Tim Keller's View on Nations

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris.

Tim Keller, Social Justice, and Why This Book Matters

We're gonna take a trip down memory lane and talk about Tim Keller's 2010 book, Generous Justice. I've talked about this before, but there's a section in it I wanna read to you. So this is gonna be a little bit of a story time.

The reason I wanna talk about it is because I think that we're in a situation right now that is hard for some people to understand in evangelicalism. We have been through a lot, let's just say. You had the Young Restless Reform Movement start to use this social justice rhetoric in the 2010s.

It bubbles over in 2020, and everyone sees what's actually been going on, things they didn't think were happening were happening. And then of course, these terms are somewhat vilified and retired, but the concepts are still there.

And you have guys like Kevin DeYoung. I'll pick him as a good example of this. He was in the PCA, which Tim Keller was also in the PCA, very influential in that denomination. And I think it was two years ago at T4G that Kevin DeYoung essentially said, look, there's normal people in my congregation who are being called racist, and this is a problem.

And it occurred to me at the time he said it that this really is how it works. When these movements get going and they start vilifying certain classes of people and categorizing them as beyond the pale, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, whatever, they may be normal everyday Americans that stood up against the machine, but they're gonna be mowed down.

And that was the first few years of this in my estimation. And then what happened was I think it reached a saturation point where there was an overreach. Social justice advocates had just been too aggressive.

They went too far against normal grill Americans who just wanna grill on the weekends and leave me alone. And they weren't involved in these political fights and they're being called racist now. They're being drawn into them.

And that was my interpretation. When I heard Kevin DeYoung say that, I thought that makes a lot of sense. There's finally some of these mushy middle guys. I don't know what you wanna call them, but they didn't take a big whack at it.

They somewhat reinforced the social justice narratives, but they weren't leading the charge. Those guys, some of them liberal, perhaps sentiments. They want a multicultural country in some way. They're pluralists on a certain level.

And they didn't go all the way with wokeness. They didn't like the extremes. They didn't like the overreach. But anyway, they went along as far as they could. And then when it affected their congregations and when they saw so many normal people, quote unquote normal, were being excoriated, that's when they said, you know what?

I think we've gone too far. Something's off here. Now, when that happens, that process that I just described, when that happens, I do not think that there is fundamental changes necessarily happening.

I don't think that there is a repentance. I don't consider that a repentance. I don't think that there's even a realization that social justice thinking's wrong. I think it's just, they don't like the damaging impact it's had.

And it's just gone too far.

That's what it is.

The ideas might be okay if you keep them caged. So, obviously this is just pure John's opinion, John's reading of the situation. But I was doing some research for something and I read Generous Justice before, but I decided to look back for a certain thing I was writing about.

And I noticed something in Generous Justice that I thought, well, this is really interesting. Tim Keller talks about what a nation is. And it's in a section, I'll show you, it's on how do we do justice.

And it's social justice, right? But he has this whole section on what a nation is, how we understand nations. And his understanding is so fundamentally flawed. It's embarrassing, actually. I'm surprised that this kind of stuff was not laughed out of the PCA years ago.

This is the kind of thing people like Kevin DeYoung should have been all over, but they weren't. And you have to ask yourself why that is. I don't know the complete answer to this. But this book, Generous Justice, was very, very popular.

And it influenced a lot of guys in the Young Restless Reformed world. It also, I think, spurred on or encouraged the publication of similar books that made similar cases. And at the core, it seems like on a very fundamental level, there is a misunderstanding of God's good order when it comes to nations.

And if you wanna understand what's going on now, why some of the guys, this is where I'm getting to, why some of the guys who have been so, I would say, not helpful on social justice issues, who are now somewhat critical of social justice all of a sudden, right?

And at the same time, though, they have far more criticism for quote-unquote Christian nationalism. This is what's confusing. Why some of those guys line up that way. I think that this section from Generous Justice may explain it.

I really do.

I'm talking about guys who were very lenient, but I think they saw themselves as measured. They saw that there was a point to be made when it came to social justice. But don't take it too far, that's wrong.

And then when the Christian nationalist stuff starts going, when Stephen Wolf writes his book, they come out and they just destroy it. They say all manner, there's no sense of moral equivalency here. I mean, obviously, Christian nationalism is so much more of a threat.

Why do they think that way, right?

