53. Race Is Not The Problem

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Hello everyone and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 53 race is not the problem.

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For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the

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Jew first and also to the Greek Romans 1 16. Despite what secular woke artists, race baiters and critical race grifters may tell you, ethnicity and race are not primary to our identity.

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The world is not divided into systemic oppressors and marginalized victims and your melanin count is not the most important thing about you.

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It just isn't. In this article, I want to reject every godless notion that racism can be fought with more racism.

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Instead, I want to embrace the common sense notion that increased divisiveness does not lead to increased unity and I want to stand upon the only truth that can bring real healing to our land.

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And to do that, I will entirely ignore every pagan secular philosophy.

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This is not going to be a diatribe against critical race theory or cultural Marxism or Black Lives Matter or any of that.

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I'm not going to opine on their opinions on this issue. Instead, I'm going to joyfully share the gospel and I'm going to joyfully share how the gospel applies to our race, which is a message this country needs to hear since 4 plus 4 is no longer 8.

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It is white supremacy. So with that, let us get to the gospel. In its most basic form, the gospel is the four part story of how

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God is bringing redemption to sinful man. Part one of that story is how God created human beings to be perfect, made in his image without error.

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And yet there is a part two. Those same humans decided to choose rebellion instead of God, and they fell into sin and ruin, which is the lion's share of the

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Bible from Genesis 3 all the way until you get to Matthew. Again, the largest part of the scripture is the tale of human fallenness.

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And then in part three, we see how God sends his one and only son to rescue and redeem his fallen people, which is concluded by part four and how

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God will totally and finally bring redemption to its full completion in eternity.

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That is the general and good old gospel message.

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Now, the question we have to ask ourselves is how does that gospel speak to an issue like race?

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You see, what I find so fascinating about the gospel is how robust it truly is.

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It is not just a singular thing. It is a multifaceted thing where we can look at it from a variety of different angles.

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It not only provides the general answer to the question of redemption, but it also communicates redemption in a more particular and a more concrete way.

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For instance, the gospel not only recounts how God created us, that's a general truth.

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It also shows how we were created to be sexual beings, emotional beings, biological, rational, relational, vocational beings.

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Those are all particular truths that we can share the gospel through the lens of that. Moreover, the gospel not only argues that we have fallen into a state of sin and misery that's a general statement, but it also defines what that sin is and how that sin has affected every facet of our being.

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Those are particular appeals. With that, I believe the gospel can and should be told from a variety of different angles to show how

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God redeems us from all various and sundry sins. So with that, in this article,

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I want to tell that four -part general gospel story in a particular way and I want to tell it in the particular lens of race and how only

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Jesus through his gospel can heal the sin that is underneath racism, nothing else.

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So let us begin. Part one, a unique race. After five dramatic days of creation that are filled with the most incredible displays of God's creational power,

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God made the animals and then he fashioned the man. He personally knelt down into the dust and he very intimately formed a human being in his own image,

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Genesis 2 .7. Then he made a suitable helper for himself in the woman,

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Eve, Genesis 2 .18. And finally, he commanded both of them, male and female, to be fruitful and to multiply, to rule and have dominion and to spread out to the ends of the earth, creating more of them,

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Genesis 1 .28. This was what it meant to be human in a general sense.

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Now more specifically, we may understand that humans were designed as a single mono -ethnic people.

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Eve was made to be the flesh of Adam's flesh, bone of Adam's bone, Genesis 2 .23, which meant that Adam and Eve were members of a single race, the human race.

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Their melanin content did not matter at all in God's perfect design.

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However light or dark they were, they were human regardless of their shade.

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And their mandate as a human mandate was to fill the world full of a single race of people, a worldwide community who would worship all the same

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God, living in perfect harmony with one another without a hint of division. That is what human beings were designed as a mono -ethnic race of people to become and then enters the serpent, which leads to part two, a world in ethnic division.

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When Adam and Eve rejected the word of God and they followed the serpent's trickery, humanity fell into base sin.

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That sin not only affected their relationship with God, but it had a profound impact upon human relations as well.

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For instance, the first interracial crime in human history occurred when

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Adam's son killed his other son, Cain. These boys were members of the same human race, both descended from the same bloodline, and yet one of them decided to perpetrate a hideous act of violence upon the other.

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And this act of violence set a terrible precedent that still exists today, where there is violence done inside the single race.

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But it does not stop there. Because humans not only murdered themselves interracially, meaning members of the human race killing other humans in that race, but soon ethnocentric discrimination, hatred, and ethnically motivated murder began as well.

