What Do God & Jesus Say about Tolerance and Inclusion?
What Do God & Jesus Say about Tolerance and Inclusion?
By David Jolly
Everywhere one turns these days, they hear about being tolerant to everyone else and to include everyone regardless of their ethnicity, religion or gender identification. We are told to accept everyone and anyone who doesn’t is called a hater, bigot, racist, homophobe, islamophobe and more.
It’s interesting to note here that those hollering the loudest for tolerance and inclusion are the most intolerant and exclusive of all when it comes to conservatives and Christians. When it comes to people like myself, who are politically very conservative and a devout conservative Christian, those calling for tolerance instantly reject me and often refuse to even listen to my views while trying push their own views on me. Basically, they demand that everyone be tolerant of them and their liberalism, socialism, Marxist, hedonism and Godless views, but woe to anyone who disagrees with them.
The ideas of tolerance and inclusion have also been infiltrating the Christian community. I’m sure you’ve all had someone identifying themselves as Christians saying that as Christians we are to love and respect everyone because that is what Christ taught. They use this to embrace and accept homosexuals along with ordaining homosexuals. I’ve even seen so-called Christian churches hold a joint worship service with Muslims, but they were careful not to say or do anything to offend the Muslims.
Yes, Jesus did teach love and told us to love our enemies, but He never told us to include our enemies into our homes or places of worship as equals. In fact, Jesus taught exclusion. How many times did He speak of separating the sheep from the goats, the wheat from chaff – believers from nonbelievers (Matthew 3:12; Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 25:32-33; Luke 3:17).
Earlier is Scripture, we have some references of what God told us how He felt about inclusion and tolerance of those who do not believe the same as His people:
Deut. 7:1-4: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.” [emphasis mine]
Deut. 20:16-18: “But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God.” [emphasis mine]
Deut. 30:15-18: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.”
When I have brought these versus up to so-called Christians, who defend tolerance and inclusion in the name of Jesus, they instantly say that the Law of the Old Testament no longer governs us because Jesus fulfilled the Law. That’s when I point out to them that Jesus stated in His Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 5:17-19:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
The New Testament calls us to set ourselves apart from the world and not to be part of this world:
John 15:18-19: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
Romans: 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
It is clear and plain that neither God nor Jesus ever taught tolerance or inclusion and neither did any of those whom God inspired to write His teachings.
Therefore, those who profess to be Christians who support tolerance and inclusion are wrong and are rejecting the teachings of God and Jesus. Tolerance and inclusion are NOT biblical and should never be embraced, especially when justified on erroneous understandings of Scripture.