And these guys will defend themselves and their followers will defend them. They say, well, they're not woke, but they don't like Christian nationalism. That's the category, right? They're not woke, they're not Christian nationalists.

What explains that? I think this section from Tim Keller's book, Generous Justice on what a nation is explains this to some extent. I think that a lot of people in that young restless reform camp have bought into a concept of nationality that is not biblical.

And they feel the need to defend this concept of nationality and they see a threat in Christian nationalism, that Christian nationalists are bringing back older ideas of what a nation is. And these are bigoted and inherently racist.

And you should not categorize a nation according to something that's specific or particular like a religious tradition. If you do that, then look at all the people.

You're leaving out.

What about the Hindus, right? What about the Jews? What about, these are the kinds of questions that come up. And these are supposedly from people that say they're not woke, right? They may be seeing the excesses in social justice.

They have their certain critiques of it. But I think that what's happened, because Tim Keller would be one of the, he would be a prime example of someone who definitely led people into social justice.

I don't know if he's the founding father, but he's definitely up there when it comes to evangelical social justice advocates, right, who's influenced a lot of other people. I think when we look at him, you look at his followers, they buy into this incorrect assumption, unbiblical assumption of what a nation is.

But then what they do is they attach that to their social justice plan. And so if you are against their social justice, you gotta drill down deeper. You gotta see that if you're against their plan, they see you as definitionally against what they think is a biblical understanding of what nations are.

And I think a lot of the supposedly non-woke people who think it's gone too far still buy into this definition, even if they don't want to attach it to Tim Keller's conclusions. They say, well, hey, it's wrong to redistribute wealth and income, I'm not for that, I'm not woke, right?

But they still buy into this idea of what a nation is. And so I want to talk to you about this. I want you to consider with me what generous justice has to say. It's chapter six, how should we do justice?

And the section is racial reconciliation. And I want to just point out before this section, you have relocation and redistribution. So this is where John Perkins talks about redistributing wealth, which Tim Keller wants to say is reweaving a community.

I'm not gonna focus on that. I've focused on that before in other videos, but that comes before this. And then he gets to racial reconciliation. He says, there's a third important factor in John Perkins' strategy for rebuilding poor communities.

He names it racial reconciliation. In both private charity and government agencies, many of the providers are of a different race than the care receivers. While Perkins insisted that leadership for development be based in poor communities, he also invited outsiders, usually Anglo, to play a critical role in fostering indigenous leadership.

He did this while many civil rights organizations often radicalized and politicized the role of the outsider at the expense of people in poor communities. These two factors, inviting outsiders to play a role along with insisting that the residents of poor communities be empowered to control their destiny meant that leadership for community development had to be multi-ethnic and interracial.

It is always much easier for the leaders to be one of one race, whether just indigenous members of the community or only professional helpers from outside the neighborhood. But Perkins knew that the combination, if it could be made to work, was powerful.

So hear what he's saying, okay? This multi-ethnicity, interracial workforce is powerful. Even if it's not efficient, even if it doesn't work well, these are Keller's words, not mine, this makes a statement, an important statement, right?

So we should pursue it. This was one of Perkins' most important contributions and challenges. What is best for the poor community, a non-paternalistic partnership of peoples from different races and social locations was also one of the gifts that the gospel makes possible.

And when he says non-paternalistic, what he means is that you don't have, the CEOs, the people at the top of whatever structure it is, if it's a hospital or a convalescent home, I suppose in this case, they're not Anglo, they're not white people, there's a mix, right?

So how do you get there is the question, right? This is the whole civil rights regime is trying to figure this out. How do you get to that point and make sure that it all runs smoothly and efficiently?

And it seems like they haven't found a great way of doing that, at least coming up with the quotas that they would like to see. But it says the Bible provides deep resources for racial rapprochement. It's depiction of creation cuts the nerve of racism at its core.

So he's grounding this social enthusiasm for diversity in leadership, in control and influence and power. He's trying to root this in something the Bible teaches, okay? And this is the core teaching is on the fundamental level here that I think the Young Restless Reform crowd, whether they think they're woke or they're not woke, many of them have really drunk deeply from this.

It's depiction, the Bible's depiction of creation cuts the nerve of racism. It insists that all human beings are of one blood, Acts 17, 26. The account, it's a funny verse to use for that, right? From one man, he made every nation and including the boundaries, the time of their existence.

