Who Am I?نموونە

How does the teaching of God’s Word about us as humans apply to race and racism?

First, regardless of who we are or what we look like, we share universal dignity and value before God and before one another. We all have a common ancestry from Adam and Eve.

Second, God loves and pursues all people in all people groups. God loves the world (John 3:16). Jesus died for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2). And the reconciliation with God that Jesus made possible has paved the way for our reconciliation with each other, regardless of ethnic differences or divisions in this world (Colossians 3:11).

Jesus’s Revolutionary Bloodline creates a counter-cultural family of multi-ethnic unity called the Church. In this family, dividing walls of hostility are destroyed, first between Jews and Gentiles and then eventually between all ethnicities.In the words of Aubrey Sequeira, an Indian brother in Christ pastoring a multi-ethnic church in Abu Dhabi, “While homogeneity in churches simply reinforces the status quo of society, the biblical evidence shows us that the gospel broke down and cut across ethnic, social, economic, and cultural barriers in ways never before seen in history.”

So what does all this mean for how we understand race and racism in the world?

Well, clearly, according to what God teaches about all of us without exception, as men and women made in His Image with equal dignity and value, racism is a fundamental perversion of God’s good design for Humanity. We must reject any semblance of a hierarchy of different races, whether in our personal thoughts or in the practices of the world around us, as the apostle Peter needed to learn in Acts 10.

On a more proactive level, in Christ God calls us to commit ourselves to true multi-ethnic community. In multi-ethnic community, we appreciate our ethnic differences without assigning more or less value to them. It’s not that we disregard our differences, nor do we attempt to discount or erase those differences altogether. Instead, we see our diversity as God sees our diversity: as a stunning portrait of His Creativity that exalts His Glory as our Creator, much like we’ll see in Heaven for all of Eternity.

As we pursue this kind of community in the Church, we pray and work as the Lord leads us for justice for people, regardless of race. We do justice (Micah 6:8) and deplore any hierarchy of race in the Body of Christ or in the world around us.

• We celebrate interracial marriages and multi-racial families.
• We train our children to hate racism.
• We work against any injustice that is in any way directed against a person or a group of people because of their race.

So as the Church, we humbly, kindly, lovingly, and confidently lock arms together across all ethnic dividing lines. We do right for the sojourner, fatherless, widow, and needy in a way that reflects God our Father (Ephesians 5:1). And we look forward to the day when Jesus will return and racism will be no more; when people from every tribe, language, and nation are one, reigning together in a New Heaven and a New Earth (Revelation 5:9–10).