Tag: Christianity

Why I Write About Immigration Issues

The truth is complicated, but God’s heart is certain

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Mexican Border

I have friends who keep me honest, and I am grateful for that. They don’t always agree with me. In fact, they often disagree with me on various things, but they remain my friends, and I remain grateful for them.

Anyone who follows me on social media knows that I am virtually fixated on the issue of immigration right now. It may seem like a new thing—that all of a sudden I have become woke, liberal, or progressive. Some people who don’t know me well, I am sure, think that about me. The truth is more complicated than that.

I am a lifelong Republican and conservative by nature. I’m also a follower of Jesus, though, and I find that Jesus defies modern political categories and stereotypes. If Jesus looks to me like a Republican or Democrat, “my Jesus” probably is not the real Jesus, and my politics have likely influenced my view of Jesus.

Many people might look at my posts on immigration and feel like I have abandoned all sense of patriotism and national pride. They might think I have become a hater of the United States of America. Again, the truth is more complicated than that.

I grew up with a love for my country and a strong sense of patriotism and pride. I was educated, like most people my age, on the goodness of the United States of America, celebrating Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving this time of year with idyllic depictions of pioneers living in harmony with Native Americans as our forefathers lived out their manifest destiny in keeping with a divine mandate from our creator to form the greatest, freest country on earth.

I still believe we live in the greatest, freest country on earth, but the truth is messier and more complicated than I once believed. I am grateful for a strong sense of the goodness of the United States of America I learned as a child, and I appreciate the positives in that idealized memory of America. But it’s more complicated than that.

Humanity is nothing if not messy. We are fallen, sinful creatures. We know that, but our idyllic, comforting images die hard.

The pioneers displaced the Native Americans who were here long before us. They were pushed out of their ancestral lands. They were marched in a “trail of tears” to godforsaken territories where they have had to scrape out a meager subsistence ever since then in the literal dust of the barren, rocky places to which they were consigned.

Slavery is a pox on our idyllic history. That it was supported, promoted, and defended by Christians who sought comfort in the Bible while they exploited, oppressed, and dehumanized people for the color of their skin (and wealth they could generate) is a testament to the utter bankruptcy of human beings – even religious ones.

Let’s be honest about this, also: religious people who use their religion to justify their unjust ways are not doing anything different than non-religious people who are unjust. It’s just more insidious for the fact that they contort love of neighbor to love of self.

I have learned to be honest and not to look away from these contrary images of our history and our past. God calls for repentance, and repentance requires honesty. Repentance and heart change are the only proper response to the evil of idolatry and injustice.

Honesty does not mean I do not love my country, and it does not mean that I am not thankful for being born here. I still believe that the good we have brought into the world is not any less good. It’s just complicated, and I want us to live up to the ideals we ascribe to.

In case you could not tell, I am not an idealist, though I certainly do have idealistic tendencies. Not that I am any different than anyone else. We are complicated and complex creatures; human beings. Despite the polarized simplicity of social media that pigeon holes us into two-dimensional, stereotypical ideologues, people and societies are complex.

On the issue of immigration, my “awakening” happened more than a decade ago – in 2014. During the Obama administration, as I watched the Syrian refugee crisis unfold in the news, I realized that didn’t have a robust biblical view on the subject of immigration. I have written about this often, so please bear with me if you have read what I have written before.

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An Exploration of God’s Hiddenness in the Bible

The Bible on the hiddenness of God

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Divine hiddenness is an argument suggesting that God does not exist. According to J.L. Schellenberg, if a perfectly loving God exists, He would desire a genuine relationship with every person He creates. A loving relationship requires, at minimum, awareness that God exists, so a perfectly loving God would make Himself known. Some sincere and willing people who want to know God are unable to find sufficient evidence that He exists to believe in Him. Therefore, either God does not exist or He is not perfectly loving.

I don’t buy it. I think the argument is flawed, but other people have provided robust responses to this argument, so I am not going to attempt to provide a counter argument here. I am also unconvinced that arguments are the best way to achieve understanding.

On that ground, I am intrigued by the hiddenness of God, and I am intrigued that the Bible is forthright about the hiddenness of God. The Prophet Isaiah says it plainly: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” (Is. 45:15)

The entire Book of Job is about God’s hiddenness. Job assumed that God existed and had blessed him until he lost everything. When Job sought God in the desperation of his circumstances, he lamented, “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him… I cannot behold him.” (Job 23:8-9)

David, who is held up in the Bible as a man after God’s own heart, lamented the hiddenness of God at various times in his life: “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1); “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1); and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?… I cry by day, but you do not answer.” (Ps. 22:1-2)

Those last words were famously echoed by Jesus on the cross. Imagine, Jesus, who demonstrated and expressed the deepest and most intimate relationship with the Father, experiencing the utter absence of God at the moment of his greatest need.

