On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In that speech, he eloquently challenged a divided nation to come together in racial harmony and to sit together at a table of brotherhood. He had in mind the brotherhood of man, but, we are even more deeply concerned with the brotherhood of the believer.
Neither the brotherhood of humanity nor the brotherhood of Christ should ever be defined or disrupted by something as evil as prejudice. King said,
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today. (MLK Online)
Standing in the midst of the Athenian Areopagus, the apostle Paul proclaimed that God “made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).Then, the concern was mainly Jewish or Gentile; today it is perhaps even more complicated, but every believer should number himself among the community of mankind, because everyone can trace his heritage back to a common mother and father upon the Earth, Adam and Eve.
Even unbelievers and atheists come to a similar conclusion, for Darwinists believe in common ancestors for all the human race, even if they would not call them Adam and Eve. From one blood, red – not black or white or yellow or brown – God created man and every generation that succeeded him. Just as importantly, God has extended his hand of fellowship and love to every human, regardless of his color or background; to be godly is to be colorblind when it comes to the community of man, for he desires that all be saved (First Timothy 2:3-4).
Racial and cultural prejudice has raged for thousands of years, however, as ignorant and proud men have ignored their common Adamic heritage and insisted that their branch of the human tree was superior to others; no race or culture has a corner on the prejudicial market, but bigotry and suspicion are found creeping in the shadows wherever the spiritual is compromised by the physical.
Jesus confronted this kind of prejudice at Jacob’s well, when he met a Samaritan woman, surprised at his conversation because “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). Jews and Samaritans were related biologically but they were just different enough to create disharmony; Jesus could have written that division into stone with a few words, but instead he prepared the way for its destruction by predicting a common manner of worship that would come (Orr).
The division between Jews and Gentiles was even more pronounced before Christ, but his death on the cross terminated the enmity between the races (see Ephesians 2:11-18). The effect is that race matters not at all to God, nor should it matter one whit to his children (Galatians 3:26-29). All of us – black, white, brown, red – are his children and it is a terrible evil to segregate ourselves based on something as meaningless as skin pigment.
In the early days of the church of Christ, a preacher met a prospect, now known as the Ethiopian eunuch. “Little is known about the Ethiopian. In all likelihood, he was a black man who had turned to Judaism. We know he was a sincere individual, for he had traveled over 1,000 miles, from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, to worship God” (Padfield 1993).
Other commentators disagree, arguing that he was probably just a Jew born in a foreign country instead of in Israel. In reality, who cares? If God did, he would have told us about the eunuch’s race – that’s how little it matters.
Jesus taught in John 7:24, “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” Nothing is so lazy as to make reflexive assessments based on scant evidence or lumping together every member of some group based on the misbehavior of one poor representative. Nothing is so lazy as racial or cultural prejudice.
Judging righteous judgment compels one to look past skin pigment, regional dialects and accents, prosperity and poverty and every other physical indicator to examine at the content of one’s character (James 2:8-9). Be careful, “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you” (Matthew 7:2). If you judge people based on race, culture and language, they are likely to judge you the same way and there are enough miscreants in whatever group you call your own to condemn you quickly. Moreover, the cycle of bigotry is only accelerated with each person who succumbs to it.
Furthermore, would you want God to employ the same method of judgment when it comes time for you to kneel before him with eternity on the line, employing stereotypes and bigotry against you rather than judging you according to your own works? Certainly, racial prejudice violates the golden rule of doing unto others as you would want them to do to you (Matthew 7:12).
Prejudice reveals a perspective that is too little spiritual and too much fleshly. Race, culture, language and wealth are matters of the flesh, not the spirit and if Christians cannot rise above the flesh, no one can (Romans 8:5-8)! Christ would lead us to learn to look at such things as he does – with colorblindness and a spiritual eye (Matthew 6:22-23). We understand that racial prejudice is often just a euphemism for hatred and no one who hates a fellow man will ever see Heaven (First John 4:7-8). Hell is populated with bigots.
Thinking prejudicially is bad enough, but sin multiplies when we announce our bigotry to others, either by espousing the evil cause or employing nasty language and stereotypes against others (Ephesians 4:29-32).If your language is not meant to edify, but to foster suspicion, division and disharmony, what can it be but sin?
Christians fill the world upon every continent, speaking every language and representing every culture, dialect and color; we sit at a table of brotherhood when we partake of the Lord’s Supper and it is past time that we put away our fleshly prejudices so that we can flourish spiritually.
