Should We Encourage Interracial Marriage?

00:00:00.000 | We get a surprising number of questions on interracial marriage and we take them very

00:00:03.760 | seriously. We should take them seriously and they come to us very seriously. This one comes from a

00:00:09.520 | young Asian American woman who writes, "Dear Pastor John, my boyfriend and I are both believers in

00:00:14.080 | Christ and have been dating for almost 18 months. We love each other very much and really want to

00:00:19.040 | be married. However, my boyfriend has a conscience struggle because he has been told in the past that

00:00:24.320 | interracial marriage is a sin. We are of different nationalities, although we were born in the same

00:00:28.960 | city and country and raised in the same high school. The only thing different about us is our

00:00:32.640 | skin color and cultural differences that every family has. My boyfriend really is trying to look

00:00:38.000 | at God's Word to see what God teaches on the issue of interracial marriage. He's listened to many good

00:00:42.560 | sermons on the topic, but he still finds in his conscience like it may be wrong to marry someone

00:00:47.600 | from another ethnic background. This causes him lots of heartache because he has the desire to

00:00:52.720 | marry me. What would you say to me and to my boyfriend?" Well, this question goes very deep

00:01:00.400 | with me because my opposition to interracial marriage was the foundation, at least

00:01:09.600 | the conscious foundation, of my opposition to integration, my opposition to lots of good things,

00:01:20.160 | and my support for segregation as a teenager in South Carolina when I was growing up.

00:01:24.960 | And I think it was the origin of most of my deplorable attitudes towards other races in

00:01:33.040 | those days. So I wasn't just taught that it was a sin. I believed it was a sin.

00:01:39.200 | So I don't take this struggle lightly, and I very much would love to persuade this young man

00:01:47.600 | that biblically his conscience should be clear in marrying a godly, Christ-exalting,

00:01:56.400 | otherwise compatible woman, whatever race she is. That's what I hope I can do. Now I know—I

00:02:02.960 | was one, and I was related to hundreds—I know that among thousands of Christians,

00:02:12.240 | there is a conviction that this kind of opposition to interracial marriage is grounded in Scripture.

00:02:18.080 | The Scripture teaches it's wrong to marry across races. Now here's an example from a letter that

00:02:25.440 | I got some years ago. "As individuals, they, the blacks, are precious souls for whom Christ died

00:02:34.000 | and whom we are to love and seek to win. As a race, however, they are unique and different

00:02:41.760 | and have their own culture. I would never marry a black." Why? "Because I believe God made the

00:02:49.520 | races, separated them, and set the bounds of their habitation." Deuteronomy 32, 8, Acts 17, 26.

00:02:58.880 | "He made them unique, uniquely different, and intended that these distinctions remain."

00:03:06.640 | God never intended the human race to become a mixed or mongrel race. So,

00:03:15.280 | while I am strongly opposed to segregation, I favor separation. That the uniqueness with which

00:03:25.440 | God made them is maintained. Now that's what I believed when I was 15 years old,

00:03:34.080 | and it bore ugly fruit. But of course, we don't base our behavior or our beliefs—we shouldn't

00:03:45.040 | anyway—merely on ugly fruit and outcomes of beliefs, but whether they are in fact biblical.

00:03:52.400 | So let me give four brief pointers to the way the Bible, I believe, supports

00:04:00.960 | the marriage of believers in Christ Jesus, regardless of race. Number one, all races

00:04:09.840 | have one ancestor, Adam, created in the image of God, and all humans following from him

00:04:21.280 | are in God's image, such that there is essentially one God-like human race.

00:04:30.720 | So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him male and female. He created

00:04:38.800 | them, and then the apostle Paul, rooted in that theology of creation, says astonishingly to these

00:04:46.800 | arrogant ethnocentric Athenians in Acts 17, 26, he made from one man every nation of mankind to live

00:04:59.120 | on all the face of the earth. And I think the point there, the implication in the context of these

00:05:06.880 | proud Greeks who boasted of their ethnic purity over against the barbarians, was that those

00:05:14.080 | barbarians out there are family. You better get over this. You are all part of one race rooted in

00:05:22.800 | one great-great-great-grandfather, and your arrogance of separation is sinful. Being human

00:05:32.080 | in God's image, compared to any racial distinction, is ten million to one in terms of importance.

00:05:43.200 | Let me say that again. Being human in God's image is ten million, and any racial distinction

00:05:53.760 | is one when you talk about what's important in life. That's step one. Step two in the argument.