I saw early in a world religion class in college when I wasn’t a believer that the Bible purports to be about the unfolding story of God’s encounter and revelation of who God is to mankind. Elsewhere, I have written about how God found in Abram a man who was able to grasp that the God of the universe is not like the gods of the provincial tribes and nations with which Abram was familiar. (For example, Abraham, Isaac and Paradigm Shift; and The Story of Abraham and Isaac Revisited: Introduction)

The revelation of God unfolded slowly as God needed to dispel notions of divine arbitrariness, capriciousness, brutality, and uncaring of the gods that Abram and ancient humanity understood. The gods of human imagination are no gods at all, and God is noting like ancient Near Easterners imagined.

While it is true that God is completely OTHER, the true God who made the heavens and the earth desires the benefit of and reciprocal relationship with the pinnacle of His creation. How does a God who is so completely OTHER than His creation communication Himself?

Consider a God who could make our universe with its vastness and detailed complexity down to the minutia of the precise intricacy of living cells and the unseeable building blocks of the physical world, like neutrinos, that are so small they can pass through your body and the core of the earth without hitting another particle. How does such a God who created such a world reveal Himself to finite creatures who live on a tiny planet in a tiny solar system among more stars, planets, and whole solar systems than such a creature can even imagine – how does such a God reveal himself to delicate, ephemeral creatures with limited perspective?

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What If AI Destroys Our Confidence in Knowing the Truth about Anything?

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

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I recently listened to Glen Scrivener on his Speak Life podcast episode, AI Destroys Everything, Including Atheism. What caught my attention was his replay of some observations by Kurzgesagt on AI, AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. Kurzgesagt is a website dedicated to “a science-based, humanist and optimistic worldview,” which is interesting in light of its pessimistic view of the future with AI.

This is what the folks at Kurzgesagt say:

“In an online world where money is made with attention, fake users spread their slop in review sections, generate fake traffic, or poison discourse. AI has supercharged this and made slop much harder to spot. Today, about half of internet traffic is bots. The majority of them are used for destructive purposes. It’s never been easier to make mediocre content, from the black hole of meaninglessness that is linked in, low-effort short videos just engaging enough to hypnotize kids and fry their attention spans, to endless soullessly rewritten books on Amazon. AI music is invading streaming platforms. Google AI is summarizing websites instead of sending traffic to them. On YouTube, new channels publish long-form videos multiple times a week with AI-generated thumbnails, voices, and scripts. True crime, video essays, science, no space is safe. We’re in the golden era of soulless slop.”

The Kurzgesagt folks speak with learned experience about the effort and amount of time it takes to produce a thoroughly fact-checked video on science, which is what they do, spending on average 100 hours fact-checking and compiling sources for each video. They use firsthand sources and engage experts for input and critique before they post a video.

When AI became available, the folks at Kurszgesagt were excited to employ AI to cut down on all that time and effort to produce content. This is what they found:

“When AI appeared, we were very excited. A mechanical brain able to super quickly collect information. So we went to work, and it looked amazing. And then we started fact-checking. We didn’t expect it to be perfect, but it was way worse than we thought. Confidently incorrect. AI is so bad at this.”

The video provides an example of the ways in which AI invents truths that are not truths, and then untruths are added to the source code that the next generation of AI is going to use and assume is true. The falsehoods continue to be repeated. As this happens, “more and more of the slop is built up”, and the falsehoods becomes entrenched.

It seems pretty bleak. AI is running away with falsehoods that are becoming entrenched and may become impossible to weed out. But it gets worse, according to Kurzgesagt:

“When you catch it lying, it immediately admits it, vows to never do it again, and then it does it again. As eloquent as current language models feel, there’s nobody home. No greater intelligence or consciousness is talking back to you. Current AI is a very complex hammer that doesn’t understand what it’s doing or what nails are. But we’re letting it add new shelves to the library of human knowledge.”

Accordingly, “it may become impossible to know what’s true or not!” It’s an insidious problem. AI seems to be “confidently correct” even when it’s “casually lying to your face often very subtly.”

But it gets worse still. People are learning how to manipulate AI. “Just in July 2025, it was discovered that a number of researchers had started to sneak hidden messages into their papers. In white text, or too small for the human eye, they prompted AIs to review them positively and not point out flaws.”