I just think that's a very curious verse to use, but he says, the account of Adam's creation is crucial for an understanding of race. Here is a comment from the Mishnah. Okay, so we're gonna go to the Mishnah now.

The first major commentary on the Bible compiled by Jewish scholars. Why did God create only one human being? So that no one can say to a fellow human being, my father was better than yours. Because all are created in the image of God.

No one race is inherently superior to any other. Now, obviously in a sense of moral worth before God, the sense of the transcendent image of God that is in each one of us, regardless of racial makeup, this is a hundred percent true that we are equally in need of salvation.

I talk about this in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, right? We're equally in need of a savior. We are equally sinners or have the capacity for it. And we do participate in sin and that's why we need redemption.

So there's a great many ways in which groups of people are equal at a very fundamental level according to creation and the fall. There's no doubt about this. And when answers in Genesis says things like, we're all one race, there's a truth in what they're saying.

We all came, my uncle used to say, my uncle Fred in Mississippi used to say, well, we all came off the same boat, right? We all came off the same boat. But that's, I think that's the hook in a way. When you say that, we all kind of have this concept, we gather around that and we say, absolutely.

And then look what he says in the next paragraph, where does racism come from then, right? If that's true, that's a good question. If we're all the same, then why would we have racism? And really what he's talked about so far is a paternalistic relationship, a system or a structure where you have Anglos at the top or receiving care, and then minorities, people who are immigrants from other countries in America coming in and providing services that are more menial, that are bottom level, and viewed as a negative thing.

This is not what we're supposed to have. Whether it's efficient or not, it doesn't matter. So that's, let your view of racism here, let your view of Tim Keller's view of racism here be influenced by what we just read, that these kinds of disparities are, that's racist, okay?

That's the problem. So this isn't, like, I think a lot of people hear this, they read this and they, at least maybe before they did, not as much now, but they would hear, oh yeah, hatred for other people, thinking they have less worth in the eyes of God or something like that, that's evil, that's wrong.

And they would read their own understanding into it. Just listen to what Tim Keller's saying though, it's not that exactly at all. May include that, but it's definitely beyond that. He's making an argument here.

He says in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel tells us that the people of the earth were marked by pride and a lust for power. Now I need you to pay attention very closely because this is where things go really off the rails.

As due punishment for this pride, we are told that God confused their speech. They could not understand each other or work together. And as a result, they scattered into different nations. We must not miss the profound message of this account.

Okay, what's the profound message? What is the Bible trying to tell us in the story of the Tower of Babel? Here's what Tim Keller says, that human pride and lust for power leads to racial and national division, strife and hatred.

Wait a minute, hold on. Let's hold the phone for a minute. Let's look at Genesis 10, verse five. It says, from there, the coastlands of the nations were separated into their lands. Everyone, according to his language, according to their families, into their nations.

You read the rest of the passage, the sons of Ham were Cush and Mizraim and Put and Canaan. And it goes on and on. And it gives you these genealogies. And over and over again, in verse 20, it says, these are the sons of Ham, according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, by their nations.

You look at verse 31, these are the sons of Shem, according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, according to their families. What do you keep seeing over and over? Family, language, land, these characteristics associated with nation here.

And it's after that that you get to Genesis 11 and the story of Babel. And in the story of Babel, we find that the sin was that man wanted to reach heaven. They said in verse four, come let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose top will reach into heaven and let us make ourselves a name.

Otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. So they're realizing, they're recognizing, we're gonna be separated here. That is what's going to happen. I would think that this is because they recognize the natural flow of things and this was God's will.

They seem to have known that in some way, but that's what they're afraid of, that they're gonna be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

The Lord said, behold, they are one people and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do. And now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible. Let us go down and they're confused their language so that they will not understand one another's speech.

So that the Lord scattered them abroad from over the face of the whole earth and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of the whole earth.

And from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. Okay, so you definitely see, I think pride here. They wanted a tower that will reach into heaven, but they were also afraid of either a natural tendency to be scattered over the face of the earth or the will of the Lord that they would be fill the whole earth because that was God's intention.

Right?

And God's looking at it. And one of the things he says is, well, they're all the same language. You know, this is making it possible for them to do whatever they wanna do. They can cooperate with one another.

This needs to change. And so God, and this is part of his creation, right? It didn't all end with the six days of creation. This is part of his creation. He actually invents languages. And it says that there, the Lord confused the language of the whole earth.

