The Meaning Of Life (Part 5)

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Our Father in heaven, what a delight it is to think that you are in heaven controlling all things, sovereignly ordaining and orchestrating everything that happens.
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Lord, all of our concerns, all of our worries, ultimately are just sinful.
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We need to just trust you. Lord, we thank you that you are a sovereign God, and more than that, that you are loving and that you have sovereignly set your affection upon us, that you love us, that you care for us, that in each of our lives,
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Lord, you do exactly what is best for us. Father, as we're here this morning, would you bless each one, would you bless our time and just guide us as we look to your word, as we apply your word to real life situations.
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Father, we pray for these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, you'll have to pardon me if at some point
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I just burst into song. I feel like I'm in training to perform on Broadway.
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We've been with the grandkids. It seems like I'm singing Beauty and the Beast like every day.
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So there's no telling when that will happen. I don't know about anybody else in the room.
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Obviously, I don't know about anybody else in the room. But for me, I grew up in a very suburban, middle class, you know, it was a baby boom kind of white bread area.
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And I want to talk a little bit about race relations or ethnic relations this morning.
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You know, I was thinking about it this week, and it just occurred to me that really I didn't, I mean, there was, let's see.
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I mean, as I think in my head, I can almost name the few ethnic kids that I knew.
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But it never seemed like any big deal, because we all just ran around and we did all these things together and nobody ever thought about it or said anything about it.
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And it wasn't really until I got in the Army where I took any note of it at all, because now there's this concentration of guys.
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We're living together every day, and some of us are white, and some of us are black, and some of us are Hispanic. And it was funny how, you know, people tend to click up.
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Initially, I think mostly maybe by a little bit by race and by bunk and stuff like that.
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But over time, we just kind of mixed all up together. But it's funny because some of the guys that you get to know the best because you're around them all the time and you like the best, it didn't really matter, it didn't matter what they looked like.
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It mattered what they did and what they said. And, you know, I feel like that kind of cauldron is the ultimate sort of evidence of what
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Martin Luther King said, you know, judging somebody by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
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Because you get to know some people that are reprehensible, and it really has nothing to do with the color of their skin.
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And then you get to know some people that are really nice, and it has nothing to do with the color of their skin either. But I want you to turn to Galatians 3, see what the
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Bible says about it. I mean, there's so much said about race. And, again, I want to stress this idea, and we'll talk about it in more detail.
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There's really no such thing as race per se. There's one human race. There are a lot of ethnicities.
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But the common language is race. You know, what race are you?
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It's not really right, but that's how it's commonly said. Well, let's look at Galatians 3 and read verses 26 to 29.
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And would somebody read that, please? Galatians 3, 26 to 29. Please don't everybody raise your hand at once.
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Okay, Mark. Okay, but maybe what are the key words in this little passage here?
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I think it's in Christ. Because that's kind of the condition, right?
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In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free.
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There is no male or female, for you are all one. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. You're all equal in Christ Jesus.
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But in our society today, there's a way of looking at things where somebody is, and this has been going on for centuries, probably millennia.
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Somebody is greater because of their ethnicity or because of their gender, and someone is lesser.
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That's just the way people look at things. Listen to what Hendrickson says. He says, in Paul's day, fratricidal class distinctions were the order of the day.
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What does he mean? He just says, you know, it's that whole order of society thing.
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Just as they are and still in many quarters. He says, for the present purpose, it is necessary only to notice that the
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Jews drew a sharp line of separation between themselves and the swarms or hordes, that's the
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Greek word goyim, of outsiders, heathen nations in contrast to Israel.
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Often such heathen were simply called dogs. Dogs. We are the
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Jews, and if you're not a Jew, then you are a dog. And, you know, not my cute little latte, fluffy and nice and everything like that.
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Dogs in this world were thought of as what they were back then, which was scavengers.
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They ran around eating trash and stuff like that. People didn't have dogs typically in their homes.