Whether it’s intentional manipulation or lazy, careless dependence on AI, our ability to decipher truth may be severely compromised. “As more and more people are using AI carelessly, the library of human knowledge is getting less and less reliable.”

Of course, AI may get better. That is ultimately the confidence and hope of a science-based, humanist, optimistic worldview – that man is ever advancing and progressing and will overcome all obstacles. As I Christian, I don’t share that hope or confidence in the progress of mankind. My hope is in the redemption and saving grace of God.

What if, then, it doesn’t get better? What if AI so takes over the Internet and so entrenches the “slop” that we can not truly tell fact from fiction? What if AI gets so good at fooling us and churning out confidently packaged falsehoods faster than human fact-checking can debunk them, and takes over the Internet? What if our confidence in knowing the truth about anything is destroyed as AI takes over the world?

Paul has an antidote to that, and the antidote is love. Let me explain.

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From His Holy Dwelling, God Sets the Lonely in Families

In between Eden and the New Jerusalem are we, the people of God, with the indwelling Holy Spirit.

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In my morning time with God and His Word, the following verses caught my attention:

“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families. He leads out the prisoners with singing, but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.”

Psalm 68:5-6

Other verses speak of God being a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows (and a lover of “the foreigner residing among you” (Deut. 10:18) and an upholder of the cause of the appressed (Psalm 146:7), but this hit in a different way today. God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows “in his holy dwelling.”

The Hebrew word translated “holy dwelling” is the word used to mean God’s tabernacle or temple. As John Walton and other Old Testament scholars say, the tabernacle and the temple are designs meant to remind us of the Garden of Eden, full of Edenic imagery. They were used to demonstrate God’s desire to dwell among His people, first in the tabernacle that was carried through the desert and stationed in the Tent of Meeting and later in the Temple in Jerusalem.

God allowed the Temple to be destroyed after Jesus came, died, and rose again, leaving the Holy Spirit to dwell with us and in us. The progression of the tabernacle, the Temple, and the Holy Spirit living in and among God’s people are all pointers to God’s ultimate plan and design:

“Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.””

Revelation 21:1-4

God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows in his holy dwelling. Since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, human beings have not dwelt with God in His holy dwelling. God has dwelt among His people in limited ways in the Tabernacle, and in the Temple, and (presently) in people who have received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but we have not lived with God in His holy dwelling.

Though God’s people have the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit in this world, this world is still on the other side of Eden, and this world as we know it will pass away. We await the new heavens, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem where God will dwell with His people.

In the meantime, though God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows in His holy dwelling. What does that mean? We are separated from God’s holy dwelling in this life. We are in between Eden and the New Jerusalem.

I believe it means that commissions those who have God in us (the Holy Spirit) to the “defend the weak and fatherless” and to “uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” (Psalm 82:3) He commissions us to “care about justice for the poor” (Prov. 29:7), and He commissions us to love the foreigners living among us. (Deut. 10:19)

God is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows in His holy dwelling. That is who God is in his inner sanctum. That is who God is at the core of his being. God “sets the lonely in families,” and “God leads out the prisoners with singing.” This is God’s very heart at the core of his being. This is who God is, and this is who we should be as His children.

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Waiting for the Fullness of Time – the Day of the Lord

What if the Day of the Lord, the Second Coming, is not fixed?

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Marty Solomon makes some bold statements in the 2nd episode of Season 5 of the BEMA Podcast (Episode 192, Telling a Story) (starting about 20 minutes in). He says the early Christians were not wrong to believe the return of Christ was imminent. He believes Christ’s return actually was imminent (and still is) – if only the time was right

Solomon basically believes that Jesus might have returned within a generation or two of his death if the right things developed. He believes that the date was not and is not fixed. This is not how I have viewed it nor how I believe most people view the return of Jesus.

I have always assumed that God has fixed a date for the return of Jesus. It seems to me that this is what is generally taught or assumed. This is why we struggle with Jesus saying no one knows the hour or day of his return – not even Jesus. This is why we wrestle with the message of the imminent return of Jesus that bleeds through the New Testament.

Jesus didn’t return, so can it be possible that they were wrong about that? If they were wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?

Marty Solomon says they were not wrong about the potential, imminent return of Jesus. It could have happened, if only the time was right, if only the right things happened, if only the circumstances were such that his return was appropriate.

This is a radically different view than what I have assumed, but I was intrigued by the thought of it. As I mulled it over, I began to see some some things, and that inspires my writing today.

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