Merry Christmas — now open those dang borders: That’s the message from a church in California, the Claremont United Methodist Church near Los Angeles, and its rage-in-a-cage seasonal nativity scene of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

What an outrage; what an offense to Christian truths.

“Church nativity displays Jesus, Mary and Joseph in cages, separated at the border,” The Washington Post wrote in a headline.

As if. As if Americans are now supposed to collectively fall to their knees and beg forgiveness for the audacious cruelty called border control.

The Bible is hardly a book that teaches open borders.

In fact, it’s just the opposite.

The God of the Bible was the first to create a land and post sentries to keep out the undesirables. Can you say Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden?

The God of the Bible constantly, consistently, continuously called on His people to separate themselves from the pagans. Can you say Ezra — for just one example?

“[T[he officials approached me,” Ezra said, “and said, ‘The people of Israel and the priests and Levites have not separated themselves from the people of the lands with their abominations … for they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons; so that the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the land.”

There are countless other examples of God leading His people to chosen lands; of God warning his people against intermingling with other nations; of God telling His people to keep from adopting practices of other cultures; of God establishing actual borders to protect and house His followers.

The left likes to pretend the Jesus of the New Testament teaches love means tolerance — that love replaces law. This is where they dig to get their open border nonsense.

“What if this family sought refuge in our country today? Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus no older than two taken from his mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,500 children have been the past three years,” wrote Karen Clark Ristine, the minister at Claremont, on her Facebook page. “Jesus grew up to teach us kindness and mercy and a radical welcome of all people.”

Indeed.

But as Jesus also taught: He came not to wipe out but add to the laws of the Old Testament.

He came with a message of love — but also an insistence for standards.

He came with a call of faith to individuals — not with a demand for government, or the collective, to regulate.

Using the teachings of the Bible, and of Jesus, to score political points against this White House’s border controls and to make the case that America ought to cede sovereignty for the sake of those from other nations is a sell of a false and deceptive premise.

That it’s coming from someone who should know better — a minister of a church, supposedly schooled in the ways of the Bible — is all the more egregious.

There’s just no way to read the Bible and come to the truthful conclusion God wants America to open borders to all.