The Bible is Anti-Racist: A Vision for Racial Justice and Social Transformation

Although we are universally created in the image of God and thus share a common identity as his beloved children, ever since the Tower of Babel human beings have been deeply divided by our differences. Down through the ages various groups and individuals have been demeaned, devalued, and oppressed because of their ethnic identity, cultural heritage, and the color of their skin. This is a great evil rooted in the sin that first separated Adam and Eve from their Creator and caused them to hide from him in shame. Racism in countless forms has continued to plague humanity ever since.

Sadly, Americans are historical heirs of this racial sickness as our great democratic ideals were, from their very foundations, hypocritically intertwined with the merciless kidnapping of Africans brutally uprooted from their homeland and forced into dehumanizing enslavement. Our nation has become the most materially prosperous in the history of the world, but the foundations of our economic advantage rest squarely on the backs of enslaved Africans who have now become the most economically disadvantaged members of our society.

We have witnessed two great movements of racial justice and equality with the abolition of legalized slavery in the late nineteenth century and the abolition of legalized segregation and discrimination in the mid-twentieth century. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are painfully confronted with the continued racial inequity and persistent racial discrimination latent within our society. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and social media have brought the truth of this painful reality into sharp focus. No one with a shred of humanity can watch the slow murder of George Floyd by police officers without feeling some measure of outrage and a longing for justice. The summer of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and economic uncertainty, brought countless millions of Americans onto the streets across every state in thousands of demonstrations calling for justice and real change.

Both the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century were profoundly shaped and empowered by a biblical vision of humanity and justice expressed by those who followed Jesus. The question is whether or not the predominately white church in twenty-first century America will rise up and sustain the sacrificial effort and Spirit-inspired love required to bring about genuine liberty and justice for all. If we are to walk in the Way of Jesus and follow the example of the abolitionists and civil rights workers who have come before us, we will need a robust understanding of that same biblical vision. The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, reveals God’s good purpose in creation to form one family made up of people from every tribe and nation under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The following is a select representation of the clear biblical condemnation of racism and this profound anti-racist vision of unity in diversity:

Genesis 1-4: In the beginning God created all human beings in his own image, forever establishing the sacred value and dignity of every woman and man on this planet. As divine image-bearers we begin to see God the Creator is our Father which means we are all brothers and sisters in one global family, regardless of our tribe, nation, or tongue. When Adam and Eve decided to rule themselves rather than serve their Father the King, sin entered God’s good design and so did the domination of man over woman. This division and subjugation were deepened by the jealous violence of one brother against another. Here we see seeds of racism starting to take root when the value of one human being is raised up over another.

Genesis 10-11: God gave humanity a new start through his saving Covenant with Noah and his family. As Noah’s descendants multiplied, a powerful unity of language within a beautiful diversity of culture and ethos began to develop. However, in a tragic repeat of history, human beings used that power to try and take the place of God by raising themselves into the heavens on the tower of Babel. The result of this rebellious sin was a profound confusion and scattering that destroyed the unity of God’s global family and set the stage for millennia of conflict, bias, violence, and domination. The division and conflict between differing people groups was a result of rebellion against God and his good design for unity within diversity.

Genesis 12: God chose Abraham and Sarah to form a new people of God who would be his representatives to the rest of humanity. He invited them into a Covenant relationship, promised them a new identity in that Covenant, and called them to extend his Kingship to all people in order to become a blessing to all the diverse families of the earth. The call of God’s people has always been to live in relationship with him so that as one people, made up of every tribe and nation, we can represent his good and gracious reign over all of creation.

Exodus 1-14: After God saved his people and the surrounding populations from famine through his representative Joseph, the descendants of Jacob migrated to Egypt where they multiplied and prospered. The Pharonic ruling class felt threatened by the people of Israel, so they enslaved them and sought to carry out genocide through the murder of their newborn sons. In the face of increasingly oppressive servitude, God raised up Moses to lead his people out of slavery and into the promise of freedom and fruitfulness. Ultimately it was through the blood of the lamb that God saved his people and delivered them from racist oppression. This experience of liberation from racial slavery became the normative story for the people of Israel and continues as one of the central themes of the entire Hebrew Scriptures. Celebrating liberation is at the heart of what it means to be the people of God.

