Diversity and Discrimination
Yesterday we saw how Jesus ministered to the downtrodden, the outcasts of society. Today we want to focus on that a little more, but with the emphasis more on national or ethnic diversity.
Ethnic and national bigotry was very common in the ancient world. Various groups just saw themselves as superior to those around them. The ancient Greeks, for instance, viewed non-Greeks as barbarians. All through ancient literature we find this kind of bigotry. Unfortunately, Jesus' contemporaries were not immune to that same kind of thinking, no matter how exalted their religious profession.
Read Exodus 12:38, 18:1; Numbers 12:1; Ruth 1:16, 17; and Matthew 23:15. What should these texts tell us about the ethnic diversity that made up the nation of Israel?
From its beginning as a nation, Israel was never a pure stock. The idea of a pure lineage is a more modern conception, an offspring of evolutionary ideology. God has made all humanity "one blood" (Acts 17:26); we are all offspring of Adam and Eve, our first parents. And through faith in Jesus, we all-regardless of color, nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion-become the "sons of God" (John 1:12).
This point cannot be overemphasized: Christ's death on the cross, for every human being, should once and for all denude all disciples of any sense of ethnic or national superiority. More so, it should remove all sense of bigotry toward any group of people. Before Jesus on the cross, upon whom all our sin, everyone's, fell, we all stand equal. More than anyone else in the world, Christ's disciples, those who follow Him, should be purged of the kind of prejudices and ethnic tensions that seem to be inbred in every culture and society. In the end, there are only two classes of people: the saved and the lost. And we who are saved should be busy going around, as did our Master, seeking to find the lost and pointing them to the only thing that makes us different from them, the promise of salvation that we have claimed for ourselves.
To what degree have you been tainted with the prejudices and bigotries inherent in your own society?
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