And from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. So the Lord accomplished his purposes in this and use language as a way to separate them and make them distinct peoples.

It sounds like this was part of the Lord's plan that they were trying to avoid. And that God, what did he do? He punished them for trying to avoid it. If you wanna call that a punishment, he ensured that his plan would be carried out.

What does Tim Keller do with this though? Tim Keller uses this story to answer the question, where does racism come from? And he says, it comes from pride. And it's that human pride and lust for power that Babel had that led to the racial and national division.

Actually, it's the exact opposite. It is the exact opposite in a way. What he's saying is we have nations, because these separations, because of lust for power and human pride. When in reality, we have those things because God stepped in to force man to carry out his plan, to fit into the plan that he had for man, which was to be fruitful, multiply, fill the whole earth.

So it's not human pride and lust that led to these nations forming and these divisions between peoples. That was part of God's plan. He's blaming God. He's saying that God's plan is the curse, that God's plan is the result of pride and lust.

When in reality, God's plan, his good order is perfect. And the pride and lust led to unification. The pride and lust gave him a common purpose in building this tower. Tim Keller is giving you absolute poison here.

He is saying the exact opposite. He's turning scripture on its head entirely and basing his view of social justice on this. This is on a fundamental level, guys. I think many Christians have drunk deeply of this.

And they think that this is probably the way the story went. This is what the Tower of Babel was and the lesson we should learn from it. And so any divisions between people groups is in effect not the plan of God or even natural developments.

It's all sin. That's all it is. And it needs to be overcome. And that's what you'll see Tim Keller arguing. He says, the division into religious people groups with different languages was a consequence of human disobedience.

Immediately thereafter in Genesis 12, God comes to Abraham and promises to bring a salvation to the world that will help all the families of the earth. This word families means people groups, nations, or races.

God is distressed, he says. Now notice there's no verse here. God is distressed that the unity of the human family has been broken and declares his intention to take down the walls of racism and nationalism that human sin and pride have put there.

How deceitful this is. He goes on, he says, the New Testament completes the story and acts to when the Holy Spirit descends on the church on the day of Pentecost, another miracle occurs. While at Babel, people who spoke the same language couldn't understand each other at Pentecost, everyone who spoke different languages could nonetheless all understand the preaching of the gospel by the apostles.

It was a reversing of the curse of Babel. It was a declaration that the grace of Jesus can heal the wounds of racism. At Pentecost, the first gospel preaching was in every language showing that no one culture is the right culture and that in the spirit, we can have a unity that transcends all nationalistic, linguistic, and cultural barriers.

So there you go. That's what Pentecost was apparently. That this was a way of reversing this curse, the curse of Babel, he calls it. The result, according to Ephesians, is a community of equal fellow citizens from all races.

Now, of course, what's Ephesians actually talking about in Ephesians 2? Spiritual reality, the church, and how the divisions between Jew and Gentile, divisions, ethnic divisions, what kind of divisions?

Well, divisions according to the law, Jews saying that you need to keep the law of God, the specific laws that are tied in with ethnic Israel. And the gospel, well, the church, the advent of the church is this organization, this entity, where people who are not part of that, and they don't have to become a proselyte, they don't have to keep those specific laws in order to be part of the community of faith.

It's not a requirement anymore. It's something that is specific to all peoples. It doesn't mean nationality gets washed away. It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as nations. It just means that that dividing line between Israel and Gentiles, because of the law, is no longer in effect.

According to 1 Peter 2, again, same moral there, but he's gonna use it incorrectly, Christians are a new ethnic. Partnership and friendship across racial barriers within the church is one of the signs of the presence and power of the gospel.

In Christ, our racial and cultural identity, just for a moment, just think about this. What if you're in a church that the community is all one ethnicity? What if you're in Nigeria and they're all Christians and they're beautifully singing and worshiping the Lord, do they just not have one of the signs of the presence and power of the gospel because they're just devoid of other peoples?

Think about where this leads. I mean, does this apply to all the black churches out there?

How does this work?

This is what Tim Keller is saying now. In Christ, our racial and cultural identities, while not insignificant, are no longer primary to our self-understanding. What do you mean by primary? You know, I'm a man, I have a wife, I have a child, and I have all the things that come with being a man, the hormones, the organs, I guess the way I think, there's all kinds of things.

Is that primary to my self-understanding? There's neither male or female in Christ, so is that primary? Of course it's primary to my self-understanding. It's on a different level, though, than being in Christ.

