Can a White Woman Marry a Black Man?
00:00:00.000 | We don't want to presume any answers here on Ask Pastor John, and Tracy, who's a
00:00:09.960 | white woman, writes in to ask, "Pastor John, I would like to know if dating or
00:00:13.400 | marrying a black man is wrong. If so, could you please tell me where to look
00:00:16.960 | in the Bible for it? I know a lot of people frown upon this, but I want to be
00:00:20.080 | sure what God says and not what man says." I preached on this, I've written on it in
00:00:25.480 | bloodlines, I got a whole chapter on interracial marriage, and here's the
00:00:29.560 | summary of my argument. There are two basic restrictions on marriage in the
00:00:35.320 | Bible. Number one, she should marry a man. Number two, he should be a Christian. And
00:00:41.200 | I get that from 1st Corinthians 739. If her husband dies, talking about a widow,
00:00:48.040 | she is free to be married to whom—this is a masculine pronoun here—to whomever
00:00:57.320 | she wishes, only in the Lord. So Paul is very vigilant that you don't go out and
00:01:07.280 | marry an unbeliever. So this is just huge, that we should only marry people who
00:01:13.600 | love Jesus. He didn't restrict it in any other way. People have brought up to me
00:01:20.280 | over the years the restrictions that God put on Israel for intermarrying with the
00:01:25.320 | nations, and used that as an argument for being opposed to interracial marriage,
00:01:30.680 | and my answer to that is, those stipulations in the Old Testament were
00:01:35.720 | religiously motivated, not racially motivated. In other words, Solomon's
00:01:41.560 | foreign wives took his heart away from God, and that was the issue, not that his
00:01:47.760 | his ethnicity would be corrupted by them. The Old Testament simply doesn't
00:01:52.440 | argue that way. It is very concerned, just like Paul is, with marrying in the
00:01:59.120 | faith. Another issue. When Christ came into the world, he created a new
00:02:07.640 | Israel, a new ethnic group, as it were, made up of every other ethnic group. You
00:02:15.240 | are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own
00:02:20.560 | possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out
00:02:24.160 | of darkness into light, once you were not a people. And the "you" he's talking about
00:02:28.640 | is Jew and Gentile, every ethnicity, but now you are God's people. Marry in your
00:02:35.440 | tribe, namely the tribe Christian, across any ethnic or racial lines, but marry in
00:02:41.840 | the tribe of this new tribe that Jesus is the head of. You have received mercy,
00:02:47.200 | and so you're a new people, and that's the qualification. Here
00:02:53.520 | there is no Greek, no Jew, no circumcised, no uncircumcised, no barbarian, no
00:02:58.060 | Scythian, no slave, no free. Christ is all, and in all. Go ahead, marry across all the
00:03:04.160 | lines inside that new humanity. And my last vivid argument, maybe, that I
00:03:12.680 | should refer to is Moses married a Cushite, and everybody agrees that the
00:03:19.760 | Cushites are black Africans. They're from down the Nile River, and we know it
00:03:27.560 | caused problems because Miriam, his sister, and Aaron got very angry about
00:03:33.120 | this and confronted him in Numbers 12 verse 1, "Because of the Cushite woman
00:03:40.280 | whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman," the text says, and they got
00:03:45.240 | angry, and in that anger, as they opposed Moses, God showed his colors, and he was
00:03:53.080 | really upset, so that he gave to Miriam a leprous hand, and she pulls her hand, and
00:04:01.920 | she's leprous. And the Bible, I think, and I could be wrong about this, maybe
00:04:08.400 | pushing it too far, it points out her hand was white as snow, white as snow.
00:04:13.720 | This is verse 10 of Numbers 12. Is God saying to Miriam, "Look, if you're
00:04:22.600 | so concerned about Moses' wife being too dark, I'll give you something really
00:04:29.760 | light. Here's snow called leprosy on your hand." I think this is a picture of God's
00:04:38.720 | indignation that Moses would be confronted, not as to whether or not the
00:04:44.240 | Cushite was a believer, but whether she was the right color or the right
00:04:48.960 | ethnicity for the man. And let me just close with a story. I love to tell
00:04:54.840 | this Urbana story. Noel and I were at Urbana in 1967, and a great missions leader was on a
00:05:02.640 | panel, and somebody asked him from the audience, they had microphones
00:05:06.080 | in those days, "Aren't you concerned in going to Pakistan for so long that your
00:05:12.200 | daughter's gonna grow up there, fall in love with a Pakistani, and marry a
00:05:15.680 | Pakistani?" That's what he asked from the floor. And this answer, I've never
00:05:19.400 | forgotten it. It had a huge effect on me in those days. I was 20 years old at the
00:05:23.800 | time, and he said, 21, and he said, "Better a believing Pakistani farmer than a rich
00:05:32.920 | unbelieving American banker." And it just sank into me that, yes, that's
00:05:40.840 | exactly the right answer. Of course it matters who she marries. She must marry a
00:05:46.320 | Christ lover, a Christ follower, and if it's a Pakistani, praise God, but don't
00:05:52.440 | marry a rich white American banker, because he's not a believer, and that's
00:05:59.080 | gonna make for an impossible biblical marriage. So every marriage is a
00:06:05.960 | cross-cultural marriage. Every marriage is hard. Get ready for stress no matter
00:06:12.800 | who you marry, but that's what the gospel is for. That's what we're supposed to
00:06:19.760 | understand. So don't marry—I'll say this to women right now—don't marry a
00:06:25.920 | marginally Christian man. Some women want to be married enough that they're willing
00:06:31.640 | to settle for this man he's just squeaking by. He says he's a Christian. I
00:06:35.760 | don't think he could provide any spiritual leadership at all. I don't even
00:06:38.680 | know if he's solid, but he just says the right words. I just want to encourage
00:06:43.400 | women, pray that God would lead to a man whom you can trust as a deeply
00:06:51.240 | Christian man, and same thing of course goes for men.
00:06:55.840 | Thank you, Pastor John, and for more on interracial marriage, see Pastor John's
00:07:00.360 | book "Bloodlines," which you can download for free at DesiringGod.org. I'm your
00:07:05.160 | host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:07:08.560 | [BLANK_AUDIO]