Kennystix's podcast
Racial Harmony and Interracial Marriage
The following resource is from desiringgod.org. And I ask Father that your name would be exalted here. Help me to be faithful to your Word. Father, I pray again with Chuck for those in the room who don't love Christ, don't lean on Christ for the salvation of their souls. Don't cleave to Christ as their Savior and Lord and treasure that you would open their hearts to see in this particular issue that Christ is true. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen. My aim today is to show from Scripture and from experience that interracial marriage is not only permitted by the Bible but is a positive good in our day. It is, it's not just to be tolerated, it's to be celebrated. Now that is extremely controversial since it is opposed by people from all sides racially. For example, in 16 states, when I was a college senior in 1967, it was against the law to marry interracially. That's real fresh. Laws reflect deeply, deeply held convictions. And when laws change, convictions don't change necessarily. When I did a Google search for Martin Luther King/Interracial Marriage, the first site that came up was the Ku Klux Klan, which has very anachronistically, this quote on the front page, "Interracial marriage is a violation of God's law and a communist ploy to weaken America." Remember the Communists? Well, they're still there in China and Cuba and Vietnam and North Korea. Black opposition is profound and widespread. Lawrence Otis Graham writes, "Interracial marriage undermines African-American ability to introduce our children to black role models who accept their racial identity with pride." Conservative white opposition is probably even stronger. H. Millard wrote, "We are seeing the death of the American and his replacement with a non-European type who now has enough mass in our society to pervert European American ways. White people are going to have to struggle mightily to survive the neo-melting pot and avoid being part of one-size-fits-all human model, call it what it is, genocide, an extinction of the white genotype." I got a letter from a Christian man, a white Christian man who wrote this. As individuals, they are precious souls for whom Christ died and whom we are to love and seek to win. As a race, however, they are unique and different and have their own culture. I would never marry a black. Why? Because I believe God made the races, separated them, and set bounds of their habitation Deuteronomy 32 8, Acts 17 26. He made them uniquely different and intended that these distinctions remain. God never intended the human race to become a mixed or mongrel race. So while I am strongly opposed to segregation, I favor separation that the uniqueness with which God made them is maintained. To these opposing views, that is views that oppose interracial marriage, I would add my own experience. I was a teenage, southern, racist, by almost any definition. And since I am a sinner still, I don't doubt that there are elements of that still for which I must continually repent. Indeed, for those lingering attitudes and actions I do repent. Racism is a very difficult thing to define. The Bethlehem staff have spent months working on this. And we are presently, I would say, most closely committed to the definition adopted by the Presbyterian Church in America last summer at their annual meeting, goes like this. Very short, and every word is packed and weighed carefully. Freedom is an explicit or implicit belief or practice that qualitatively distinguishes or values one race over other races. One of these days I'll preach on that definition. But suffice it to say now, that's the definition I would use in calling myself one in my teenage years in Greenville, South Carolina. My attitudes and my actions were demeaning and disrespectful toward non-whites, and right at the heart of that demeaning attitude was the persuasion, conviction, and felt, passion that interracial marriage was wrong. And everything flowed from there. Of course you don't go to school together for goodness' sakes. You're going to fall in love with somebody if you do that, and since it's wrong, that's wrong. Good grief, that's easy, what's the big issue? My mother, I will celebrate her again and again, saying that song with more meaning than some of you, washed my mouth out with soap, literally, over the pink sink in our bathroom for saying shut up to my sister. If she had known what I said when she wasn't around about blacks, she would have washed it out with gasoline because she wasn't of that ilk. In 1963, the year my sister married, my church voted on a Wednesday night to prohibit blacks from worshiping at our church. My sister's wedding was held in that church after that vote, and my mother escorted with her hands the black guests into the main sanctuary because the ushers would not do it. And I watched, and my redemption began. Noel and I, in 1967, attended, I was a senior at Wheaton Urbana Mission's Conference. Noel and I would be married a year later, and we went together seeking