So there's a spiritual level, but I also, I'm still a man. Like, this whole trying to create a hierarchy, so he's against these hierarchies. He doesn't like a convalescent home where, I guess, the people receiving the care are Anglo and the people who are giving it tend to be minorities.

He doesn't like that. That's a bad hierarchy. But he wants to set up a hierarchy here where your identity is in Christ, and so it trumps all these other identities in some way. Maybe they exist on different levels.

I can communicate with someone who's not a Christian who speaks my language and have probably a more profitable discussion than I can with someone who is a Christian who does not speak my language because I can't understand them, and they can't understand me.

So what does that mean? It just means my, I have an identity. I share something in common with both people, and they're different things, and they're both important things. Our bond with others in Christ is stronger than our relationship to other members of our own racial and national groups.

The gospel makes us all like Abraham who left his home culture but never arrived in another one. So for example, Chinese Christians do not denounce, well, he was the father of, he never arrived at another one.

He was the father of a nation. He set all the defaults for a nation. So for example, Chinese Christians do not denounce their Chinese identity to become something else, yet the gospel gives them critical distance from their own culture, enabling them to critique their own cultural idols.

It's an odd, this gets into another issue, I think, that maybe I don't wanna delve into today, but this idea, though, that the gospel itself is, which, what is the gospel, right? It's the work that Christ did on our behalf to make us right before the father, the good news that we can be right before God.

Apparently that gives you all these tools to be able to transcend the political and social controversies of your day and critique them from this outside vantage point. I've talked about this before. That's a different issue I don't wanna get into, but you see that here and that's an assumption a lot of people have as well.

It is true, obviously, becoming a Christian does give you a new perspective on things, and there are certain things, perhaps a sin that you were engaged in you now see as wrong. So that obviously exists, but that's not, it doesn't give you, the way he phrases it here, it gives critical distance from their own culture, as if now you're separated from your culture.

There is, you're still Chinese, but now you're kinda like, you're not as Chinese. You can view the group from this outside perspective. You've leveled up, right? It almost sounds gnostic, right? But you've like leveled up.

You're not really totally part of them anymore. So you can criticize them in ways that you wouldn't have. You would have been trapped before in your culture. And I just think that's a bit of a silly notion.

You're still, if you're Chinese and you become a Christian, you are still Chinese. Yeah, it may mean that you're seeing some things that are sinful, that conflict with your new found faith in Christ that offend you.

It goes for any culture. But the idea that you can't have self-reflection, if you need Christianity to do that, obviously is not the case. You can have self-reflection towards a lot of things without Christianity.

It may not be right self-reflection, but you can have, there is a critical distance that you can have on some level, I suppose. But it's not a separation though. It's not a, now you have this stronger, more significant, like primary, these are the words he uses, identity that separates you from the rest of the group.

The only separation you have really is a spiritual separation. And that is very significant, but it's not, it's for the purposes he's trying to make this work, for the purposes of bringing together people from these diverse ethnicities and so forth in a hospital setting or a structure like a convalescent home where we'll find in a moment other factors, other sectors of society.

That's not what's being talked about in Ephesians 2 or 1 Peter 2, that's not in their minds. Paul, Peter, not thinking about this. Like, oh, you know what would really help make our society more diverse?

Well, we need to make sure that people understand the gospel so that they can then gain the self-reflection and separate from their people groups and not identify with them as strongly. And if we can weaken those identities and get everyone to kind of be Christian, then we're gonna create this great place.

Obviously that's like, he's not making any requirement that the people at the convalescent home or the hospital or wherever who are gonna be used to diversify those arenas are Christians, right? So on the one hand, this argument is made to Christians that you need to support diversity and that's part of the gospel somehow.

And this is all tied in with our Christian belief because there's a curse at Babel and we need to do what Pentecost did and reverse that curse. But then part of reversing the curse ends up doing, it ends up what?

It's not gospel. It's just, you could have a hospital and everyone's pagan, but it's diverse. Is that, it's not the gospel?

It's not the gospel at all.

But in this scheme, it really tricks Christians into thinking that that is somehow in line with the gospel. It's so, I wanna say clever. It's not really that clever. It's just so in line with, I think, other things we were taught as young kids from the time we grew up in liberal America with this multicultural ideas, propositionation idea.

