The Strength of the King: Refugees

3,982,439

That's the number of Syrian refugees today, according to UN sources.

Their stories are horrifying beyond comprehension. Online searches on the topic are filled with the survivor accounts. Seven year old boys with broken arms, having to care for their families because their fathers didn't make it out. Women, who had to leave some of their children behind. Families forced by circumstance to live in tents, thousands of miles away from those they loved.

Even more terrible were the untold stories of the ones who couldn't make it out. Monday, June 15th, my dad handed me a news article as we got in the car to head to Minnesota for nationals. On the front page was a crowd of refugees, making their way toward the barbed wire fence that marked the Turkish border. They were within sight of safety, when armed members of ISIS appeared in front of them, and forced them to turn back to the war zone of Tal Abyad. Tears burned in my eyes, as I looked at the picture. The members of ISIS were laughing.


Looking at images like those, and feeling the pain they arouse, it's easy to think that it's our heart that breaks over those events. But God feels the pain even more deeply.

About a week after I saw that news article, I was on the phone with a close friend, and the conversation turned to the topic of refugees.
"I was just thinking about how God understands their pain. You know, Jesus was a refugee."


I started to look deeper. I'm amazed how ingrained the theme of refugees is in the Bible!  God's people were refugees. In Exodus, the Israelites were slaves in a nation that was not their own. For generations, they were without a homeland. But God promised to make them a great nation, and He gave them victory. In the book of Esther, the Jewish people are forced under Assyrian rule, and threatened with death. But God stood with them. In the time of Daniel, God's people were driven from their homes, tortured and oppressed by Babylonian captors whose atrocities would easily have rivaled those of ISIS. But He delivered them. In Matthew 2:13-18, Jesus' family was driven by violence from their home nation, and forced to flee in to Egypt... just like many of the Syrian refugees of today. Jesus was a refugee.

Being a refugee in a place like the Middle East is excruciating, not only because of the natural pain of loss, but also because of the cultural implications. The Middle East is built in an "honor-shame" culture; Palestinian refugee, Tass Saada, explains that, unlike the western world and its focus on individualism, honor-shame cultures have a more communal focus. The ultimate Arab dishonor, he says, is having no land. No land equates to no name, and no honor. He describes the rejection and spite his family was shown in Saudi Arabia; they were strangers in a land that did not welcome them, and they were the lowest element of society. Living in America's diverse society, which is so eager to embrace people of virtually any background, it's almost impossible for us to wrap our minds around this. But Tass Saada, now a convert to Christianity, points out that the Bible was written to an honor-shame culture. Jesus was a refugee in that honor-shame culture. He was a seemingly illegitimate child who had been forced from his homeland, and was not even welcomed in his own home town. We can't understand the pain of refugees on that level. But the God of eternity can; He experienced it.

3,982,439

And He knows every single one.

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Worship Song: 

"King Jesus",
by Laura Hackett Park