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He goes on to say, even proselytes, in other words, if you converted to Judaism, you weren't really a
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Jew, and why weren't you really a Jew? Even though you would go and you would worship and everything like that, why weren't you really a
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Jew? Because you weren't born a Jew. You didn't have the right genetics.
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You know, you wouldn't be one of the Jews who would say to Jesus, we are sons of Abraham. Because you weren't a son of Abraham.
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You were an adopted son of Abraham, but you were genetically inferior. Just sort of reminds me.
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How many of you are familiar? There is, I'll just ask, this will seemingly be a political question.
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How many of you know how many Muslims there are in the Congress of the
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United States? Six, eight, ten?
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I think, as far as I know, there is one. And his name is
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Keith Ellison. But they will call him the only Muslim in Congress, but he is not really a Muslim. He belongs to a religion called the
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Nation of Islam. Anybody familiar with the Nation of Islam? Malcolm X.
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And you know, it's funny, I saw years ago, I saw this biography of Malcolm X, and a funny thing happens to him when he actually does the
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Hajj, that is the commanded pilgrimage to Mecca.
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And he goes to Mecca and he finds out that, you know, there are people of all these different ethnicities that are worshiping the same false god that he does.
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And it transforms his thinking. Why? Because the Nation of Islam says that the supreme race, as it were, are
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Africans, blacks. And that Jews were actually a mixture of monkeys and mankind, done by this,
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I mean, they have a really bizarre religion. They get far off from the, even the
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Koran. So when people say the Nation of Islam is, you know, the people who follow that are Muslims, I go, well, not really.
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It's really a bizarre and a very racially driven religion. But the point of what
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I'm saying there is just to understand this, that there are groups out there, even today, that profess a racial superiority.
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Sure, there are white supremacists, but there are also black supremacists. There's just about every kind of supremacist.
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There are people, I used to hear, you know, they talk about the, out west, there are people who talk about the,
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I'll probably say it wrong, the reconquista, the reconquering of the western
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United States. You know, in fact, I once had an inmate in Spanish.
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He yelled out from his dorm, you know, California belongs to Mexico. He said that in Spanish. And I said in English, if you want it, send your army up here and take it back.
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But there's a lot of ethnicity. In fact, just talking about in jail,
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I won't really recommend any movies, but if you see a movie about jails, or if you ever visited a jail, there's one thing you need to understand is that those things are very, jails are very, they're inherently prejudiced.
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It's not the system that forces it, it's the inmates. And what they do is they separate along racial lines.
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I'll just give you one more example and then I'll move on. But, you know, we had these riots, massive riots in the jails, where basically as soon as one dorm stopped fighting, another one would start fighting.
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And we were running in our ERT gear back and forth. And I mean,
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I had a suggestion for how to stop it. I won't mention what it was. I mean, I had a couple. One of them was probably not acceptable.
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But what they wound up doing was segregating the inmates by race to stop the rioting because it was all racially motivated.
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To stop the rioting, they separated these guys by race, and so all the whites were in one dorm.
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And I remember coming in and just saying, this is a bad idea, this is not going to go well. And what do you suppose happened?
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It took about two or three days, and we started having the white guys getting beat up by the other white guys.
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And I'm just like, it's Lord of the Flies, right? Somebody has to be over somebody else.
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And that's just the nature of unredeemed mankind. I'm better than you, therefore
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I deserve what you have, and I'm going to take it by force. That's just the way the world is.
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That is sinful man. That is how sinful man thinks. And so we have this genetic idea that the
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Jews who were not even, or who were proselytized into the faith were not the same as the others.
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But he says, Hendrickson goes on to say, it seems that the Judaizers of Paul's day had not broken away from this feeling, and that's what
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Galatians is talking about, the idea that we're going to add the
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Old Testament law. And Paul was trying to put a stop to that, to Christianity. And he said the
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Judaizers, that is those who wanted to live by the law, had not broken away from that feeling of disdain for non -Jews.
