We get a surprising number of questions on interracial marriage and we take them very seriously. We should take them seriously and they come to us very seriously. This one comes from a young Asian American woman who writes, "Dear Pastor John, my boyfriend and I are both believers in Christ and have been dating for almost 18 months.

We love each other very much and really want to be married. However, my boyfriend has a conscience struggle because he has been told in the past that interracial marriage is a sin. We are of different nationalities, although we were born in the same city and country and raised in the same high school.

The only thing different about us is our skin color and cultural differences that every family has. My boyfriend really is trying to look at God's Word to see what God teaches on the issue of interracial marriage. He's listened to many good sermons on the topic, but he still finds in his conscience like it may be wrong to marry someone from another ethnic background.

This causes him lots of heartache because he has the desire to marry me. What would you say to me and to my boyfriend?" Well, this question goes very deep with me because my opposition to interracial marriage was the foundation, at least the conscious foundation, of my opposition to integration, my opposition to lots of good things, and my support for segregation as a teenager in South Carolina when I was growing up.

And I think it was the origin of most of my deplorable attitudes towards other races in those days. So I wasn't just taught that it was a sin. I believed it was a sin. So I don't take this struggle lightly, and I very much would love to persuade this young man that biblically his conscience should be clear in marrying a godly, Christ-exalting, otherwise compatible woman, whatever race she is.

That's what I hope I can do. Now I know—I was one, and I was related to hundreds—I know that among thousands of Christians, there is a conviction that this kind of opposition to interracial marriage is grounded in Scripture. The Scripture teaches it's wrong to marry across races. Now here's an example from a letter that I got some years ago.

"As individuals, they, the blacks, are precious souls for whom Christ died and whom we are to love and seek to win. As a race, however, they are unique and different and have their own culture. I would never marry a black." Why? "Because I believe God made the races, separated them, and set the bounds of their habitation." Deuteronomy 32, 8, Acts 17, 26.

"He made them unique, uniquely different, and intended that these distinctions remain." God never intended the human race to become a mixed or mongrel race. So, while I am strongly opposed to segregation, I favor separation. That the uniqueness with which God made them is maintained. Now that's what I believed when I was 15 years old, and it bore ugly fruit.

But of course, we don't base our behavior or our beliefs—we shouldn't anyway—merely on ugly fruit and outcomes of beliefs, but whether they are in fact biblical. So let me give four brief pointers to the way the Bible, I believe, supports the marriage of believers in Christ Jesus, regardless of race.

Number one, all races have one ancestor, Adam, created in the image of God, and all humans following from him are in God's image, such that there is essentially one God-like human race. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him male and female.

He created them, and then the apostle Paul, rooted in that theology of creation, says astonishingly to these arrogant ethnocentric Athenians in Acts 17, 26, he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth. And I think the point there, the implication in the context of these proud Greeks who boasted of their ethnic purity over against the barbarians, was that those barbarians out there are family.

You better get over this. You are all part of one race rooted in one great-great-great-grandfather, and your arrogance of separation is sinful. Being human in God's image, compared to any racial distinction, is ten million to one in terms of importance. Let me say that again. Being human in God's image is ten million, and any racial distinction is one when you talk about what's important in life.

That's step one. Step two in the argument. In Jesus Christ, God is creating a new humanity. You might say a new race, and it's called the Christian race. Read 1 Peter 2, 9 following. In Christ, ethnic and social differences cease to be obstacles to deep, personal, intimate fellowship. Colossians 3, 11.

Here, that is in the body of Christ, there is neither Greek nor Jew. Those are significant physical and religious and ethnic and traditional distinctions. Neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. Barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. So in the old humanity, the decisive factor in human unity was being created in the image of God.

In the new humanity, the decisive factor in human unity is Christ is all and in all. To make racial and ethnic distinctions decisive in relations is to oppose the truth of what Christ is creating in Christ. Number three, the Bible forbids intermarriage between believer and unbeliever, not between members of different ethnic groups.

1 Corinthians 7, 39. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. So one key stipulation, only a believer, only a Christian. That was Paul's way of expressing the Old Testament concern about intermarriage with pagan nations by the Jews.

The issue back then was not race. The issue was faith, religion, allegiance to the true God, Yahweh. Here's a verse, Deuteronomy 7, 3. "You shall not intermarry with the nations. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods." That's the reason.

"Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you." But think now what happens when the people of God is no longer identified with a single ethnic group, namely Israel, but rather the people of God, the new race in Christ is being taken from every race, people, tribe, tongue, nation.

Now what do those prohibitions mean? They mean exactly what 1 Corinthians 7, 39 says. She is free to marry whom she wishes, only in the Lord, because that's the definition of the new race, the new people of God. If you want to talk about a prohibition of interracial marriage, then let it be the biblical talk about the prohibition of marrying outside the Christian race.

Finally, number four. There is only one high-profile interracial marriage focused on in the Bible that I am aware of. There may be others, and I've just missed them. Namely, between Moses and the Cushite, a black woman from Africa, and we know she's black because Cush was an area of Africa below Ethiopia, and because the very word used for Cushite in Numbers 12.1, where this story is being described, is the same word used in Jeremiah 13.23, where it says, "Can an Ethiopian change his skin?" So Ethiopian there is the same as the word Cushite, and you can see what the point is.

We can't change our skin color. Moses' sister, Miriam, criticizes this marriage between Moses and the Cushite, and God is so displeased with Miriam and her criticism that he strikes Miriam with leprosy, which the Bible describes as turning her hands as white as snow, as if to say, "Miriam, you value light skin?

I'll give you light skin." At least we know from this story that God is not pleased with Miriam's criticism of Moses' marriage to a black woman, and there is no other criticism of it. So for those four reasons, and there are more, I think it is right to not simply permit or tolerate but to celebrate the marriage of a godly, Christ-exalting man and woman who are marrying in the Lord across racial lines.

It will not destroy—like that quote from that letter—it will not destroy any God-appointed diversity in the world. It will, in fact, feature that diversity and the power of Christ in it. Amen. Well said. Thank you, Pastor John. And some of you know Pastor John wrote a whole book called Bloodlines, which deals with the race issue in far greater detail.

If this is a topic of interest, be sure to check out that book. You can download it free of charge at DesiringGod.org/books. It's one of a hundred books you can find and download free of charge. For more details about this podcast or to catch up on old episodes or to subscribe to the audio feed for new episodes as we release them, and even to send us a question of your own, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

On Wednesday, we're going to return and hear from a listener who wants to know the differences between hating our sin and hating ourselves for sinning. What's the difference between sin hate and self-hate? That's on Wednesday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper.

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