Trump’s New Immigration Plan and the Sovereignty of a Free People

It’s been a whirlwind of weeks for President Donald Trump with staff reshuffles at the White House, but he did announce a new legal immigration plan that in part eliminates chain migration and restricts legal immigration. For all of Mr. Trump’s character flaws and liberal positions, his rhetoric and this plan were good. And right on cue, all the open borders secular humanists hated it.

Setting aside our feelings of Mr. Trump because in the grand scheme of things, he’s irrelevant. Let’s talk about the issue of immigration and the nature of sovereignty.

God is sovereign.

In fact, He is the Sovereign over everything in creation. He makes covenants with mankind and with His people to make Himself known to them, as well as for the common grace of human flourishing. Covenants are law. They are a legally binding promise, a contract, between the parties involved.

There are two redemptive and creational covenants. A covenant of grace (redemptive), which was made between God and His chosen. And a covenant of creation (creational), which He made between Himself and all of mankind, Christian and non-Christian alike are partakers and beneficiaries of the common grace of this covenant. We are all obligated, as creatures of the Creator and partakers of this covenant, to abide by the commands of natural revelation, or Natural Law.

Throughout biblical history, there have been kingdoms and nations. In God’s sovereignty, He has allowed them to rise and fall, but the cultures and lands have remained sovereignly distinct from one another. When these sovereign kingdoms fell, it was primarily due to them breaking covenant with God’s sovereignty over them. They didn’t follow Natural Law in relation to God’s Sovereignty, which typically led them to break covenant and not respect the sovereignty of people and their lands.

Individual and national sovereignty exist between people and nations because of the sovereignty of God’s Kingdom above them. When nations reject God, they tend to welcome legalized theft of property, and open borders and no rule of law. The ignorance of most Christians with regard to public theology and the sovereign dominion of man has led the Church to accept legalized theft in the name of social welfare, and open borders with a faux compassion for the sojourner and refugee.

The Church should care for the refugee when they’re here and are in need of help, but we must apply the biblical distinctions between the citizen and the sojourner. The Church should not set aside vertical and horizontal sovereignty to push the nation to accept unfettered immigration to satisfy a faux compassion based on no immigrant-citizen distinctions. Sovereign people have a covenantal obligation to the sovereignty and welfare of their own before the sojourner, the general equity principle of 1 Timothy 5:8 nationally applied, not just individually.

In reality, the Church’s embrace of the legalized theft of social welfare and the open borders of unfettered immigration makes us the covenant breakers. We’re telling God, “We don’t need your covenant of creation and sovereignty anymore, we can care for others better.” What we end up building is a blurred, multicultural pot of tribal people who don’t respect the individual and national sovereignty of free people. It is the fundamental rejection of the Eighth Commandment as applied to sovereignty and property. We end up rejecting the covenantal and sovereign basis for a true heart for the sojourner and refugee, as if they are our own.

Governments are not a social welfare organization. They are God’s ordained enforcers of the covenant of creation, the ultimate rule of law. Sovereignty among nations is paramount to man’s lawful dominion over creation.

When Natural Law is acknowledged and Christ’s sovereign Lordship is declared, the respect of people’s cultures, lands, and laws flourish. God gives us a true heart for the legitimate sojourner and refugee from foreign lands when vertical and horizontal sovereignty is recognized and understood within the context of the covenant of creation.