God Has A Plan, Are You Going To Help Racial Reconciliation

God Has A Plan, Are You Going To Help? Racial Reconciliation

1/17/2021

Genesis 9:1-16 Ephesians 2:11-22

For the Next three Sundays we will be joining Bay Presbyterian Church in doing a series on Racial Reconciliation. The first message will deal with a theology of race, the second message will be a pulpit exchange with Pastor Mark preaching here, and I will be at Bay on “A View From The Other side”.

The last message will be on “Where do we go from here.” Today I am going to give us a background on the concept race in the Scriptures.

How many of you know that God is a God of great imagination? How many of you know that a rose is a beautiful flower, but you can be thankful that God created some other kinds of flowers.

Their presence and their beauty does not diminish the beauty of the rose. If you put them together in the right arrangement, you can create something far more spectacular than simply having a display of roses.

Did you know that God is so creative that when it comes to apples, there are 7500 different varieties of apples in the world with 2500 of them grown in the United States.

It does not matter, whether it is fish, birds, rocks, galaxies or snowflakes. God creates things and then creates varieties within those things, and further creates diversities within the varieties. God has given us the job of furthering creation, by providing us with wisdom to create a host of hybrids of both plants and animals.

What is it according to the Bible that separates human beings from all other life forms? We as human beings have all been created in the image of God. That one single fact lifts us all above the animal world and at the same time places us all on the same level of standing in the eyes of God.

In the eyes of God, all of humanity began as one race. Every member of that race is entitled to a certain amount of respect and dignity simply because he or she is in the image of God.

When God created Adam and Eve, what color was their hair. What were the color of their eyes. What was the color of their skin? How tall were they? Which shape type of human face did they have? The answer to these questions has been found in a book that’s over 2000 years old. It tells us that we do not have the faintest idea to the answers to these questions.

That book that tells us this is the bible. When God created humanity, these things were not in the least bit important to God? What mattered to God, was, would they love God by choosing to obey him or would they choose to believe lies about God’s character and do their own thing.

After Adam and Eve deliberately rejected God’s one command, things went from bad to worse. The more people multiplied upon the earth, the more they rejected the things of God and God Himself. The bible tells us that the thoughts of the entire human race was on evil all the time and they became very violent toward one another.

I find it interesting that nothing is mentioned in the history of humankind before the flood about racial divisions among the people. The only race that exists in God’s eyes is the human race. When God regrets that He had created humanity. It’s the human race that had broken the heart of God.

God’s plan was that the human race would seek to serve Him and to be in a right relationship to Him so that we could be in a right relationship with one another. After God saved humanity through Noah and his family, God gave all of a humanity a fresh new start.

At this point, everyone is in relationship to the one true God. God tells them again to be fruitful, increase in number and fill the earth. God also tells them that God consider every human life valuable because it is created in the image of God.

God will hold any animal accountable for killing a person. God will hold any person accountable for killing another person. A person who intentionally took the life of another person was not to be permitted to live.

God also makes a promise to never destroy all of life again by a flood. He gives us the rainbow as a sign of his promise. For the next 350 years everybody speaks the same language, but not everybody is willing to obey God.

God told them to scatter over the face of the world and fill it up with people. Instead the people got together and decided to build a great city that would reach high into the sky. They wanted to make a name for themselves. They were not going to be scattered all over the earth as God had told them to do.