09.13.23
Are There Really Different Races?
And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings. (Acts 17:26)
Racial tensions are not fun. As a nation we of course experienced them prior to the Civil War. We saw them portrayed strongly during the Wuhan virus. They continue with the promotion of Critical Race Theory.
The question that we wish to answer from the Bible today is, are there really different races? That might seem like a silly question, but you also might be surprised at what the Bible has to say.
Before the days of Darwin, when evolution was popularized, when people spoke of race, they were referring to the ‘Irish race,’ or the ‘Danish race.’ All of that changed in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
True, that is a mouthful, but most people don’t realize the full name of this book. Darwinism is inherently a racist system. It was only after the book began to be widely read that Aborigines and the Pygmies began to be looked upon as semi-human. Because to some people they may have looked a little like monkeys, the idea was derived that man came from the monkey and these peoples were thus closer to the monkey on an evolutionary scale. In fact, for a time, an African Pygmy was displayed in a cage with an orangutan in the Bronx zoo!
As a result of years of evolutionary teaching, most people have some ingrained prejudices, whether they are conscious or unconscious.
In fact, ‘race’ has no biological reality. We have cultural differences but not racial ones. It would be much better to refer to various ‘people groups’ or ‘ethnicities’ rather than to ‘races.’
The worst example of racial prejudice we could think of is that provided by Hitler’s Germany. In that demonic system, based on Darwinian thinking, there was a super race, and many others were inferior, including Jews and Gypsies.
What the Bible declares is that we are all “of one blood” (Acts 17:26; the full verse is above). We are all descended from the first man, Adam, who was made in the image of God. The Last Adam, Jesus Christ, was also a son of Adam. All descendants of Adam can be forgiven of their sin because He died and rose again. This is the motivation for spreading the gospel to every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
Enforced enslavement of other human beings is of course detestable. It is notable that most of those who spearheaded the end of slavery in years gone by were Bible-believing Christians: William Wilberforce, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and John Newton [a former slave trader who came to Christ, became an Abolitionist and wrote ‘Amazing Grace.’
Yes, there are various people groups, but it has been found that if you take any two people in the world and compare their genetic makeup, the difference will be around 0.2 %. This is slight variation!
There are of course variations in skin color. But really, they are simply various shades of the same color, medium brown. If we would take the Bible at its word, race conflicts could end.