We don't want to presume any answers here on Ask Pastor John, and Tracy, who's a white woman, writes in to ask, "Pastor John, I would like to know if dating or marrying a black man is wrong. If so, could you please tell me where to look in the Bible for it?

I know a lot of people frown upon this, but I want to be sure what God says and not what man says." I preached on this, I've written on it in bloodlines, I got a whole chapter on interracial marriage, and here's the summary of my argument. There are two basic restrictions on marriage in the Bible.

Number one, she should marry a man. Number two, he should be a Christian. And I get that from 1st Corinthians 739. If her husband dies, talking about a widow, she is free to be married to whom—this is a masculine pronoun here—to whomever she wishes, only in the Lord. So Paul is very vigilant that you don't go out and marry an unbeliever.

So this is just huge, that we should only marry people who love Jesus. He didn't restrict it in any other way. People have brought up to me over the years the restrictions that God put on Israel for intermarrying with the nations, and used that as an argument for being opposed to interracial marriage, and my answer to that is, those stipulations in the Old Testament were religiously motivated, not racially motivated.

In other words, Solomon's foreign wives took his heart away from God, and that was the issue, not that his his ethnicity would be corrupted by them. The Old Testament simply doesn't argue that way. It is very concerned, just like Paul is, with marrying in the faith. Another issue. When Christ came into the world, he created a new Israel, a new ethnic group, as it were, made up of every other ethnic group.

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into light, once you were not a people. And the "you" he's talking about is Jew and Gentile, every ethnicity, but now you are God's people.

Marry in your tribe, namely the tribe Christian, across any ethnic or racial lines, but marry in the tribe of this new tribe that Jesus is the head of. You have received mercy, and so you're a new people, and that's the qualification. Here there is no Greek, no Jew, no circumcised, no uncircumcised, no barbarian, no Scythian, no slave, no free.

Christ is all, and in all. Go ahead, marry across all the lines inside that new humanity. And my last vivid argument, maybe, that I should refer to is Moses married a Cushite, and everybody agrees that the Cushites are black Africans. They're from down the Nile River, and we know it caused problems because Miriam, his sister, and Aaron got very angry about this and confronted him in Numbers 12 verse 1, "Because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman," the text says, and they got angry, and in that anger, as they opposed Moses, God showed his colors, and he was really upset, so that he gave to Miriam a leprous hand, and she pulls her hand, and she's leprous.

And the Bible, I think, and I could be wrong about this, maybe pushing it too far, it points out her hand was white as snow, white as snow. This is verse 10 of Numbers 12. Is God saying to Miriam, "Look, if you're so concerned about Moses' wife being too dark, I'll give you something really light.

Here's snow called leprosy on your hand." I think this is a picture of God's indignation that Moses would be confronted, not as to whether or not the Cushite was a believer, but whether she was the right color or the right ethnicity for the man. And let me just close with a story.

I love to tell this Urbana story. Noel and I were at Urbana in 1967, and a great missions leader was on a panel, and somebody asked him from the audience, they had microphones in those days, "Aren't you concerned in going to Pakistan for so long that your daughter's gonna grow up there, fall in love with a Pakistani, and marry a Pakistani?" That's what he asked from the floor.

And this answer, I've never forgotten it. It had a huge effect on me in those days. I was 20 years old at the time, and he said, 21, and he said, "Better a believing Pakistani farmer than a rich unbelieving American banker." And it just sank into me that, yes, that's exactly the right answer.

Of course it matters who she marries. She must marry a Christ lover, a Christ follower, and if it's a Pakistani, praise God, but don't marry a rich white American banker, because he's not a believer, and that's gonna make for an impossible biblical marriage. So every marriage is a cross-cultural marriage.

Every marriage is hard. Get ready for stress no matter who you marry, but that's what the gospel is for. That's what we're supposed to understand. So don't marry—I'll say this to women right now—don't marry a marginally Christian man. Some women want to be married enough that they're willing to settle for this man he's just squeaking by.

He says he's a Christian. I don't think he could provide any spiritual leadership at all. I don't even know if he's solid, but he just says the right words. I just want to encourage women, pray that God would lead to a man whom you can trust as a deeply Christian man, and same thing of course goes for men.

Thank you, Pastor John, and for more on interracial marriage, see Pastor John's book "Bloodlines," which you can download for free at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.