Opinion

Nancy Pelosi Misreads the Bible Again

The political party that shuns and ridicules Christians has no problem appealing to the Bible when it suits their warped and twisted big-government purposes. Pelosi said the following in a Tweet:

It should be a sign to us that today’s Catholic Gospel reading is the Good Samaritan, where Jesus teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves and treat them with mercy.

Trump’s ICE raids today tear families apart—the opposite of mercy.

We don’t know anything about the beaten and robbed victim. Nothing is said about immigration. “The parable of the Good Samaritan does not talk about a person whom a court has ordered deported for violating the immigration laws. It describes the way three different passersby deal with a man who had been robbed and left half dead.”

Those trying to get into the United States illegally are being treated as best as an overwhelmed government can treat them.

Israel was commanded by God to remove the occupants from the land. It doesn’t make sense that Israel would then let anyone back in. Certainly, potential enemies of Israel would not have been permitted to return.

The Bible does speak about treating strangers righteously. Someone residing in Israel had to follow Israel’s laws. There were not two standards of justice. The United States no longer has a legal system based on God’s law.

Also, there was no gigantic welfare system in Israel.

The irony is thick with Pelosi’s statement about loving one’s neighbor. The closest “neighbor” for a pregnant woman is her unborn baby, and yet she and her fellow-Democrats have made it legal for these unborn babies to be killed by their mothers.

She’s reading a Catholic Gospel reading. The thing of it is, the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to abortion. Pelosi says she’s “personally opposed to abortion,” but does not believe she should impose her religious convictions of others. Maybe the two passersby were “personally opposed” to helping a stranger.

Notice that no government is involved. The Samaritan uses his own money. Charity is sharing … voluntarily. That’s not Communism or Socialism. The Good Samaritan extended charity by sharing what belonged to him with the man beaten by robbers:

But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him. On the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, “Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return, I will repay you” (Luke 10:30-37).

The oil, wine, the Samaritan’s mode of transportation, and the two denarii were his.

Jesus and His disciples shared a common purse as they traveled. This, too, was voluntary.

An appeal cannot be made to Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37 to support some wealth transfer scheme. These early Christians voluntarily sold their property and used the proceeds to help those in need. People are free to help anyone in need.

Neither the Roman Empire nor the Church had any role in the sale of the property. John R. Richardson writes:

No one was forced into giving up his goods and possessions. It was not socialism legislated either by church or state. It does not resemble modern communism in any respect…. Ananais was free to keep or sell his property. When he sold it, he had the right to determine whether he would give all of it, or part of it, or none of it, into the treasury of the church for the alleviation of the needs of poor Christians. J. W. Lipscomb is certainly correct when he says, “The program was a voluntary expression of Christian concern for the needs of fellow Christians, and was not a program for compulsory collectivism such as we hear advocated all too often today.”1

Paul took up a collection for the Jerusalem church “from the saints” (1 Cor. 16:1-4; 2 Cor. 8:1-9:15; Rom 15:14-32). They gave “according to their ability, and beyond their ability, of their own accord” (2 Cor. 8:3).

The Pilgrims were initially organized as a Collectivist society as mandated by contract by their sponsoring investors. No matter how much a person worked, everybody would get the same amount. It didn’t take long for the less industrious to realize that their diminished labor would net them the same result of the most industrious.

  1. Christian Economics: The Christian Message to the Market Place (Houston: St. Thomas Press, 1966), 60. []
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