Race Is Not The Problem

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"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." - Romans 1:16

Despite what secular woke artists, race baiters, and critical race grifters may tell you, ethnicity is not primary to our identity. The world is not divided into systemic oppressors and marginalized victims. And your melanin count is not the most important thing about you. It just isn't.

In this article, I want to reject every godless notion that racism can be fought with more racism. Instead, I want to embrace the common sense notion that increased divisiveness does not lead to increased unity. And I want to stand upon the only truth that can bring healing to our land. To do that, I will entirely ignore every pagan secular philosophy that has an opinion on this issue, and instead, I will joyfully share the Gospel! That message is what we need to hear, now more than ever. 

WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?

In its most basic form, the Gospel is the four-part story of how God is bringing redemption to sinful man. Part 1 is the story of how God created humans to be perfect. Part 2 is about how those same humans chose rebellion and fell into sin and ruin. Part 3 is about how God sent His only Son to rescue and redeem those fallen men. And Part 4 is about how God will totally and finally bring total redemption to full completion in eternity. That is the general and good old Gospel message.

HOW DOES THE GOSPEL SPEAK ABOUT RACE?

But, what I find so fascinating about the Gospel, is how robust it truly is. It not only provides the general answer to the question of redemption, but it also communicates redemption in more particular and concrete ways. For instance, the Gospel not only recounts how God created us (a general truth); it also shows how we were created as sexual, emotional, biological, rational, relational, and vocational beings (particular truths). Moreover, the Gospel not only argues that we have fallen into sin (A general statement), but it also defines what that sin is and how it has infected every facet of our being (a particular appeal). 

With that, I believe the Gospel can and should be told from various angles to show how God redeems us from all various and sundry sins. So with that, this article is about how the four-part general story of the Gospel can be told through the particular lens of race, and how only Jesus can heal the sin of racism.

PART 1: CREATION (One Unique Race)

After 5 dramatic days filled with the most incredible displays of God's creational power, God made the animals, and then He fashioned the man. He personally knelt down in the dust and intimately formed a human in His own image (Gn. 2:7). Then, He made a suitable helper for him in the woman, Eve (Gn 2:18). And finally, He commanded both of them, male and female, to be fruitful and multiply, rule and have dominion, and to spread out to the ends of the earth (Gn. 1:28). This was what it meant to be human in a general sense.

More specifically, we may understand that humans were designed as a single ethnic people. Eve was made to be the flesh of Adam's flesh and the bone of Adam's bone (Gn. 2:23), which meant that Adam and Eve were members of a single race; the human race. Their melanin content did not matter at all in God's perfect design. However light or dark they were, they were human. And their mandate was to fill the world full of people so that a worldwide community would all worship the same God, living in perfect harmony with one another, without even a hint of division.

Then enters the serpent.

PART 2: FALL (A World In Ethnic Division)

When Adam and Eve rejected the Word of God and followed the serpent's trickery, humanity fell into sin. That sin not only affected their relationship with God but also had a profound impact upon human race relations as well. For instance, the first intraracial crime in human history occurred when Adam's son Cain killed his other son Abel. These boys were members of the same human race, both descended from the same bloodline, and yet one of them decided to perpetrate a hideous act of violence upon the other. This set a terrible precedent that still exists today, but it does not stop there.

Humans not only murdered themselves interracially (meaning members of the human race killing other humans), but soon ethnocentric discrimination, hatred, and murder began as well. After humans were judged through a global flood, the rebooted race of Noah gathered in a valley called Shinar, also known as Babel. The goal was not to be fruitful, multiply, or for man to spread out to the ends of the earth in obedience to God's covenant commission (Gen 1:28; 9:1). Instead, their goal was to cloister together in a valley of disobedience, and in pure hubris, attempt to build a tower that reached up to the heavens; making themselves equal to God.

God, of course, vetoed their foolish plans, but He also introduced a new facet into the human race. That was ethnicity. Up to this point, all humans spoke the same language and looked the same color. Again, there is only one race of human beings. But, after the curse of Babel, humans naturally segregated into ethnolinguistic tribes who scattered all across the earth in search of places to call their own. Thus, after Babel, one human race was divided into a myriad of ethnicities. This was not the problem.

The problem was sin. And since sin affects every facet of the human condition, humans began acting out their dysfunction, discrimination, judgment, and violence along ethnic lines as well. It was not enough to perpetuate violence against another human. Sin, instead, caused humans to group and stratify themselves according to color, tribe, language, and culture. This way, evil could be inflicted upon groups and not just individuals.