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And he goes on to say Gentiles too were often guilty of similar snobbery. They looked down upon the Jews, much as the latter looked down upon them.
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And that's just, there are all kinds of ethnic troubles throughout the world. Why is that?
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Because people always presume that the different is what? If somebody's different than you, they must be less.
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But that's not true in Christ, and really it's not true in God's eyes. Why? Because if we go back to the basic idea of this, every single person has the breath of life.
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Every single person has the image of God. Excuse me. And every single person is ultimately a soul who will stand before a thrice holy
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God and one day have to answer for what they've done with the Lord Jesus. Sorry about that.
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Now, Henrickson goes on, he says, As to their attitude towards slaves, they cannot be far removed from that of Aristotle.
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Aristotle, one of the most brilliant men in history, brilliant philosopher, listen to what he said about slaves.
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He called them an animated implement. What do you mean by that?
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What is an animated implement? A tool that moves.
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Not a human being, not an image -bearer of God, but just a breathing shovel, right?
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Just a pickaxe that can move on its own. Nothing else. And again, it's that dehumanizing sense.
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I am superior to someone else, and therefore they are nothing. With regard to women,
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Josephus wrote, he said the woman, speaking of women in general, so says the law, is inferior in all things to man.
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That's just kind of old -world thinking. And again, someone's different, therefore they must be less.
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They must be inferior. But what Paul's writing is that in Christ, all these racial, social, even sexual differences mean nothing.
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Everybody is equal in value in terms of being in Christ. I mean,
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Christianity sounds like the very embodiment of the Declaration of Independence, right? All men are created equal and endowed by their
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Creator with, well, a spirit, with the breath of life, with the image of God.
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But moving on, again, as I've said, there's only one race, the human race.
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I mean, God did not create... Now, here's the foolishness of Nation of Islam. I don't presume to know, frankly, what color
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Adam and Eve were. I have no idea. But I think probably I would guess that if you go into any given culture and you read
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Genesis 1, that each and every person sitting there is going to think what? That Adam and Eve look like me, right?
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Not me, but the person who's listening or who's reading. I'm pretty sure it looked like Steve.
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Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're in Japan and you're reading this, you just go, you know,
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Adam is Japanese. And if you're reading in Europe, he probably is
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European or whatever. And we have absolutely no idea. Let's turn to Genesis 11, a familiar account, the
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Tower of Babel. I read this, a couple messages from MacArthur, where he preached on this, and I have some excerpts there.
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But let's read Genesis 11, verses 1 to 9.
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And we see, really, we're going to see the origin of some of these things. Verses 1 to 9, who would read that?
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Go ahead, Gary. We still use that word, right? I mean, it's transposed, the letters are transposed.
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But if you say, stop your babbling, what do you mean to somebody? Stop building a tower? Stop building that tower.
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What does it mean? It just means stop your nonsensical speech, because I hear you and it means nothing to me.
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And so what these people all hear is their languages all being changed, and they hear what is
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Babel. But let's just go back here to the beginning of this. Genesis 11, what are we talking about here?
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What's the context of what's happened here recently? In the not too distant,
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I mean, like, for example, if I said, you know, to give you an idea of what I mean by recently, I mean within the last 100 or 200 years before this, what's happened in this time frame?
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The flood, right? So we're starting with a few people,
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Noah and his wife, sons, eight people, animals.
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Then what happens after that? What does the Lord say at the end of the flood when they get out of the ark?
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Be fruitful and multiply. That's not exactly, I think the idea was that they were going to, you know, possess the earth that they were supposed to spread out, and instead they kind of collect here.
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But let's listen to what MacArthur says. He says in these nine verses we're going to find that we have the only true record of the origin of nations and the origin of languages.
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Because what does it say there? That the whole earth had one language and the same words. Well, that would make sense.
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We're talking about, as he'll say here in a little bit, he says probably about 100 years after the flood.
