Replenished From The East

To follow on from yesterday's blog, I just wanted to highlight how clear it is that the Bible teaches the dangers of multiculturalism. This is very clear if you understand how strict the law was in limiting Israel's interactions with foreign peoples. They were to shun all foreign religious influences (Ex. 20:3), refuse to marry women from certain nations (Ezra 10:10), they were not allowed to let foreigners rule them (Deut. 17:15), they were to ensure all who settled in their land submitted to the law of God and did not practice their own religions (Ex. 20:10; Lev. 17:15, 22:18, 24:16, 22), some settlers from certain nations were not allowed to become citizens for multiple generations (Deut. 23:7-8), and people from other nations were banned from becoming full citizens in perpetuity (Deut. 23:2-6). Full citizenship in Israel meant being able to come into the assembly of the Lord, and foreign influences were to be kept from changing Israel's religious culture. 

All these laws were designed to protect the Biblical culture of Israel. The Bible is not quiet about this issue, and there are many times in which the Prophets condemned Israel for allowing multiculturalism to flourish in its nation. For example, Isaiah 2:

"5 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord. 6 Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers. 7 Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures; their land is also full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots: 8 Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made..." (Isaiah 2:5-8, KJV).

Note especially verse 6, Jacob, or Israel, has allowed itself to "be replenished from the east", become fortune tellers like the pagans, and they have also become reliant on foreigners. In other words, they were filled with things from the East, religious things, things like this:

2 Kings 16:10-14 - "10 When King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, he saw the altar that was at Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar, and its pattern, exact in all its details. 11 And Uriah the priest built the altar; in accordance with all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, so Uriah the priest made it, before King Ahaz arrived from Damascus. 12 And when the king came from Damascus, the king viewed the altar. Then the king drew near to the altar and went up on it 13 and burned his burnt offering and his grain offering and poured his drink offering and threw the blood of his peace offerings on the altar. 14 And the bronze altar that was before the Lord he removed from the front of the house, from the place between his altar and the house of the Lord, and put it on the north side of his altar."

Because they were filled with innovations from the East, they had become just like the pagans in their religious outlook, and this had been facilitated by them becoming too close with foreigners. The ESV says they struck hands with foreigners. In other words they engaged in all sorts of trade and military alliances with foreign peoples which allowed those foreigners to influence them in religion and other matters. Because of this, by Isaiah's day, Israel had lost its unique culture and become condemned. 

Now does this sound familiar? 

This is exactly what our nation has done, indeed this is what all western nations have done to varying degrees. These influences are not hard to work against either. All that needs to be done is you need to believe in the culture and identity of your own people, and believe it should be protected. You need to limit your nation's reliance on foreign nations, because reliance on foreign nations causes you to mimic those nations. You need to have strict multigenerational laws about who can be citizens and leaders of your country, like Israel did. And you need to make sure that those who come into your land come in very small numbers and anyone who settles in your land adopts the laws, customs and culture of your people, if they wish to interact as full citizens. 

These principles all sound antithetical to the modern multicultural western mind. But these are all biblical principles, that were applied in different ways throughout Church history. And as long as they were applied they protected western culture from decline into paganism. A couple of generations after we rejected such standards, and now many people deny that any nation of Christendom was ever even a Christian country, contrary to the foundation identity of many of those nations. For example, the Church made England a whole nation from the antagonistic Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and now people try to say England is a multicultral country...that is evil. 

The Old Testament law did not forbid interactions with foreigners, or even trade. It simply put very strict guidelines around these interactions so that their culture was protected. The Bible warned us, and we did not listen. God willing future generations will.