This just like speaks that language. I think that's how it works. In the final chapters of the Bible, a time is envisioned, he says, in which God's people are united from every tribe, tongue and people and nation, right?

They're still separate, okay? But at the climax of the world's history brought about by death and resurrection of Jesus, there will be the end of all racial division and hatred. Okay, and then of course, that's something Jesus does,.

Not something we do.

And it's also a spiritual reality in which we're all still have our separate identities. So it doesn't, we're not one indistinguishable group of people. We're not abstracted. We're not separated from ourselves in some way to become one pool of sameness.

We're not deracinated.

The way he presents it,.

It sounds like that's what he's saying. Between the promise of Genesis 12 and its fulfillment and revelation, the Bible strikes numerous blows against racism. So now he's gonna bring in these specific scenarios.

Moses' sister Miriam was punished by God because she rejected Moses' African wife on account of her race. Jonah was condemned because he regarded... Actually, I'm trying to think, is that actually even accurate?

I have to brush up on that. Number's 12. Let me just look it up real quick. It says that Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married. And they said, has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?

Has he not spoken through us as well? And the Lord heard it. Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron and to Miriam, you come out of the tent of meeting. So the three of them came out. Okay, so yeah, that's all we get.

Well, it just says against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married. I don't, I mean, what does Tim Keller say here? That she rejected Moses' wife on account of her race. Wow, talk about reading into the passage.

Jonah was condemned because he regarded Nineveh primarily on the basis of race and politics. Their prosperity threatened Israel instead of on the basis of their spiritual need. Well, they were enemies of Israel.

And it was because he disobeyed the Lord. And yeah, he, certainly he didn't, he hated those people and he didn't want them to be redeemed and saved. So, okay, I'll give Tim Keller that. The apostle Peter through a vision and the conversation of Cornelius and the Gentile centurion was taught about the sinfulness of racial and ethnic bias.

Not really, that's, it's, again, this is the law. We're talking about Jewish law. Are the Gentiles, the Gentiles can come on in if they're willing to follow the Jewish law, right? It wasn't racial ethnic bias.

He was brought to see that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation those who fear him.

And do what is right.

Well, what does that mean then? Does that mean God in the Old Testament? Tim Keller is really setting up a bad argument if he wants to do this, that I guess the God of the Old Testament wasn't accepting, right?

That was like, he had to break his own rules if that's the case, right? To make a way for every nation. Well, you could become a proselyte in the Old Testament. Israel was a light to all the peoples. You had the Queen of Sheba coming to Solomon and saying, what accounts for the wisdom that you have?

So it was a different role. Israel played a different role in a little bit than the way that the church is also a light. Jesus actually appropriates that term. It's not the United States. The United States is not the city on a hill, the church is, and a light to the world, but a light to the nations.

But the thing is that there's, one of the differences, and that's what's talked about in Acts, is that you had to go through a process of adopting Israeli ways and beliefs. Obviously the beliefs, no one has a problem with, but these other, these ceremonial laws, you had to adopt those in order to be part of the covenant people.

That's what is being talked about here. And those are, that's no, Israel is not playing the same part that they were playing in the Old Testament, the same unique part. And so this is what Acts 9 is about, but Tim Keller wants to make this about, there's some kind of ethnic racial barrier that God is knocking down.

And I'm just saying, if he wants to make that case, then he's, God's the one that also erected it. Despite this testimony, sometime later, the apostle Paul saw Peter refusing to eat with Gentile Christians and he confronted him about his racism, right?

This is Peter's racism.

He told Peter he was not acting in line with the gospel. It wasn't, just go read the passage. That's not what happened. Wasn't Peter's racism. It was, again, the same issue I keep talking about, the division between Jews and Gentiles because of the specific Jewish ceremonial laws.

To act in line with the gospel is to live consistently with the truth that we are sinners saved by sheer grace. Racial prejudice is wrong because it is a denial of the very principle that all humans are equally sinful and saved by only the grace of God.

Now here's the thing, he comes back to something very familiar to you. We all agree about this, right? That humans are equally sinful and saved by the only grace of God. We all believe this. So now he's treading into familiar territory and he's, I think he hopes, whether he's self-aware of it or not, I don't know.

So I shouldn't say that, but he, at least the effect of what he's doing is everything that he just said, you can reject that and still believe his conclusion here, that his evaluation that racial prejudice is wrong because it's a denial of the very principle of all human beings are equally sinful and saved by only the grace of God.