Why are asylum seekers so important to God?

Britain in 2024 is obsessed with asylum seekers. After having been a major issue at the election, migration became the focus of protests and counter-protests. A terrifying outbreak of national rioting may now be fading out. But the issue is still huge in Britain and it’s huge in the Bible too.

God became an asylum seeker

The Bible reveals that God wrote himself into the messy history of human migration. God had already directed many Bible people on their own migrant journeys, but at the start of the New Testament, at the very beginning of the incarnation story, God became the lowest sort of migrant – an infant asylum seeker.

Jesus was born at a time when God’s people were part of a multicultural intercontinental empire, under one dominant group. They’d had centuries of experience of this, but they didn’t like it, and except for an elite who benefitted from Roman rule, the Jewish people wanted out. They loved their uniqueness and exile had made them truer to it.

Israel had a multicultural location

But God had located Israel in a funny place. The Promised Land was on a road between different imperial cultures and populated by diverse peoples hostile to Israel and to the Jewish lifestyle. Although it was God’s intention for Israel to replace the various peoples they found resident in the land, God never intended for Israel to have no neighbours or to receive no visitors. Israel was a light to the nations, the way that God chose to reveal himself to the world, which he loved and intended to redeem. And, in the cross, this redeeming of the world goes far beyond any muddled human attempt at multiculturalism.

One of the ways God’s redemption of the world is shown in the Old Testament is through occasional cases of Israel not being closed to the world. Not only did foreigners migrate to Israel and join the community, under God’s command to welcome and integrate them (Leviticus 19.33–34, which Jesus later took as the basis for the second greatest commandment), they ended up part of the messianic line.

Refugees in the royal family

Rahab didn’t just have her life spared, she became the great-great grandmother of King David. That’s in spite of her nationality and her profession (which the Bible doesn’t try to conceal) making her inappropriate for the royal family of an exclusive nation. David wasn’t an expected king, and Rahab didn’t know she was marrying into royalty, but when the New Testament includes her in Jesus’ genealogy, the author is making a point.

Ruth, who became Rahab’s daughter-in-law, was also inappropriately foreign. She came from Moab, a neighbour Israel had a deep prejudice against, running through the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. Deuteronomy 23 excludes Moabites from the worship of God. Even as it commands mercy on two of Israel’s other enemies, Egypt and Edom, this passage forbids friendship with Moab.

Yet Ruth, for a while, turned this around. Her attachment to her mother-in-law Naomi, and her powerful expression of that in words, resonates through the Bible. ‘Your people shall be my people, and your God my God’ (Ruth 1.17, ESV). That isn’t how things worked in ancient times, and especially not between the people of these two countries. Migration may have been a fact of life, but integration was never this smooth.

From an old covenant perspective, Ruth had no business boldly approaching the throne of God, and her offspring would be legally excluded for ten generations. But her great-grandson, David, became Israel’s greatest king, fondly recalled through the rest of Scripture, and the Bible’s most vivid illustration of an intimate relationship with the Lord.

David acknowledged his scandalous Moabite roots in a couple of interesting ways. When he was on the run from Saul, his parents went to Moab as asylum seekers (1 Samuel 22.3–4). And he presumably commissioned the book of Ruth, either directly or indirectly, because it’s Ruth’s relation to him that gave her the status (a century or more after her death) to have her story told.

Jesus brings unity

A thousand years later, God lived as a man and embodied many human identities in a complicated mix of the truly legitimate and apparently illegitimate. Jesus was controversial even before his birth and in exile like Israel soon after (Matthew 2.15).

The Bible gives no details of his time in Egypt as a refugee, but history tells us it wouldn’t have been easy. He and his family either lived among gentiles or the Egyptian Jewish community, who were Greek-speaking and culturally very different from Palestinian Jews. Later in the New Testament, the earliest days of the Church saw tension between Hebraic and Hellenic Jews (Acts 6.1). Both Jews, both Christians, but struggling to get along.

Multiculturalism is one of the most ambitious social goals you can imagine. Some people would give up and say it’s impossible – and with riots breaking out across Britain, those voices would seem to be getting loud. But the New Testament presents cross-cultural unity as something manifest in the Church as a glorious result of the victory of Jesus. Membership of God’s family is open to people all cultures. And they’re seizing hold of it.


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