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After humans were judged through a global flood, the rebooted race of Noah gathered in a valley called

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Shinar, also known as Babel. The goal was not to be fruitful, multiply, or for man to spread out to the ends of the earth in obedience to God's covenant commission,

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Genesis 128 and Genesis 9. Instead, their goal was to cloister together in a valley of disobedience and in pure hubris, attempt to build a tower that reached up to the heavens, making themselves equal with God.

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Now, of course, God vetoed their foolish plans. It says that he even had to come down in order to see it because it was that insignificant.

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But he also, along with vetoing those plans, he also introduced a new facet into the human race.

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Before, everyone was not only monoracial, but they were also monoethnic.

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Now, after Babel, we have the introduction of ethnicity. Up to this point, all humans spoke the same language and look the same color.

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Again, there was only one race of human beings in one ethnicity. But, after the curse of Babel, humans naturally segregated and divided into ethno -linguistic tribes who scattered all across the face of the earth in search of places to call their own.

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Thus, after Babel, one human race was divided into a myriad of ethnicities.

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But yet that was not the problem. The problem was sin. And since sin affects every facet of the human condition, humans began acting out their dysfunction, discrimination, judgment, and violence along ethnic lines as well.

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It wasn't enough for humans to perpetrate violence against members of the human race. Sin instead caused humans to group together to stratify themselves according to color, tribe, language, and culture.

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And in this way, evil could not only be inflicted upon individuals, but upon racial groups as well, causing ethnically motivated hatred and sin.

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While one race of people still existed, the human race, a deep distrust for other ethnic people settled down upon the human psyche, so that human people, genetically similar in every way, could become more and more divided.

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Wars and prejudices were now being enacted over skin color and complexion. Slavery became an early institutional norm in the ancient world where one tribe would act shamefully against another, believing that the other group was subhuman based off of the color of their skin.

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And while examples could abound in history and in the modern world of this kind of ethno -hatred, it is essential to note that it is not racism that is the problem.

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It is sin. Sin causes racism and sin causes ethnocentrism to multiply among all people.

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Again, I do not use the word racism here as the problem because there's only one human race and it's not that race that's the problem.

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It's the sin that's the problem. Sin is what produces fear, prejudice, discrimination, and antagonism among the various races.

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It is sin that produces these things. And it's sin that produces opposition among the many competing ethnicities that exist as one broken, fractured race of people.

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This is the problem, sin. This distinction is so critical because racism really doesn't get at the problem.

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People hating one another inside the human race is not specific enough to account for the intentional sins that are ethnically motivated by dissimilar people enacted upon one another.

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And again, racism as a term is just not robust enough to describe any meaningful cure.

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You can't combat racism with more focus on race. You can't combat ethnocentrism by focusing more on ethnicity.

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This is because human beings cannot be cured by that. They can't be made whole by that.

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They can't be made whole with more division. Humans will be cured and made whole only when they come together as the human race that God intended them to be.

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And that will only occur if they come under the power of the gospel, which is where we get to part three in our story, redemption, neither

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Jew nor Greek. You see, in our fallen sinful nature, we are prone to prejudice.

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We are prone to ethnic antagonism, ethnocentrism, and all the other isms that you've heard, valuing one another's otherness as opposed to someone else's ness.

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This sin is enough to condemn us to eternal hell because it violates God's eternal law.

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While God did in fact divide human beings into various ethnic tribes so that they would accomplish his command of scattering to the ends of the earth so that they would fill the world with multiple colored human people who are worshiping him in spirit and in truth.

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Yes, he divided them according to color to accomplish his great commission, but he did not command them to hate one another.

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In fact, humans were supposed to love their neighbors as themselves. They were supposed to celebrate other people's distinctiveness and to work together to fill the world with worshipers who celebrate all that God has done in our life and in yours.

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And while humanity has fallen short of God's glorious standard time and time again, doing vile and shameless things to one another,

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God himself is the one who provides the cure. Unlike the modern world, which is attempting to cure the sin of racism with more hatred and more division, with more heat instead of light, with more anger instead of more joy.

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God sent his one and only son to heal this sin perfectly. He came wrapped in a particular ethnicity, a

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Jew, but he lived his life showing us what a human in relation to other human beings actually means.

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Instead of following the cultural norms by hating the ethnic Samaritans, a group of half

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Jewish and half Gentile people, Jesus loved them and brought salvation to their city.

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John chapter four. Instead of looking down his nose at the despised Gentiles, which is what a

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Jew at that time would have done. They would have been ethnically motivated towards hatred of Samaritans and Gentiles.

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He healed them. Matthew 15, 21 through 28 is an example. When he marched up the hill to the cross that set atop

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Calvary, he permanently healed the divide that existed among the nations.

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Paul even says in Galatians three 28, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free.

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There's neither male nor female for you all are one in Christ. Whereas the hill called

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Babel divided everyone into various ethnicities in Christ and his gospel.