God's will for our lives, knowing that marriage was coming. We remember so clearly, we've talked about it more than once. Warren Webster, some of you know that name is a very, very strong spokesman in the missions world of the conservative Baptists in those days, was a missionary in Pakistan for 12 years before he came to that event, he was on a panel, and in those days, they took questions from the floor at Urbana, can you believe that, 12,000 people there? And he was asked, what if your daughter on the mission field fell in love with a Pakistani and wanted to marry him, isn't that a problem for missions? We both remember, we were just rocked back on our heels by his answer, because he said it was such prophetic force, and I'm not claiming the exact wording, but this is the gist and Noel is sitting there to verify, anybody in that Urbana '67, I would just love to compare notes here. I couldn't see your hand if you raised your hand Sunday morning, but check with me. He said, better a Christian Pakistani than a godless white American. So you can see that the Lord, little by little, from my mother to Wheaton, Urbana, then I went to Fuller Seminary, and I went back into my files, and I think God is still there. In 1971, in an ethics class from Lewis Smeads, I wrote this paper. Remember this kind of paper? If you type on this paper, it's so sticky, you can erase the ink with a pencil eraser, that's before the days of computer, and the title of this paper is the Ethics of Interracial Marriage, written with a view to black-white marriage in America, Ethics T33, Dr. Smead, John Piper, in the spring of '71, and I settled it for myself, and I've never gone behind this paper. I just settled it for myself, and that's the thesis of this sermon that interracial marriage is not only permitted by the Bible, but in our day is a positive good. Now here I am 30 plus years later at Bethlehem, and I took our directory, get one of these if you don't have one, and then stand in awe of that picture, and deal with that picture. That's a very, very provocative picture. These are Bethlehem folks, and very hard to figure out where to draw the line of who you are going to like in that picture, very difficult to figure out where to draw the line. I counted 203 non-anglows in the picture part of this directory. I'm sure I missed some, and I'm willing to get emails on the fact that I shouldn't have been counting non-anglows, what's that got to do with anything, and how do you define Anglo anyway, Pastor? Well, I don't have a clue how to define Anglo, I just chose people who didn't look like me. And here's the issue. There's a lot of kids in that group, there's a lot of teenagers in that group, and there's a lot of single young adults in that group, and guess what? They're going to find each other here, and they're going to get married if we believe they should, and that's a good thing. In other words, given the reality, the Bethlehem already is not just what it's becoming, we need to place the stand on this as a people. My job, among other things, is to articulate the place to stand, and that's what I like to do biblically. My goal is to now give you four passages of Scripture, and then close with some application and illustration. Number one, Genesis chapter one, "The Bible portrays the human race as coming from one pair of human beings," Adam and Eve, "do believe they're historical people, and it symbols merely." I don't think you can follow through with New Testament theology if you don't believe that. Adam and Eve are traceable back through the genealogies, they don't go forever, and they are historical, and they are one, and the oneness of it is what makes all the difference, and secondly, they're created in the image of God, Genesis 1.27, "So God created man in his own image." In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them, and then very significantly in chapter five, after the fall, verses one to three, we see that this immago, this image of God, this unique thing distinguishing from all other animal life, this absolutely unique, magnificent human reality called the image of God, continues in sinners. Chapter five, verse one, "When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image." Now the point of that is to say again in verses one and two, "Yes, Adam is in the image of God, yes he's fallen, yes he's sinner, yes the whole creation has come under God's judgment, and yes he just had a son, and that son is like him in that regard, and all of his sons and daughters are like him in that regard." Everybody in this room has the same great, great, great granddaddy and grandmama. You get to wake up to that, that's really big, and bigger yet is that the family trait is we're all different from monkeys and porpoises, we're like God, like nobody else in the universe, no other being is like God. Acts 17, 26, "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth," and he's saying that into a Athenian situation who were boasting in their superiority over the barbarians. That's the context, he's looking at those proud philosophers on Mars Hill and saying, "Guess what, you both have the same great, great granddaddy, get off it." That's what the message he delivered was among others on Mars Hill in Athens. That's text number one, it's huge, it's foundational, think long about it. Number two, 1 Corinthians 739 says, "I believe the Bible forbids intermarriage between believers and unbelievers, but not members of different ethnic groups." 