Remember That You Were Strangers

Today's Scripture

Deuteronomy 10:17-19 — "For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt."

Exodus 22:21 — "You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt."

A "sojourner" is an old word for someone living in a land that is not their own — an immigrant, a refugee, a foreigner far from home.

The Big Idea

Before the Bible says one word about immigration policy, it tells God's people who they are: former strangers. Israel's treatment of the foreigner was meant to flow from two sources — God's own character and Israel's own memory. You love the stranger because God loves the stranger, and because you have not forgotten what it felt like to be one.

Reflection

The God who takes no bribe

Notice how Deuteronomy 10 builds. First comes one of the biggest descriptions of God in the whole Old Testament: "God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God." Then, without pausing for breath, the very next thought: he "executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing."

There is no gap between those sentences. The Bible does not treat God's greatness and God's care for migrants as two separate subjects. The God who runs the universe also keeps track of who has dinner and a coat tonight.

A.W. Tozer said our picture of God shapes everything else about us:

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." — A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

So test your picture. If the God in your head is a national mascot — a God who naturally roots for your country, your language, your kind of people — Deuteronomy 10 says your picture is too small. The real God "is not partial and takes no bribe."

Why mention bribes? Because ancient courts ran on them. If you were rich, or local, or related to the judge, you could usually buy your verdict. A foreigner had no money and no cousins in the courtroom. So God announces that he has taken the foreigner's side personally. Psalm 146:9 — "The Lord watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin." In a world where nobody watched out for the stranger, God says: I do.

Memory is a command

Then comes the reason attached to the command: "Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." Not "because it will grow the economy." Not "because it is polite." Because you remember.

Exodus 23:9 — "You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." You know the heart. You know the 2 a.m. fear of living in a place where you cannot read the signs, where one official's bad mood can wreck your family, where nobody has to take your side.

Think of your first day at a new school. You carry your lunch tray across the cafeteria, scanning for one face that might make room. Every table is a country, and you have no passport to any of them. Multiply that feeling by four hundred years of slavery, and you have Israel's national memory. God builds his law on it: never forget that feeling, and never inflict it.

Exodus 22:21 turns the memory into a warning: "You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him." The Hebrew word for "oppress" here belongs to the same family of words used for what Pharaoh did to Israel. God is saying something blunt: do not become the Egypt you escaped. The abused can become abusers. The formerly excluded can guard the door hardest. Only living memory — rehearsed, retold, prayed — keeps a people from repeating the cruelty that was done to them.

And in case Israel ever filed this under optional kindness, God wired it into their courts and their calendars. Deuteronomy 24:17-18 — "You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless... but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this." Watch the logic of that sentence. Remember. Redeemed. Therefore. Gratitude for rescue is supposed to come out of us as justice for the vulnerable. A redeemed people who treat strangers harshly have not lost their manners. They have lost their memory.

John Calvin knew this from the inside. He was a refugee himself, a Frenchman who fled persecution and spent his life in Geneva, a city flooded with people running for their lives. Here is how he taught Christians to look at any person in need:

"The Lord enjoins us to do good to all without exception, though the greater part, if estimated by their own merit, are most unworthy of it. But Scripture subjoins a most excellent reason, when it tells us that we are not to look to what men in themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God, which exists in all, and to which we owe all honour and love." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

We do not love strangers because they have earned it. We love them because God's image is stamped on them — and that stamp does not fade when someone crosses a border.

You are still a sojourner

The memory goes deeper still. Even after Israel settled in their own land, God would not let them think of themselves as permanent owners. Leviticus 25:23 — "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me." Read that again. Inside their own borders, holding their own deeds, Israel were still tenants. The landlord was God.

King David — the most established, most secure man in the nation — prayed the same way at the height of his reign. 1 Chronicles 29:15 — "For we are strangers before you and sojourners, as all our fathers were. Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding." The king of Israel calls himself an immigrant before God.

The New Testament picks up the thread and ties it around every Christian. Hebrews 11:13 says the heroes of the faith "acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth," and Hebrews 11:16 adds, "they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." 1 Peter 2:11 addresses the church bluntly: "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles..." That is our legal status in this world, according to the Bible. Jonathan Edwards preached a whole sermon on it:

"It was never designed by God that this world should be our home." — Jonathan Edwards, The Christian Pilgrim

And C.S. Lewis explained why we can feel it — that low hum of homesickness that never quite goes away, even on our best days:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sixteen centuries before Lewis, Augustine traced the same ache to its source in the very first paragraph of his Confessions:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Augustine, Confessions

Restlessness is not a malfunction. It is a homing signal. Every human being you will ever meet — including every migrant at every border — is a sojourner looking for rest, whether they would use those words or not.

Here is why this matters for the immigration question. A Christian who looks down on the foreigner has forgotten his own ID card. Our deepest identity is not "citizen" but "sojourner." The person at the gate is not a different species. She is a picture of what we all are before God — and of what, by grace, we no longer have to be.

Strangers welcomed home

So what do sojourners-by-faith do with actual sojourners next door? Henri Nouwen, who wrote some of the wisest pages ever written on welcome, described the goal:

"Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place." — Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

Hospitality is not a program. It is space — a chair, a meal, an unhurried hour — offered without demanding the other person become like us first.

But notice where the power for that comes from. Tim Keller points out that the Bible never starts with "be more welcoming." It starts with what you have received:

"Before you can give this neighbor-love, you need to receive it. Only if you see that you have been saved graciously by someone who owes you the opposite will you go out into the world looking to help absolutely anyone in need." — Tim Keller, Generous Justice

This is the gospel underneath today's reading. "Gospel" simply means good news — the announcement of what God has done, not advice about what we must do. Israel loved the stranger because God had rescued them when they were strangers. Christians have an even sharper memory to draw on. We were the outsiders at God's gate — no claim, no documents, no merit. And God did not just leave the gate unlocked. In Jesus, he came outside to where we were, took the cost of our welcome on himself at the cross, and walked us in as family.

People who have been welcomed like that find it very hard to slam doors. Not because a political party told them to be nice, but because the memory will not let them. "Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners" — in Egypt, yes. And before the cross, every one of us.

Going Deeper

Today, write down a memory of being the outsider — three honest details. The cafeteria, the new city, the group chat you were left out of. Sit with how it felt for one minute; that feeling is what Exodus 23:9 calls "the heart of a sojourner." Then write one name: a person near you — a new student, a new coworker, an immigrant family on your street — who may feel that way right now. Choose one small act of free space this week: a hello with their name in it, an invitation, a meal. Welcome the way you have been welcomed.