That feeling you have right now about Donald Trump’s appointment of Jay Bhattacharya to direct the National Institutes of Health is important for reasons that go way beyond health care. It also speaks to how you’ve likely changed in terms of your expectations for governance and citizenship overall. Enough screwing around, right? Get busy living or get busy dying.

To that end, Bhattacharya and Tom Homan, Trump’s would-be border czar, are clearly very different sorts of people. But both have very clear missions to reform that which is utterly broken, and you must remember that when things get hard along the way. The excitement you have right now can’t merely be an emotion. It must be a promise.

What began as people coming to pick berries and shingle roofs to access the American dream has devolved into an unsustainable culture of criminal entitlement.

We will not quit until we are done restoring truth and righteousness to our cause.

To that end, let’s sweep away some of the chaff and head off some nonsense when it comes to immigration. For example, are any mass deportations and wall-building used in the Bible to secure a country’s borders? The answer is yes. But a lot of you who grew up in the era of Hawaiian shirts, pleated khakis, and sweater vests haven’t been taught about that by your pastor.

Thus, loving your neighbors as you love yourself probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. Don’t feel too bad, though. Much of Latin America, for example, where the current pope comes from, was hoodwinked by something called “liberation theology,” which is neo-Marxism in the name of the Lord.

When Ronald Reagan endorsed amnesty for illegal aliens in 1986, many of the people coming to the United States shared a common value system with Americans. They sought to escape hardship and build better lives. What followed, however, was a series of waves of immigration that increasingly rejected the idea of borders as a guarantee of freedom and security. Instead, many began to see borders as something between negotiable and irrelevant, diverging from the values sought by earlier generations of immigrants.

Today, this generational and motivational clash has reached a tipping point. It fueled Trump’s successful presidential campaign, in which he ran on a platform of mass deportations and secured the largest percentage of the Latino vote of any Republican in history.

Why did this happen? Initially, many Hispanic immigrants lacked strong alignment with Democratic values but voted for Democrats out of fear of deportation or losing the chance to reunite their families in the United States. Over time, however, those fears gave way to more immediate concerns. Communities faced the devastating impact of unchecked immigration, including Venezuelan gangs raping women and taking over apartment complexes.

These harsh realities forced a shift in both electoral and existential priorities, fundamentally altering the political landscape in what many see as a moment of cosmic justice.

Earlier this year, the trajectory of the Republican presidential race shifted dramatically with Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump. Yet as the year progressed, one of Bragg’s own attorneys witnessed a member of a Venezuelan gang masturbating in public. The irony is staggering. This is the kind of situation that evokes “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” energy, and we must respond by allowing someone like Tom Homan to take decisive action.

Do not be deceived — God will not be mocked. We inevitably reap what we sow. What began as people coming to pick berries, make beds, mow lawns, and shingle roofs to access the American dream has devolved into an unsustainable culture of criminal entitlement. This decline has been fueled by unchecked globalism and the misplaced guilt of woke white suburbanites. It’s the worst version of the “We Are the World” sentiment — one born from ignoring or dismantling the fundamental plumb line of civilization.

That plumb line is the true gospel. No, continuing in sin does not cause grace to abound. No, good does not come from committing evil. Hunger does not justify theft. And it certainly doesn’t justify welfare fraud while real Americans in places like Western North Carolina endure ignored suffering, or while parents like Laken Riley’s in Georgia are left to bury their daughter.

God shows no partiality. He demands justice. To address the question: Does the Bible support mass deportations? Do God’s people build walls to secure their borders? Absolutely. The book of Nehemiah chronicles such an effort. After enduring exile and learning a harsh lesson, the Jews mass-deported those who did not belong in their country, including women and children.

That is what it looks like when a people consumed with repentance returns to God’s path. Remember that when Homan commences that which the American people have now rightly given him a mandate to do. For it never should have been otherwise.