1 Corinthians 739, "A wife has bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord." So I was praying in there with those who pray before the service and you're all welcome to come to pray with us for half an hour before the service. That God would give us a passion as parents and as leaders of young people at Bethlehem that our children would grow up with a mighty passion. I will never consider marrying an unbeliever, never. I won't date an unbeliever toward marriage, I won't even ponder the possibility of marrying somebody who doesn't love Jesus Christ with all his heart and soul and mind and strength or love Jesus Christ with all her heart, soul and mind and strength. It is not in the question, that's the kind of young people I would like to grow up and within that any ethnic group goes. There is one limitation laid on this woman in this text, "Mary whom you wish when your husband dies, only in the Lord." That's huge, don't play around with unbelievers toward marriage. Deuteronomy 7 was read, what's the point of that? You shall not intermarry with the nations, Israel, you shall not give your daughters to their sons nor shall you take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods. There's the ground clause, there's the reason, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods and the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you. There's no issue there about color mixing, there's no issue there about customs mixing, there's no issue there about clan identity. The issue is one common allegiance to the one true God. If you want to apply that text today, here's the way it would go. Let there be absolutely no intermarriage between the true Israel and anybody else. You got that? Let there be no intermarriage between the true Israel, the church of Jesus Christ and anybody else. The only people we marry are those who have an allegiance to our King, Jesus, color what they be, custom what they have. That's the way it comes into the New Testament. We are the true Israel, we are the new, true people of God. Let there be no intermarriage outside this new humanity with Jesus as its head and many wonderful colors within. Number three, text number three, Colossians 3, 9, 2, 11, and the point of this text is in Christ ethnic and social differences cease to be obstacles, barriers, at least decisive barriers to deep personal intimate personal fellowship. Colossians 1, 3, 9, you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here in Christ, here in this new humanity, here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian or Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, many and all. That does not mean that every minority culture gets swallowed up in majority culture in the name of unity. God does not obliterate all ethnic and cultural differences in Christ. He redeems them, he refines them, he enriches them with togetherness in his kingdom. The final image in heaven is every tongue and tribe and people and nation, not all that blotted out. The point of Colossians 3, 11 is not that culture, ethnicity, and race don't have any significance. That's not the point. I think that would be belittling to one of God's beautiful designs if we went that far. Rather, the point is they are now in Christ, no barrier to profound personal intimate fellowship. Singing alto is very different from singing bass, significantly different for the sake of music. But singing alto is no barrier to being in the choir, it's an asset, and so is bass. When Christ is all and in all, as verse 11 says, when Christ is all and in all, differences are important but subordinate to fellowship, and I will argue to marriage. Last text, Numbers chapter 12, the marriage of Moses to a black woman. Numbers chapter 12 verse 1, Moses the Jew, here's the situation, Miriam and Aaron, that's his sister and his brother, so he got family going on here. Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman, my tone of voice is an interpretation to what I think they were saying. I'll just forget the tone of voice. Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. They spoke against God's anointed, they didn't like this woman and this marriage, they did not like this. No, Cushite, what's a Cushite? A Cushite is a person from Cush, which is south of Egypt and almost synonymous in those days with Ethiopia and everybody knew they were black. There's one piece of biblical evidence, besides the external biblical evidence that points in this direction, it's Jeremiah 12, Jeremiah 1323, Kenanethiopian, now the Hebrew word behind Ethiopian there is exactly the same word as this Cushite, so this Cushite, I'm not sure why they translate Cushite one place to Ethiopian another, but that's the way they did it. An Ethiopian, a Cushite, changed his skin or the leopard his spots, then you also can do good who are accustomed to do evil, so it's taking a stand out skin color, in this case black, and saying, "You can't anymore be a different person than that person can be a different color," so just pointing to what Cushite means. Ethiopian means, Daniel Hayes, I've been reading this book for a year or so a little bit, from every people and nation, a biblical theology of race, it's kind of an academic study, J. Daniel Hayes writes, page 71, "Cush is used regularly to refer to the area south of Egypt and above the cataracts of the Nile where a black African civilization flourished for over 2,000 years, thus it is quite clear that Moses marries a black African woman." If you wonder, how in the world did that come about, I can go into more detail here, I'll just drop in one more detail, it says that when they went out of Egypt, other nations went with them, it says that, so probably already in Egypt there was all kinds of intermingling and so some of these folks left with the Jews. Now that's significant that Moses married, but that's not the point of the text. The point of the text is, Miriam is mad, and how God responds to Miriam is really the point of the text and it's not exactly what you might think it is. So Miriam is criticizing, let's read it again, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. I wrote a poem on this, those who've been around for 20 years may remember. The first line is, "My God Moses, she's black!" That's the first line in the poem. It's one of my advent poems and you can go find it, it was a little controversial when I read it because people didn't quite get the point, but you can go to the Desiring God website and read that poem, just look up, "My God she's black!" or something like that. All right, here's what happens, here's God's attitude towards Miriam's attitude. He takes him outside the camp, like to the woodshed, and he says, "This is my servant." I talk with Moses mouth to mouth, you're getting in his face about whom he married, I'm not getting in his face, about whom he married, and then verse 10. When the cloud removed from over the tent, behold Miriam was leopress, like snow. You want to be, you want to be white Miriam? I'll make you white, you like white, I'll make you white. You know, if you've ever thought wrongly that black is a biblical symbol for uncleanness, you better think again, or a white symbol for uncleanness may land on you. I don't think it's an accident that he says white. You want to be white, you're in this guy's face because she's too dark, okay, here's my punishment, and the story has a real happy ending, and you can go to the poem to hear that as I spell it out, or read the Bible. Summary number one, all races have one ancestor, and all of us are in the image of God. Number two, the Bible forbids marrying unbelievers, but within the faith does not prohibit marrying any race. Three, in Christ our oneness is so profound that it transforms racial and social differences from barriers to blessings. Or criticizing one interracial marriage was severely disciplined by God, closing implications from experience. Number one, I don't even know if I have these numbered, but we'll start one, opposition to interracial marriage is one of the deepest roots of racial distance, disrespect and hostility in America, show me one place in the world where interracial and inter-ethnic marriage is frowned upon, and yet two groups live with equal respect, honor, and opportunity. I don't think it exists anywhere. It can't. It won't happen. Why? Because the specter, the supposed specter of my kid, Mary and Dad kid, demands barrier after barrier after barrier be erected. That can't go to church together and camp and hang out on Friday night. They can't go to the same schools, they're going to sakes. They can't go to the same clubs, they can't live in the same neighborhood, they start hanging out together. Kids are kids, they don't know all the prejudices that we bring. This is huge, I think. As long as we disapprove of interracial marriage, we will be pushing children and therefore ourselves away from each other. It must be. The effect is not harmony. The effect is not respect. The effect is not equal opportunity no matter how many times George Wallace or anybody else ever said it could be separate but equal never was, never is, never will be in this country. Therefore where there is a racial intermarriage disapproved of, the dominant culture, the culture of the money and the power will dominate and oppress. They must, they must because they're going to, I mean if you don't make a good spouse for my kid, you don't make a good neighbor for my kid or me, it's got to be. There is no other way to live this thing out except segregation with a vengeance if you have a deep disapproval in your heart for interracial marriage. Here there's a great irony, I speak right