Biblegems #146
Question: What does the
Bible teach about interracial marriage?
Before going any further in answering this question I
would strongly encourage the reader to see my earlier Bible Gems post, #75, “Origin
Of The Races,” February 2012.
“Interracial” marriage is something of a
misnomer, since we all belong to one race—the human race:
Acts 17:26 From one man he made every nation of men,
that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for
them and the exact places where they should live.
So the real question has to do with inter-ethnic and
inter-cultural marriage. Sometimes people have used God’s commands to the
Israelites against intermarrying with other nations as a prohibition against interracial
marriage in general. They will cite verses such as Numbers 25:1-3 as examples
of idolatry when the Israelites have ignored this prohibition.
The truth is, however, that God’s commands against the
people of Israel intermarrying with those of other nations are not about
ethnicity or race, they are a prescription against believers in the one true
God marrying nonbelievers. The same point is made in the New Testament:
2Cor. 6:14-15 Do not be yoked
together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in
common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there
between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an
unbeliever?
Not only does God’s Word not condemn, instruct against or
even discourage inter-ethnic marriage, but the day is coming when all the
wonderful variety of the human race will be joined together in a beautiful
display of skin tones, languages and cultures praising God and the Lamb around
the throne of heaven:
Rev. 7:9 After
this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could
count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the
throne and in front of the Lamb.
When people come to faith in Jesus Christ they also become
part of a new race, a race where color barriers and language / culture barriers fall
away:
2Cor. 5:17 Therefore, if
anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
1Pet. 1:23 For you have been
born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and
enduring word of God.
This is more than metaphor; we are new creatures in Christ, a new kind
of human—regenerated and alive in Him. “When Christ
is our all, and when Christ is in all, ethnic differences change from being
barriers to become blessings. Even ‘barbarians’ and the most distant of them,
‘Scythians,’ are in the new ‘race’—the church. The head of this race is no
longer Adam, but the ‘last Adam’ (1 Corinthians
15:45), Jesus Christ. God aims that in this
new ‘race’ of humans all ethnic groups in the world will be included (Matthew 24:14). Inter-ethnic marriage in this new humanity is one
manifestation and one means of Christ being all in all.”[i]
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