremost on a shared tribal identity as defined by God. All the other demands thrown at us are inherently invalid.
So you and I face a world with no hope of ever getting it right because God’s answer is precluded in every way possible. What we have left is a crap we have face, a galactic-sized pool of lies. And we aren’t going to solve the world’s problems, or any nation’s problems, nor even our neighbor’s problems. We will be lucky if we can gain enough moral awareness to work through our own individual problems. No matter where we live, no matter what the ambient culture, we are aliens because of our commitment to heart-led service of the Creator. He is the source of all our understanding.
It’s just possible we might offer some glimmer of wisdom to folks who ask us. If you fail to grasp that there is a vast concerted evil plan at work in this world, then you do not understand God’s Word at all. It really doesn’t matter how you envision it as people colluding to hurt others; the Bible clearly states that there are cosmic demonic forces at work and they are as much purposeful intelligence as we need to grasp to proceed with the task of glorifying Our Lord in the midst of what we see around us.
So you can blame all the humans you like, but we can be sure Satan is pushing for some folks to make decisions that will hurt other people. And one of those decisions involved herding a bunch of folks from one part of the world to another part of the world. And a critical element in this plan is to destroy the place to which those folks are being herded. The radical difference between the culture at the destination and culture of the folks going there is impossible to understate.
And there is nothing particularly virtuous about either the folks there or the folks going there. We mustn’t forget that there is no society of which God approves anywhere on this earth. Some are a little closer than others, but not a one is righteous in God’s sight. Meanwhile, there will be a horrendous conflict in the clash of cultures that is entirely natural. Your calling and mission to glorify God means you will need to reach out to everyone in this mess while keeping an awareness of their particular moral needs. We will have mercy on all because we are the true aliens among humans, and we are the only ones truly at home in Creation.
We aren’t at war with people, despite whether they may regard themselves at war with us. We are at war with moral darkness; we reflect the light of God’s glory.