1 Kings 8: As the people of Israel crossed the Jordan River into the land of Canaan, they faced large and well-fortified cities of pagan cultures which were opposed to the rule of God. Tragically this led to a series of bloody conflicts as the local populations tried to prevent the conquest of their land. Once the twelve tribes were established in the land, they continued to be in conflict with the surrounding cultures but were also influenced by their pagan practices. This led to the demand for a human king and the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon. In this diverse racial context God continued to call his people to represent him to the world and welcome all people into one family under his rule. When King Solomon dedicated the newly built Temple in Jerusalem he prayed for the Gentiles who would be drawn there to pray “in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel.”

Amos 5-6, Micah 6: As time went by the people of Israel increasingly saw themselves in distinction from the rest of the people of the world and often forgot their call to represent God and become a blessing to all the families of the earth. God used the prophets of Israel to remind his people that they once were strangers in a strange land and so reiterated the call to welcome and love the foreigners among them. Even more the prophets directly confronted favoritism and discrimination by calling God’s people to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” for the economically oppressed and racially excluded. The biblical prophets remind us that we belong to the larger global human family and our call is to reconcile all people to this family by doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with God.

Jeremiah 7: During times of defeat and exile the Jewish people developed increasingly segregating systems of holiness and purity to separate themselves from those who were different from themselves. God called the prophet Jeremiah to stand in the gate of the Temple, the place of greatest racial segregation, and declare, “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever.” Sadly, this vision of a Temple where people of every race were welcomed to worship together was not realized, but Jesus would one day turn over the tables of the money changers and quote Isaiah’s prophetic reminder, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”

Isaiah 40-66: Beginning with the Messianic servant songs and concluding with the great apocalyptic vision of the Lord’s final coming, the prophet Isaiah called God’s people back to their original mission of being a blessing to all the families of the earth. He prophesied that the suffering servant would use the people of Israel as “a light to the nations” to bring people of every race into one family of God. Isaiah concludes with a majestic vision of “a new heaven and earth” in which people from every nation on earth process together into Jerusalem to worship God as one family. Isaiah prophecies, “the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come and shall see my glory.” This is God’s purpose, this is our destiny, and this is a promise we are still longing and laboring to see fulfilled.

Matthew 2, Luke 2: After the successive invasions and the oppression of the people of Israel by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, now it was the Romans who occupied the land of Israel and levied intolerable taxes on the people. The Roman census which determined that level of taxation is what sent Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem where Jesus was born in fulfillment of Micah’s prophecy some 700 years earlier. It was the paranoid fears of the Roman vassal king Herod that forced this vulnerable family to flee the diabolical slaughter that he unleashed on the baby boys of Bethlehem and seek refuge as foreigners in the land of Egypt. Returning to Nazareth in Galilee, Jesus grew to manhood while laboring under the racially-based oppression of Roman soldiers who violently enforced unjust Roman policies and Herodian rule. Jesus grew up as a former refugee who suffered daily under systemic racism.

Luke 4: Following his baptism in the Jordan River and his time of testing in the desert wilderness, Jesus returned to Nazareth to publicly announce the vision of his new messianic mission by reading from Isaiah 61. Declaring this vision to be fulfilled in their hearing, Jesus went on to demonstrate from the Hebrew Scriptures that these messianic promises were for all people, not just the Jews. The racist reaction to this simple declaration was so profound that the crowd tried to kill Jesus and even his own family did nothing to stop them. From the beginning Jesus’ mission was aimed at overcoming all the forces that divide and enslave people, including the dark stain of racism. 

Mark 5, 7: As a Galilean Jew, Jesus strategically focused his mission on “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, spending most of his time in the smaller towns and villages of upper Galilee. However, Jesus also traveled regularly through the primarily Gentile regions of Tyre, Sidon, and the Decapolis where he openly engaged with non-Jews by delivering the Gerasene demoniac, healing the Syrophonecian woman’s daughter, and touching the ears of a deaf man from the Decapolis to restore his hearing. Jesus was criticized by the religious leaders for his engagement with Gentiles. He explained this interaction with different races by declaring invalid the countless rules of ritual purity which kept religious Jews strictly segregated from people of different races and casting the vision for one spiritual family made up of many tribes and races. This revolutionary teaching and practice set the stage for his followers to lead a profoundly integrated multi-racial movement that would reach to the ends of the earth.

