One Father, One Blood
A friend of mine recently answered a graphic going around online that claimed only white people descend from Adam and that only they can be saved. She called it what it is: white supremacy dressed in Christian words. Yet I must say, the same sin wears different clothes in different parts of the world. In the West it often shows up as race. Here in India it has a much older name, and we call it caste. Both put a person’s birth where the cross of Christ should be, and both have found their way into the church. So the question needs to be asked plainly. Does God rank people by their birth, and if he doesn’t, how can his people?
One Father, One Blood
The Bible answers this on its very first pages. “God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Adam called his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20). Every human being who has ever lived, whatever his color, country, or community, comes from that one man and that one woman. Paul told the proud philosophers of Athens that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). Malachi asked Israel, “Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother” (Malachi 2:10)?
So in God’s eyes there is no such thing as a person born higher or lower than another. The image of God isn’t brighter in one skin than in another, and it doesn’t come in grades according to the family you were born into. Men judge by what they can see, “for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). And because every person bears God’s image, the way we treat people is the way we treat the One whose image they bear. “He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker, but he who is gracious to the needy honors Him” (Proverbs 14:31). Every act of caste cruelty or racial contempt is an insult thrown at God Himself.
It’s worth seeing how men have twisted Scripture to say otherwise, because the same verses keep coming back. For centuries people defended slavery and racial hatred with Noah’s curse in Genesis 9. Yet read the passage. Ham sinned against his father, and Noah said, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants He shall be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25). The curse fell on Canaan, one of Ham’s sons, and it was fulfilled in the Canaanites of the Old Testament. It says nothing about skin color, nothing about Africa, and nothing about any people living today. Others have claimed that “the mark of Cain” was dark skin, but the text only says, "The LORD appointed a sign for Cain, so that no one finding him would slay him” (Genesis 4:15). It was a mark of protection on one man, and the Bible never tells us what it was.
Some point to Babel and say God divided the races on purpose. Yet at Babel God confused the languages of proud men who were trying to build a name for themselves (Genesis 11:4-9), and the passage has nothing to say about color or rank. And at Pentecost, God gathered “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) and let each one hear the gospel in his own tongue. What was scattered at Babel, God began to gather back together in Christ. Others take Paul’s words about God determining “the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26) as though God wanted the nations kept apart. Read the very next verse. God did it “that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him” (Acts 17:27). The point of the passage is that every nation is meant to seek the one true God. Paul said nothing about keeping peoples separate.
God’s Heart for Every Nation
From the beginning, God’s saving purpose reached beyond any one people. When He called Abraham, He promised, "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Some will say, “But God told Israel not to marry the other nations.” He did: "You shall not intermarry with them” (Deuteronomy 7:3). Yet look at the reason He gave in the very next verse: “For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods” (Deuteronomy 7:4). The command was about idolatry. That’s why Rahab, a Canaanite from Jericho, and Ruth, a woman from Moab, could be brought right into Israel once they turned to the LORD, and both of them are named in the family line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
God also commanded Israel to love the outsider. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). And there’s a story in Number. Moses had married a Cushite woman from the lands south of Egypt, and “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married” (Numbers 12:1). God’s anger burned against them, and when the cloud lifted, “behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow” (Numbers 12:10). I won’t build more on that than the text says, but God plainly took her contempt very seriously.
Jonah is another warning. He ran from God because he didn’t want mercy shown to Nineveh, the capital of a nation he hated. When God spared the city, Jonah sulked, and God’s last word to him was, “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand” (Jonah 4:11)? The book ends with that question still hanging over the prophet and over us.
Then look at our Lord Himself. He sat by a well and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink, and she was astonished, because “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). He crossed a wall that had stood for centuries to bring her the living water. When a lawyer asked Him, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29), Jesus told of a man beaten and left for dead who passed by a priest and a Levite and was rescued by a Samaritan, the very kind of man the lawyer despised. Then He asked which one proved to be a neighbor, and when the lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy toward him,” Jesus said, “Go and do the same” (Luke 10:36-37). That parable answers every prejudice based on birth.
After Pentecost, the gospel kept crossing those lines. One of the first people Philip led to Christ was an official from Ethiopia (Acts 8:26-39). In the church at Antioch, the leaders included “Simeon who was called Niger” and “Lucius of Cyrene,” a man from North Africa (Acts 13:1).
The Cross Levels the Ground
The deepest reason racism and caste can’t stand in the church is that before God every one of us stands on the same ground, and it’s the ground of guilt. “There is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). No one is born closer to God because of his family, his color, or his community. A man of high caste and a man of low caste, a white man and a Black man, are equally lost in Adam and equally unable to save themselves.
