The Bible's response to immigrants

Vista Duran, an artist, author, pastor, mother, and humanitarian, shares her insights on how Scripture emphasizes the importance of loving and respecting foreigners. She highlights the biblical origins of migration, citing examples like Abraham and Joseph. Through various laws and historical accounts, the Bible consistently promotes caring for and valuing foreigners as equals. Vista emphasizes the significant role of migrants in biblical history and the importance of treating them with compassion and respect as instructed by Scripture. My name is Vista Duran. I'm an artist who's an author. I'm a pastor for it. My husband is a pastor of a young adult church, which is a new church in North Central Texas. I'm also a mother with three young children. And relevant to tonight's conversation, I'm a humanitarian. My parents are humanitarians, so by the time I was 18 years old, I traveled the city to work with migrants from 14 different countries. So I've had the profound joy of having portions of my childhood in some of the homesteading of migrants that we meet with tonight. And when cohorts invite me to teach, they ask me to teach in some type of humanitarian. And my great tradition is as a young person to teach. And one of the reasons I'm so grateful for a voice in tonight's conversation is because in the past few years, I have made significant contributions both within and throughout the evangelical Christian church regarding how we treat immigrant people. And I do want to clear that tonight, my message is not about politics. This isn't a talk about what a humanitarian ought to do, but it's a message, although not in the words, conversations, and courtesies that happen. This is not an implementation of a prescription on what the Bible would call a foreigner who is in the homestead. This is a person who is here right now, that's working right at Target, or in the car before I see her at the American Conference. This is a person who is here right now. What does Scripture say about this? And so, over the course of the next 15 minutes, I want to tell you my hope for tonight. My hope is because I love the Word of God. I have a passion for the Word of God for my whole life, and lately I've been very interested specifically in regards to this conversation of what does Scripture say about foreigners. Because we've seen the Bible is clear, and there's a lot of things in our world that we can independently guess about when it comes to what the Scriptures say, but we don't actually know what the Scriptures say. For example, I can make an independent guess about what Scriptures say regarding the artificial intelligence of AI, but I don't actually know what the Bible says about humans and AI. Or I can make an independent guess on how the Bible responds and that's controlled by the human being, but I don't actually know how the Bible responds to that control or that kind of thing. But we don't have an independent guess about how the Bible responds to human beings. There is no misuse. It is not misused. The Bible is misused. In fact, if the primary thread that goes throughout the entirety of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, from the law of those histories, from the Psalms to the Proverbs, to the Prophets, from the New Testament to the final revelation of John, we give a thread through Scripture that God's love of foreigners does not encourage us to love them. It demands us to love them. It is the primary thread and it is the word for us to know what we are talking about. So, tonight, I hope, is actually to ask and teach Scripture as much as possible in this event. And what I want to do tonight is tell the story of Scripture in the language of Scripture. And so, in order to do this, let's start at the very beginning. We will actually just go to chapter 1 of the entire Bible, Genesis 1, verse 27, when God created humanity. At this point, we're going to make this our other name because God was looking for a spell. And as we've said this twice, back to back, this is one place on your screen that says God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God. He created them. You see, before there were foreigners or nations or foreigners, there was a God who created every person to have that image of His image. So, we live in the image of the Almighty Eternal God. And it doesn't say that anything we do with where we are from or what we have or have done or whether we follow a rule because we stand in the image of God, there is a living value inherent in every person in the world, worthy of dignity and respect and compassion and love. Before there were foreigners or nations, there was not a human being at all. So, Genesis 1 and 11 chapters later documents the process of creating a human race. There was only one nation, the Messiah, until Genesis 12. God called a man named Abraham. And He said, those of you who say, well, maybe we're in the way that He delivered this message, go to Genesis 12. It's teaching us to rise up and go into a land, and I'll show you, and I'll show you the Christian nation, and you will be a blessing. And through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And I don't want to present something significant in this moment. At the very beginning of our faith, I would say if you were in a different time, if you were Jewish or Protestant or Catholic or Muslim, the very beginning of your faith, you were in God's hand, and you did good. Get out of your country, Abraham, and go into a land, and go into a land I'll show you, Abraham, because this is our origin story of the faith, our origin story that God told us to be migrant. And He told us to be migrant for the purpose of being a blessing to all nations. You see, nations have never been spread. They've only been the goal, the goal of God, to love and to bless all people. And so we began as foreigners for the purpose of blessing others. And most of you, all of you, know the story of Abraham. Abraham was a son of Isaac, and Isaac was a son of Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons, but a lot of them avoided Joseph. And so for this whole sense of slavery, he's literally a victim of human trafficking, human trafficking, cross-border human trafficking. But God had an emergency. He had a problem. He needed Joseph to pay incentives for slavery. So at that moment, all of Joseph's family knew he needed when they were working for him. They had been immune to the way he was being treated. And in the course of 430 years, the people of Joseph's family were now called the patriarchs, the rogues in the church, and they are rejected by the church. They didn't deserve the righteousness. In the end of it, he's waiting to die. And so our faith, the origins of our faith, implicitly rejected, and defied, and slaved, and torn. The thoughts we, as a family, hold with us. And those of us who believe them, our faith is in great exodus. And once again, they have migrants wandering in the desert. In the Missouri, in our DNA as a people, there's over and over, there's hoarders, and we have migrants, and we are immigrants. And so once they are wandering in the desert, immigrants, citizens of exodus, we're now seeing the books of law, the church, where they get the numbers in the Iran. And here, we're walking to see books of law. God has cared so much, God is so much part of this DNA, of us as a faith group. It's so much part of our DNA, that we are hoarders, that God brought us in, into their law, to protect, and to provide, for foreigners. And these weren't just household schools that you would have served your children to abide by. These were the national laws. It's incredibly sad, because God takes seriously, that we were once hoarders, and so now, you will love a foreigner, and I would like to convince you, some of these laws, whether it be 1990 or 2010, says when you harvest your land, do not harvest to the very ends of your field. Do not go over your field, and by the time you have finished, that is often, leave them to the war, and the foreigner, I am a warrior, you are God. And when we're required, to leave a foreigner, for their hard work, uncut meat, for poor Asian people, leave them to the Asian people. Leviticus 19, 33 through 34, says this, when a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not treat them. The foreigner resides among you must be treated as your native born. Love them to the bone. For you were born, you're treated as I am, the warrior God. Deuteronomy 10, 17 through 19, says, for the warrior God is God, for the warrior God is the great God, you are free and awesome. He does not partake of it, and he accepts no bribe. He has been the God of the fathers and the wives, and he loves the foreigner, residing among you. He gives them food so that you are loved as a foreigner, for you yourself are a foreigner to this day. Bible lesson section, Deuteronomy 27, 19, which says, occur to you, if anyone will withhold justice from a foreigner, the father, or the widow, to come into your age, but leave him who is the last one. And we move out of the books of law and into the books of history we see the people who directly benefited from the laws of prevention and protection. One of them was a young and driven woman. She was a Moabite. Her name was Ruth. And the Moabites were the enemies of the Israelites. They were often at war with the Israelites, and yet because of these laws of prevention and protection she was selected into law with a Southern Greek woman to conquer the land of the Israelites. 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