While one race of people still existed (the human race), a deep distrust for other ethnic peoples settled upon the human psyche so that human genetically similar persons were never more divided. Wars and prejudices were now being enacted over skin color and complexion. Slavery became an early institutional norm in the ancient world, where one tribe would act shamefully against another, believing the other group to be subhuman.

And while examples could abound in history and in the modern world of this kind of hatred, it is essential to note that sin produces ethnocentrism among all peoples. I do not use the word "racism" here because there is only one human race. Sin does not produce fear, prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism among various races (i.e., racism); sin produces fear, prejudice, discrimination, and opposition among the many competing ethnicities that exist as one broken, fractured race of people (i.e., ethnocentrism).

This distinction is critical because racism does not really get at the problem. People hating one another inside the human race is not specific enough to account for the intentional sins that ethnically dissimilar people enact upon one another. And, racism as a term, is not robust enough to describe any meaningful cure. This is because humans will not be cured and made whole through more division; humans will be cured and made whole when they come together as one human race as God intended. That can only come about through the Gospel.  

PART 3: REDEMPTION (Neither Jew Nor Greek)

In our fallen, sinful nature, we are prone to prejudice, ethnic antagonism, and ethnocentrism (valuing one's native ethnicity above another). This sin is enough to condemn us to eternal hell because it violates God's eternal law. While God did, in fact, divide human beings into various ethnic tribes so that they would accomplish His command of scattering to the ends of the earth, He did not command them to hate one another.

In fact, humans were supposed to love their neighbor as themselves, to celebrate each other's distinctiveness, and to work together to fill this world with worshippers of God. And while humanity has fallen far short of God's glorious standard, doing vile and shameless things to one another, God Himself would provide the cure.

Unlike the modern world - which is attempting to cure the sin of "racism" with more hatred and division - God sent His one and only Son to heal this sin perfectly! He came wrapped in a particular ethnicity (a Jew) but lived His life, showing us what being a human in relation to other humans means. Instead of following the cultural norm by hating the ethnic Samaritans (a group of half-Jewish / half-Gentile people), Jesus loved them and brought salvation to their city (Jn 4). Instead of looking down His nose at the despised Gentiles, He healed them (e.g., Mt. 15:21-28). And when He marched up that hill to the cross, He permanently healed the divide among the nations.

This is why Paul could boldly say in Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all ONE in Christ Jesus.

Paul says that Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection brought healing to our ethnic divides. That means God shows no ethnic partiality (Ro 2:11); it means anyone who receives Jesus Christ is made acceptable to God no matter the color of their skin (Ac. 10:34-35); and it means that redemption will bring all the peoples together, into one unified and holy family (Ro. 10:12). We are not healed by Jesus to remain separate. We are healed to come back together. And only the Gospel can make that happen. How?

In Romans 1:16 (quoted above), Paul literally says that the Gospel is the power of God. No other message can make that claim! And that great power has not come to leave us divided. On the contrary, it has come to knock down the dividing wall between all Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female, white and black, and any other sinful distinction! However deeply our sin has divided us, the Gospel of Jesus Christ can and will unite us! That is, if we believe in Christ!

If we will turn from our wicked sins - our propensities for hatred, our grievances, and judgments, our narrow ways of excluding some and celebrating others - and will instead turn to Him! If we turn to Him for forgiveness, mercy, grace, and redemption! If we will turn to Him for healing… He will heal us. He will unite us. Only His Gospel can do this!

PART 4: CONSUMMATION (Every Tribe Together Worshipping)

Until the Lord Jesus Christ returns, the church has been called to live out our Gospel redemption together. Ethnocentrism has no place among our ranks, as we are perfectly united in Jesus Christ. It does not matter what color, culture, or country we hail from; we serve a more excellent King who has made us one in Christ! We now see all people, from all strata, as being created in the image of God. And we must remain diligent in opposing any instance of division within Christ's Church! He did not die to leave us divided. He died to make us whole.

As we wait on the Lord to return, we must also recognize the sinful nature of our nations. Our leaders are wicked people who are not led by the Spirit of God. They think in secular categories that do more harm than good. And in their flesh, they cannot see the hope of the Gospel.

Let us avoid adopting their categories. Let us not embrace their theories. Instead, let us confidently and courageously decry wokism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and any other godless ideology that contradicts Scripture and cannot heal. But even more importantly, let us share the only Gospel! Let us tell the world of the hope we have in Jesus Christ. Because when His redemption comes, racism, ethnocentrism, and every other division ends. 

Finally, let us remember that full redemption is soon coming. One day, all the elect saints of God will gather around the throne of God and worship Him in perfect unity. On that day, the light, the dark, the short, the tall, the male, the female, the Jew, the Greek, and every other distinct, beautiful human, will worship Him forever in Spirit and in truth. No more division. No more curse.