That also cuts down the idea, so common here in India, that a person’s birth is a reward or punishment for deeds in a past life. When the disciples asked Jesus about a man born blind, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?" Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:2-3). There are no past lives behind anyone’s birth, because “it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). No one is born unclean because of what his ancestors were, either. “The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity” (Ezekiel 18:20).
And the same Saviour is offered to every person on the same terms. “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him” (Romans 10:12). The children of God “were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). It’s strange to me how often people who rejoice in being born again still hold on so tightly to the standing of their first birth, when God’s Word gives it no weight at all in His family.
Paul knew that better than anyone. By the measures of his day, he had the highest standing a Jew could have: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). And what did he say about it? “I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord... and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). If Paul called his pedigree rubbish, no Christian has any business boasting in it.
So in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the new humanity “there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). Barbarians and Scythians were the insults of Paul’s day for people thought to be uncivilized, and Christ made those very people one family with everyone else. “He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall” (Ephesians 2:14).
I want to be careful here, because the Bible doesn’t erase our nations, languages, or cultures. In heaven John saw “a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues” (Revelation 7:9). God made those differences, and He will gather His people out of every one of them. What He forbids is ranking them, as if some were nearer to Him by birth than others.
When the Church gives in to it
Sadly, this sin doesn’t stay outside the church door. The apostle Peter himself fell into it. God had taught him on a rooftop in Joppa, and he confessed, “God has shown me that I should not call any man unholy or unclean” (Acts 10:28), and “God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him” (Acts 10:34-35). Yet later in Antioch, when certain men arrived from Jerusalem, Peter stopped eating with the Gentile believers and “began to withdraw and hold himself aloof” (Galatians 2:12). Paul “opposed him to his face” (Galatians 2:11), because he and the others “were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:14).
Read that carefully, because it speaks straight into what still happens today. Paul didn’t treat Peter’s separate table as a small matter of custom. He said it struck at the truth of the gospel itself. So when believers refuse to eat with other believers because of their caste, when churches seat people separately, keep separate cups or separate burial grounds, or allow only men from certain communities to lead, it’s the same sin Paul confronted at Antioch, and it deserves the same rebuke. “Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). The qualifications God gives for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are entirely about character and faithfulness, and birth isn’t mentioned once. The same rebuke falls on any church in any country that welcomes people of one colour more warmly than another.
The early church gives us a good example of facing this honestly. In Acts 6, “a complaint arose on the part of the Hellenistic Jews against the native Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily serving of food” (Acts 6:1). The apostles didn’t brush it aside. They had the church choose seven men to put it right, and every one of the seven had a Greek name (Acts 6:5). They met neglect along those lines head on, and they did it quickly.
James calls favouritism what it is: “do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism... if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:1, 9). When the Corinthians divided at the Lord’s Supper along lines of wealth, Paul asked, “do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?” (1 Corinthians 11:22). And John put it bluntly: “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4:20).
The Bible does draw one line around marriage, but it isn’t race or caste. It’s faith: “Do not be bound together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14). Two believers in Christ, whatever their colour or community, are brother and sister in the same family, and nothing in God’s Word forbids them to marry.
Lastly, some say the church needs the theories of modern politics, from one side or the other, before it can deal with racism properly. I don’t believe it does. God’s “divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him” (2 Peter 1:3). The Scriptures already tell us who man is, what sin is, and how Christ makes enemies into one family, and that’s enough for the church to deal with this sin faithfully.
Where this leaves us
At its root, every form of racism and casteism is pride. It’s the old desire to find something in ourselves to boast about, something that lifts us above others. Paul asks every one of us, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the colour of your skin or the community your parents belonged to, so there’s nothing in any of it for you to boast about.
Yet I must also speak to those who have been on the receiving end of this sin, and there are many of you reading this. The wrong done to you is real, and God sees it. But don’t let it turn into hatred of your own. “Never pay back evil for evil to anyone” (Romans 12:17). We are to be “forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). Christ died to break down the wall between people, and it would be a sad thing to build it back up from the other side.
So let every believer search his own heart. Ask yourself who you eat with and who you avoid, who you’d welcome as a husband for your daughter and who you wouldn’t, and whose name in the church you quietly think less of because of where he comes from. If the Holy Spirit puts His finger on something, don’t argue with Him. Repent, and go and put it right with your brother or sister.
And if you’ve never come to Christ, hear this. He doesn’t ask about your caste, your colour or your family name. He asks whether you’ll come to Him as a sinner, the same way every other sinner must come, and He has promised, “the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (John 6:37).
One day the whole multitude from every nation, tribe, people and tongue will stand before the throne together, and they’ll all be singing the same song: “Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Revelation 7:10).
“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 11:15)
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