Luke 10: Jesus often described the nature of God’s Kingdom by telling simple stories taken from everyday life that had a surprising twist. One day when asked to define the scope of his teaching on the passage “love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus told the story of a Jewish man who was traveling the dangerous road from Jerusalem down to Jericho. He was attacked by bandits who beat him and left him for dead, a sadly common occurrence. But then Jesus described two Jewish religious leaders who intentionally ignored this man’s plight, only to be followed by a member of the hated Samaritan people who showed incredible kindness and generosity in caring for this Jew and nursing him back to health. By turning the tables on the commonly held racist assumptions of his time, Jesus was directly confronting the endemic biases that divided people and contributed to their oppression. Jesus demonstrated this radical determination to break down the divisions of racial prejudice by the way he interacted with Samaritans as well.

John 4: Although religious Jews normally avoided passing through Samaria when traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus made it a point to take the harder mountainous route that brought him and his disciples into direct contact with their hated mixed-race cousins the Samaritans. When Jesus engaged in conversation with a woman at Jacob’s well outside of Sychar, he was breaking several cultural taboos, the most egregious of which was a Jew talking to a Samaritan. This conversation not only led to this woman’s conversion, but through her many in the town came to believe in Jesus and invited him and his disciples to stay with them. For a Jewish rabbi and his disciples to stay for two days in the home of Samaritans was a shockingly outrageous act of racial reconciliation which served as a dramatic harbinger of the nature of God’s coming Kingdom!

Mark 14-15: As Jesus entered Jerusalem for his final Passover, he knew that his destiny was nearing fulfillment. He could have softened his message, avoiding provocative acts, and hidden himself from danger, but he relentlessly pursued his Father’s will, knowing where it would all end. Though innocent, he was arrested by armed police, brutally beaten, and incarcerated. Both the religious and political leaders put him through sham trials that were a mockery of justice. Finally, as a man of color, he was sent to death row and executed for crimes he did not commit by white men in positions of coercive power. It is hard to imagine a storyline that could put Jesus into greater solidarity with those who are unjustly accused because of their race, subjected to unwarranted violence, and lynched without access to any kind of justice. 

Matthew 28:18-20; Acts 1: The Good News is that there is a power for good far greater than racism, oppression, and violence. Although Jesus was subjected to all these and more, it was not enough to extinguish the light in him. On the third day he was gloriously transformed through resurrection into an indestructible new life that points us toward the victory he won on the cross, breaking the power of sin and death, and opening the way for us to live a new kind of life in him. Appearing to his disciples in Galilee, Jesus commissioned them to make disciples of every ethnic group (Greek: ethne). Before ascending into heaven from the Mount of Olives Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would fill them and lead them from Jerusalem and Judea into neighboring Samaria and ultimately to the ends of the earth. Jesus’ unequivocal call is for us to break down racial barriers and bring the Good News to every people group on the face of the earth, because we are all members of one big family.

Acts 2: Seven weeks after Jesus rose from the dead his followers were gathered in the upper room of a house in the southwest part of Jerusalem, waiting and praying just as he had instructed them. Then suddenly there was the noise of a rushing wind and the image of flames on each head as they were filled with the Holy Spirit in a whole new way. The immediate effect of this filling was that each was empowered to communicate the Good News of Jesus in one of the languages understood by the many different people who had come to Jerusalem from all over the world for the festival of Shavuot ("Pentecost"). Luke lists 18 different people groups represented by the dispersed Jews who had come to worship in the Holy City. We see here a reversal of the ancient curse brought on by rebellious pride at the tower of Babel. Whereas God had confused the language of a prideful and self-serving humanity and divided them from each other, now he was creating a new humanity in which those divided by ethnicity and language would be brought together into one new people by the Holy Spirit. This was confirmation that the followers of Jesus would be empowered to fulfill their mission of reaching every people group all the way to the ends of the earth! It was also a foreshadowing of the promise that one day people of every tribe and nation will come together as one around the throne of God in his eternal Kingdom. Still today the Holy Spirit is calling us to break down the walls that divide and empowering us to connect with those of different languages and ethnicities. 