out of my life, my memory. Here's a great irony. The very situation of separation and suspicion and distrust and dislike and distaste brought about in large measure by the fear of interracial marriage is used to justify the opposition to interracial marriage, catch 22. It's going to be hard for this couple, good kids, good night, they're going to be called half breeds. You said, I mean this is so unloving to permeate such a thing, so unjust, so wrong, life will be so hard, it's like this catch 22, it's like an army being defeated because there aren't enough recruits, troops and the troops won't sign up because they're being defeated. It's called catch 22. Oppose interracial marriage and you help create a situation of racial disrespect and then you use that to justify your opposition. Now this is a Christian sermon, right here is where Christ makes all the difference. Right here Christ makes all the difference. Christ does not call us to prudent lives, safe, easy, non-problematic, stress-free life. Since when was that a Christian vocation? He calls us to God-centered, Christ-exalting, justice-advancing, counter-cultural, risk-taking, love and courage. Will it be harder, ask yourself very carefully, will it be harder to be married to another race, a person of another race? Will it be harder for the kids? Here's my answer, maybe, and maybe not. Do you know how it's going to go with your kids? You're perfectly black or perfectly white kids? You know how it's going to go with your perfectly Asian kids? You don't know. You don't have a clue how it's going to go. It could be hell for 40 years. It could be awful for the teenage years, or sweet and wonderful for the teenage years and then a marriage, a divorce, another marriage, another divorce, another marriage, another divorce. You don't have a clue how it's going to go. You don't know if it's going to be easy or hard. Your race or shade they happen to be. Is it hard to take a child to the mission field? Risks are huge, no 9-1-1. Grandmama's on your case big time and take my baby there. Is it hard to take a child to a mixed neighborhood where they're going to be teased and ridiculed for being different? Is it hard to bring up a child to be a Christian in a secular world where their beliefs might be despised? Is it hard to bring a kid up just to have standards? You're not going to wear that. No care how many kids are wearing that. You're not wearing that. You don't go out of this house. I'm your dad. And you'll be here at 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock. I don't care. 11. You'll be home. That's not easy to raise a kid with some convictions and some standards in a world. Whoever said child rearing would be easy. Whoever said marriage would be easy. Where'd we get these notions? Marrying and having and rearing kids is one of the hardest things in the world. It just happens to be right and rewarding and good for the world. And to the glory of God. So be encouraged all single people who think I've just painted the dire picture. It is dire. Wake up. And enjoy. Life is hard and God is good and Christ is strong to help. Ones are people who move toward need, truth, justice, not towards comfort and security. Life is hard. Closing word. There's so much more to say about this. Watch for the star this week. I hope I can say. I had something else I wanted really bad to say and don't have time to say it. The challenges and the blessings of interracial marriage are huge. They're great. Let's just end on this note. We at Bethlehem, and we just agree, we're going to not underestimate the challenges of interracial marriage for couple and kids, and I'm going to underestimate that. And we are going to embrace the burden and the beauty of that. We are going to celebrate the beauty and we're going to embrace the burden because it'll be good for us and good for the world and to the glory of God. There's a little chorus real old now, I mean like 20 years maybe, and I want you Sunday morning folks to sing it with us tonight. We won't hear you. You will hear us. And maybe enough of you know that I won't have to sing the first verse solo, but if I do I will risk it. And so if you recognize it, chime in. The first one through, we'll be learning, and then the second one through, we'll be praying. Okay? Father, make us one. Father, make us one, that the world may know. You have sent the Son, Father, make us one. Were you singing? We couldn't hear you, but I'll trust that you were singing. You stand and we'll stand, would you? Father, make us one, Father, make us one, that the world may know. You have sent the Son, Father, make us one. Father Sunday morning and Saturday night, we together as one, thank you for Christ. We would not dare to live lives of risk without Him. Like that all in these services, I pray, would come to Christ, trust Christ, lean on Christ, treasure Christ. 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John Piper | Interracial marriage is not only permitted by God; it is a positive good. It is not just to be tolerated, but celebrated.