Racism is evil. To hate or systemically oppress a people group because of the way we look is of the devil. For skeptics, the events of the past several months in the US, should be undeniable evidence that racism is very real.
This hatred and oppression is rooted in a most effective lie. The lie is that there is more than one race of human beings. Yep… I said it and I imagine many of you are scrunching your faces in disbelief.
I’m writing this post from the vantage point of being a black woman, a descendant of: people who were enslaved in the United States, and of Caucasians who had children with these people and of Native Americans who married and had children with these people and of at least one brown Cuban woman who did not marry, but had a child with one of these people. I am quite like the majority of black people, who are really brown in hue, that I personally know who live in the United States. We are people with a distinct and tragic arrival to the US. We are people with diversity within our broader culture. Because of our complex ancestry we have a multiplicity of beautiful shades of brown.
My statement about there being only one race of human being comes from what the Bible says. And there is plenty of scientific data that says the same thing. The Bible is pretty plain about this if you just read the verses. But I warn you – you must put on your thinking cap.
The Bible opens with this declaration.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NET
On day six of the creation story…
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.” God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27 NET
Chapter 2 of Genesis puts a spotlight on Chapter 1, giving us more of the details on how this event happened.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion for him who corresponds to him.” The Lord God formed out of the ground every living animal of the field and every bird of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man named all the animals, the birds of the air, and the living creatures of the field, but for Adam no companion who corresponded to him was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was asleep, he took part of the man’s side and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
Then the man said, “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become a new family. Genesis 2:18-24 NET
I know this is hard for many of us to fathom, but God fashions the first wife from the first man. It’s like He did a cloning of sorts. Did God give the woman Adam’s DNA but with female genetics? It is a miracle. But not as big a miracle as making a man out of dust and turning him into a breathing, thinking, loving human being.
Fast forward a bit and Adam and Eve have children. First there is Cain and then Abel. But later there are more children. And all would have Adam and Eve’s DNA. But really, all would have Adam’s DNA – because Eve was fashioned from Adam.
In fact everyone – at that point would have been coming from a very tight gene pool. Adam.
Now I personally cringe at the thought of the boys in the family marrying the girls in the family. But God either made that acceptable during the early years of the earth. Or maybe God fashioned a wife, from a husband on more than one occasion. Either way, there is only one “race” of human beings. And we don’t know what their appearance was when the earth was new.
Ironically, more evidence is found about Adam’s family in the third chapter of Luke as Dr. Luke gives a reverse order of the genealogy of Jesus.
…the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. Luke 3:36-38 NET
I shared the bottom part of the genealogy list just to show that the connection between Adam, Noah and Noah’s son Shem, along with acknowledging all of the corresponding mothers that are still related in some way to Adam. I mention Noah and Shem specifically because there is going to be a big situation coming, but according to the list above, at that point there is still only one race of human beings who all came from Adam.
The big situation is called the great flood. It is described in Genesis 6. God was so grieved by the evil all over the earth that He choose to start over. (I suspect that God is grieved by evil today and I am so grateful that He promised that He would not send another flood of that magnitude.) Thankfully God saves an extended family to begin again. That family belongs to Noah, Adam’s “grandson.”
The Lord said to Noah, “Come into the ark, you and all your household, for I consider you godly among this generation. Genesis 7:1 NET
On that very day Noah entered the ark, accompanied by his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, along with his wife and his sons’ three wives. Genesis 7:13 NET
God showed great mercy and grace to those eight human beings. He kept them throughout the flood, allowing them to be the ones repopulate the earth. And… they were all pretty near descendants of Adam.
But wait… some of you say, what about the tower of Babel. So let’s read it together:
The whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary. When the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” (They had brick instead of stone and tar instead of mortar.) Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the entire earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had started building. And the Lord said, “If as one people all sharing a common language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them.
Come, let’s go down and confuse their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there across the face of the entire earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why its name was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the entire world, and from there the Lord scattered them across the face of the entire earth. Genesis 11:1-18
Because the human race was seeking to build for its own glory and purposes God gave people different languages and this did serve as a barrier. But, I still see no new “races” being created.
The concept of race as it is used today, began with the colonization of the United States. It was established to allow one group of people to treat another group of people as less than human for personal and corporate gain. It would have been impossible to treat an equal human being as an animal if they were not of a “different” – really meaning “inferior” race. Just as with many recent examples one could not murder another human with malice and no just cause, unless his or her skin color or hair color or way of being, were not of a different, meaning inferior, race.
And the devil wants nothing more for us human beings to keep behaving this way because it grieves the heart of our Maker.
One of my favorite verses is written by the Apostle John as he sees a vision of the heavenly realm. He writes about this in Revelation 7:9.
After these things I looked, and here was an enormous crowd that no one could count, made up of persons from every nation, tribe,people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb dressed in long white robes, and with palm branches in their hands. (NET)
In this passage God is confirming that even in heaven we will be able to tell what people look and sound like… and these distinctions are certainly real and maybe even create challenges on earth that we must work through. But race is not listed, though we have accepted and talk about this concept often. It is lie that there is more than one human race.
As I finished this post… I am including an excerpt and link to a blog post from Vivian Cho, a Ph.D. candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School.
She writes, “The popular classifications of race are based chiefly on skin color, with other relevant features including height, eyes, and hair. Though these physical differences may appear, on a superficial level, to be very dramatic, they are determined by only a minute portion of the genome: we as a species have been estimated to share 99.9% of our DNA with each other. The few differences that do exist reflect differences in environments and external factors, not core biology.” Science is consistent with what the Bible says. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/
We are all Adam’s children.
And because of such, when you ask, you don’t want to know my race. You can assume I am a human being. But you may want to know my people group, tribe, nationality or language. And I lobby now to change every document that asks for a person’s race. Let’s assume the person is a human and then ask the other questions.
We can fight racism more effectively – if we can bring truth to the lie.
More food for thought…
If there are different races of humans, why can people receive a blood transfusion from anyone who has the same blood type?
The same for organ donation… shouldn’t a person need to get a kidney from a person of the same – ethnicity?
If there are different races of people – why can they successfully have children together? And then those children can have children?
For the Bible scholars who are thinking, what about Nephilim; these beings are listed in Genesis 6 which occurred before the flood. I am thinking that God called Noah’s family “godly” and they did not have any Nephilim genes to take forward into the new world.
I close this long post, using words from the Apostle Paul as a prayer… For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you. Galatians 3:26-28 NLT
These words don’t mean that the distinctions don’t exist – or shouldn’t be seen. Instead they should be seen and valued knowing that Christ brings us together into His and Adam’s family.