00:06:02.160 | In Jesus Christ, God is creating a new humanity. You might say a new race, and it's called the

00:06:11.040 | Christian race. Read 1 Peter 2, 9 following. In Christ, ethnic and social differences cease to be

00:06:23.680 | obstacles to deep, personal, intimate fellowship. Colossians 3, 11. Here, that is in the body of

00:06:30.080 | Christ, there is neither Greek nor Jew. Those are significant physical and religious and ethnic and

00:06:40.880 | traditional distinctions. Neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. Barbarian, Scythian, slave, free,

00:06:50.640 | but Christ is all and in all. So in the old humanity, the decisive factor in human unity was

00:06:58.800 | being created in the image of God. In the new humanity, the decisive factor in human unity

00:07:04.960 | is Christ is all and in all. To make racial and ethnic distinctions decisive in relations

00:07:14.080 | is to oppose the truth of what Christ is creating in Christ. Number three, the Bible forbids

00:07:25.440 | intermarriage between believer and unbeliever, not between members of different ethnic groups.

00:07:34.400 | 1 Corinthians 7, 39. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband

00:07:42.240 | dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. So one key stipulation,

00:07:54.640 | only a believer, only a Christian. That was Paul's way of expressing the Old Testament concern about

00:08:03.760 | intermarriage with pagan nations by the Jews. The issue back then was not race. The issue was faith,

00:08:14.240 | religion, allegiance to the true God, Yahweh. Here's a verse, Deuteronomy 7, 3. "You shall not

00:08:22.720 | intermarry with the nations. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take

00:08:29.680 | their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other

00:08:38.640 | gods." That's the reason. "Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you." But think now

00:08:45.920 | what happens when the people of God is no longer identified with a single ethnic group, namely

00:08:51.600 | Israel, but rather the people of God, the new race in Christ is being taken from every race,

00:08:58.560 | people, tribe, tongue, nation. Now what do those prohibitions mean? They mean exactly what 1

00:09:06.480 | Corinthians 7, 39 says. She is free to marry whom she wishes, only in the Lord, because that's the

00:09:17.600 | definition of the new race, the new people of God. If you want to talk about a prohibition of

00:09:25.520 | interracial marriage, then let it be the biblical talk about the prohibition of marrying outside the

00:09:32.160 | Christian race. Finally, number four. There is only one high-profile interracial marriage focused on

00:09:42.160 | in the Bible that I am aware of. There may be others, and I've just missed them.

00:09:48.240 | Namely, between Moses and the Cushite, a black woman from Africa, and we know she's black because

00:09:59.680 | Cush was an area of Africa below Ethiopia, and because the very word used for Cushite in Numbers

00:10:08.880 | 12.1, where this story is being described, is the same word used in Jeremiah 13.23, where it says,

00:10:17.440 | "Can an Ethiopian change his skin?" So Ethiopian there is the same as the word Cushite, and you can

00:10:23.760 | see what the point is. We can't change our skin color. Moses' sister, Miriam, criticizes this

00:10:34.880 | marriage between Moses and the Cushite, and God is so displeased with Miriam and her criticism

00:10:44.000 | that he strikes Miriam with leprosy, which the Bible describes as turning her hands

00:10:51.360 | as white as snow, as if to say, "Miriam, you value light skin? I'll give you light skin."

00:11:01.360 | At least we know from this story that God is not pleased with Miriam's criticism of Moses'

00:11:12.560 | marriage to a black woman, and there is no other criticism of it. So for those four reasons,

00:11:22.800 | and there are more, I think it is right to not simply permit or tolerate but to celebrate

00:11:35.600 | the marriage of a godly, Christ-exalting man and woman who are marrying in the Lord across

00:11:42.560 | racial lines. It will not destroy—like that quote from that letter—it will not destroy any

00:11:51.120 | God-appointed diversity in the world. It will, in fact, feature that diversity and the power of

00:11:58.640 | Christ in it. Amen. Well said. Thank you, Pastor John. And some of you know Pastor John wrote a

00:12:04.720 | whole book called Bloodlines, which deals with the race issue in far greater detail. If this is a

00:12:08.880 | topic of interest, be sure to check out that book. You can download it free of charge at

00:12:12.080 | DesiringGod.org/books. It's one of a hundred books you can find and download free of charge.

00:12:18.960 | For more details about this podcast or to catch up on old episodes or to subscribe to the audio

00:12:23.040 | feed for new episodes as we release them, and even to send us a question of your own,

00:12:27.360 | go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. On Wednesday, we're going to

00:12:34.320 | return and hear from a listener who wants to know the differences between hating our sin

00:12:38.400 | and hating ourselves for sinning. What's the difference between sin hate and self-hate?

00:12:44.560 | That's on Wednesday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John

00:12:48.000 | podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper.

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Should We Encourage Interracial Marriage?

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