Acts 8-10: The Apostle Philip was the first to fulfill Jesus’ cross-cultural promise of moving beyond the Jewish context of Judea by bringing the Good News to the Samaritans who received the word of God gladly. From there the Holy Spirit led Philip to meet an Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza and he received Jesus and was baptized, the first recorded black man to become a follower of Jesus. Peter and John followed Philip to Samaria and confirmed the work of the Holy Spirit there. Perhaps this prepared Peter for the next step when he received a vision confirmed by prophetic words that convinced him to enter the Gentile household of the Roman Centurion Cornelius, where he led the entire family to faith in Jesus and they were filled with the Spirit. Now the movement of Jesus was moving from an ethnic-specific mission to a multi-ethnic global movement, just as Jesus had foretold!

Acts 13-15: Persecution of the early Jesus followers in Jerusalem scattered the young church into the regions surrounding Israel, including the large and influential city of Antioch. There the Jewish believers began to share the Good News of Jesus with non-Jews and a remarkable multicultural community developed. The diverse leadership of that church included Jews, Greeks, a Herodian, and an African. Led by the Holy Spirit, they prayed over Barnabas and Saul and sent them westward on the first of the major missional journeys recorded in Acts. They began by preaching in Jewish synagogues but found greater receptivity from the Gentile populations of the Greek and Roman cities that they visited. In many of these cities they established new communities of disciples made up of both Jews and Gentiles. Upon their return to Jerusalem the apostolic leaders gathered and determined once and for all that the movement of Jesus was not to be defined by a single culture or ethnicity, but that people of every background could become part of God’s family simply through faith in Jesus. The church of Jesus now officially identified itself as a multi-racial movement!

Ephesians 2, Galatians 3: As the Jesus movement took root in cities across the Roman Empire these diverse communities which represented people from every race and social class flouted the normal cultural hierarchies. As Paul explained in his letter to the church in Ephesus, Jesus has “broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14). In this new reality people of various backgrounds who knew God as their Father could now call each other brother and sister, even masters and slaves were now to regard each other as equal members of a family. Paul explained that baptism into Christ creates a whole new identity that supersedes the divisive categories of human society. He stated the racial implications of faith in Jesus as clearly as could be stated when he wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). This was a radically new understanding of what it means to be part of God’s beautifully diverse and egalitarian family!

Revelation 7: When Jesus appeared to the Apostle John, he gave him a vision revealing the ultimate destiny of God’s people and the outcome of human history. Although much of the imagery of Revelation is complex and can be confusing, one of the clearest images is the picture of God’s diverse and multicultural people gathered before his throne in joyful worship: After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10) It is God’s purpose and our ultimate destiny to be gathered together into one human mosaic that reflects all the diversity and beauty of people from every corner of this globe. 

When we read the Bible, we hear the story of God reconciling all people to himself and forming one new family made up of every tribe and nation. Jesus modeled that Kingdom by consistently crossing racial divides between the Jews, Gentiles and Samaritans of his day to demonstrate that every person is a priceless child of God. Jesus raised up and empowered people who were unjustly devalued, oppressed and marginalized. Because Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended triumphantly to the right hand of God, we know that our struggle will also be victorious by his grace and power and we will become who we are destined to be, one family of God. The Holy Spirit, poured out on all who trust and follow Jesus, is the one who unites us in this new family and empowers us to overcome the diabolical sin of racism by which our enemy seeks to steal, kill and destroy.

Those who genuinely believe the Bible and seek to follow Jesus will be compelled by this vision to ask the Holy Spirit to root out any remnants of racial bias and discrimination in our hearts and minds. We will also be powerfully motivated to live out this vision by actively breaking down the strongholds of racial division and challenging the systems that subtly sustain racism in our society today. As we read, reflect on, and are guided by the Word of God, please join me in asking the Holy Spirit to show us how we can be Jesus-shaped agents of racial justice in our time as were the abolitionists and civil rights workers who came before us.