The Race-Wise FamilyExemplo

Beautifully Diverse

A biblical understanding of multiethnicity is foundational to becoming race-wise Christians. Often ignorance, discrimination, and ethnic or racial hatred come down to simply not valuing multiethnic voices and experiences.

Creating human beings who reflect multiethnic diversity was God’s idea from the very beginning. It is also part of what it means to be made in God’s own image—the Godhead itself is three diverse, unique persons in one.

From God’s promise to Abraham, which included a name change such that he became “the father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5), to God’s willingness to save the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in the book of Jonah, to the multiple ways Jesus showed love to people groups whom the Jews thought of as outside God’s mercy and grace (i.e., Samaritans and Gentiles of various eth­nic backgrounds), God showed that he embraces people from every nation (Acts 10:34–35) even when human beings don’t do the same for one another.

God has clearly valued multiethnicity from the earliest days of the church as well, which was given the directive to share the gospel “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In Acts 2, the apostles, full of the Holy Spirit, began speaking in languages they didn’t know: “God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven . . . heard their own languages being spoken” (verses 5–6).

At this moment, a multicultural group of Jews broke out in a multilingual choir of sound. The beauty of this significant day is not that people’s ethnicities were erased but that their differences were bridged. More than three thousand people became Christians that day. God did not brush over the ethnic differences of the people in Jerusalem, but he leaned into those differences and used them to bring more people to a saving knowledge of himself.

Clearly, the gospel goes forth when we celebrate diverse peoples, lan­guages, and cultures. The love of Christ ulti­mately overcomes all barriers and binds his people—his diverse and multiethnic people—in such perfect unity that “the world will know that [God] sent [him]” (John 17:23).

Creator God, instill in our family a true love for multiethnicity, not for diversity’s sake alone but rather out of a deep conviction that you showcase the power of unity when all of us together worship before you, the Lord Almighty. Amen.