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All the ethnicities come back together in unity as one race under God. Paul says that Jesus Christ's death, burial and resurrection brought healing to the ethnic divides.

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That means that God shows no ethnic partiality Romans two 11. It means that anyone who receives

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Jesus is made acceptable to God, no matter what the color of their skin acts, 10, 34 through 35.

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It means that redemption is going to bring all people together into one unified and holy family Romans 10, 12.

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We are not healed by Jesus to remain separated. We are not healed by Jesus to remain angry at one another.

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We are healed to come back together and only the gospel can make that happen.

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How Romans 116 gives us the answer quoted earlier. Paul literally says that the gospel is the power of God.

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No other message can make that claim. Cultural Marxism, critical race theory, black lives matter who do nothing but add more hatred and heat to the discussion.

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They can't cure what only the gospel can cure. And that great power of the gospel has not come to produce more division.

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Like all of the secular counterparts on the contrary, it has come to knock down the dividing wall between the various ethnicities and between different socioeconomic statuses and between different male, female genders, white and black, and any other sinful distinction that the world clings on to.

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However deeply our sin has divided us, the gospel of Jesus unites us. That is if we believe in Jesus Christ.

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If we will turn from our wicked sins, if we will turn from our propensity to hate or cling to our grievances or sinful attitude of casting judgments upon particular people, narrow ways of excluding some and celebrating others, thinking highly of those that look and talk like me and thinking lowly of those who do not look and talk like me.

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If we will repent of that, if we will turn to him for forgiveness, mercy, grace, and redemption, if we will turn to him like that, we will experience healing.

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He will heal us individually, and he will unite us into one body, one people under one gospel and only the gospel can do this.

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Let's go now to part four, the finale of the story. Part four, consummation, where every tribe, tongue, and people is worshiping around the throne of God together.

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Until the Lord Jesus Christ returns, the church has been called to live out our gospel redemption together.

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Ethnocentrism has no place inside our ranks. As we are perfectly united in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter what color, culture, or country we hail from, we serve a more excellent

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King who has brought us into his manifold worldwide kingdom under the power of Jesus Christ by the

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Holy Spirit. We now see all people from all strata, from all different societal places, we see them all as being created in the image of God, and we must remain diligent in opposing any instance of division that exists within Christ's church.

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He did not die to leave us divided. He did not die so that we could go on believing the division that the world is spitting.

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No, he died to make us whole. We are the ones who have the answer to the problem of race and ethnicity, not them.

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And as we, the people of God, wait on the Lord Jesus Christ to return, we must recognize that the sinful nature of our nations is sick.

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Our leaders are wicked people who are not led by the Holy Spirit of God. They think in secular ways and in secular categories that are doing more harm to the situation than good.

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The heat in this country over racism, over supposed racism, over real ethnocentrism, the heat in this country has gone up so that now any enemy, any thought, anything that you don't like is now racism.

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That sort of divisiveness is not helping. And it's because we've let the children be the ones who are in power instead of as adults, as Christians who are mature in Christ, standing up and saying, enough.

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Instead of withdrawing and pulling the gospel from culture, which has allowed them to act like wild beasts, we should engage with culture.

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We should bring the gospel to bear on culture because if they don't see the hope that's in the gospel, they will not have hope and they will be more divided than ever.

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Listen, we cannot adopt their categories. We cannot embrace their godless theories.

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Instead, let us confidently and courageously decry woke -ism, call down critical race theory for what it is, abhor intersectionality and all of the divisiveness that that brings, and to rebuke any other godless ideology that contradicts scripture and cannot actually heal.

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Let us be the ones who stand up and share the gospel. Let us tell the world the hope that we have in Jesus Christ.

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Let us give the clarion call to the nations to unite under the banner of Jesus Christ.

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Because when his gospel truly comes, when his redemption comes to a people, racism, ethnocentrism, and every other division ends, finally, let us remember that full redemption is going to come soon.

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One day, all of the elect saints, whether they're black, white, or some shade of brown, is going to gather around the throne of God and worship him in perfect unity.

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We will look at all of the glorious displays of color and together with one unified voice, we will sing the praises of our great

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God and King. On that day, the light, the dark, the short, the tall, the male, the female, the

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Jew, the Greek, and any other distinction, beautiful humans will worship him forever in spirit and in truth.

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There will be no more division. There will be no more curse. That is our hope.

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And only the gospel can give it. Thank you so much again for listening to the broadcast.

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It is my joy and my pleasure to bring these episodes to you every single week. And the best thing that you can do to help us get this message out to a culture that's confused, to Christians that need to be encouraged, and so that we can share the only hope, the only thing that can actually heal our world, the greatest thing you can do is hit the like button, subscribe, and share this with as many people as you can.

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