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So there's a relatively small number of people. I mean, it's greater than what we think it might be because they just have a lot of kids.
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They're fruitful. They multiply and all that. But they're still concentrated in here, and they still have one language, and they're still in one concentration.
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In fact, it says right there they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there.
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They just stayed there. Well, that's not exactly what God wanted. And he says that all these nations and languages came into existence by a single act of God.
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And we are very much aware of the fact that the world in which we live in believes in evolution. In fact, he goes on to point out that they believe in evolution of the universe, biological life, man, language.
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They even believe in the evolution of religion. How do they think religion evolved?
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From animism, basically the worship of animals or kind of almost anything, to polytheism, and then ultimately to monotheism.
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Ignoring the Bible, because the Bible always has one God, they say that there's this evolution that takes place.
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But anyway, the world believes in evolution, but the Bible doesn't ever say that. In fact, it gives, rather than the evolution of language, here we have an exact understanding of what happens.
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MacArthur says, These nations and languages essentially are established by God, by one divine act.
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And I like what he says here. Sociologists and anthropologists and language theorists imagine a slow, long evolutionary process, socializing man, getting them into tribes and whatnot, and somehow evolving from grunts and chatter and chirps into languages.
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I just like that. And it gradually turns into nouns and verbs, and we start conjugating verbs.
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Sure, that's what happened. And he says we know better from the word of God.
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He says now this is very simple and straightforward, a very simple and straightforward explanation of how nations developed all over the world and how languages developed.
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He says, It is in a way a profound tragedy. As humanity is separated and splintered and scattered from each other, after they already had rebelled against God.
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And he notes, as I said earlier, that it's likely that the Tower of Babel happened no more than 100 years after the flood.
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He says you'll notice that in verse 4 it says, Let us build a tower whose top.
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Now what it means, whose top connects to heaven, he says there's no other way to understand this than that it was their supposed connection to the gods, which indicates that they'd already begun to worship false gods.
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In other words, this idea of building a tower, I don't know where I heard this. Maybe it was a
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Sunday school when I was a kid in the Mormon church, but the idea was that they were going to build their own way up to heaven and well, maybe.
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But what MacArthur is saying here is that this really was an indication, this was like a worship center to these false gods that they were already worshiping.
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James Montgomery Boyce said that this was really where the whole Zodiac thing comes from, the 12 signs of the
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Zodiac, from this very kind of gathering together. What this tower was, was a ziggurat.
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That's a very common word and a very common feature of the ancient world. But in theory, it's a ladder by which the gods could descend and ascend, making connection with men.
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Now, it says here back in Genesis 11 that they wanted a name.
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They wanted a name. Their social goal was a city. Their religious goal was a tower.
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Their psychological goal was a name, MacArthur says. He says, let us make a name for ourselves.
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What was that? Essentially, because they were not worshiping
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God, they wanted to establish something that would elevate them, that would make them important, that would build,
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I guess you could say, their self -esteem. He says, really, it's a
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Romans 1 situation. Let's take God off his throne. Let's elevate ourselves. And he notes that they were so powerful, so consolidated, instead of obeying
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God and spreading themselves out over all the earth, they were going to just make a mark for themselves right there, and they were going to stay there.
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MacArthur says, guess what? He says, why would they say that? Why would they even think that was going to happen?
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Because it was a command from God in Genesis 9 -1, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
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I don't know how many times Noah preached that, he says. He says,
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Noah was a preacher of righteousness, not only before but certainly after the flood. How many times had Noah said,
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I love this, Pastor Noah, what's your text this morning? My text is Genesis 9 -1, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
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Right? Just over and over again. What are you preaching this morning? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Can we hear something else?
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Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. MacArthur says, get out of here, folks.
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Start spreading around the globe. But they weren't doing it. Instead, their attitude was, we're here, we're strong, and we're staying.
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We're going to build a strong social base. We've got a strong religious base. We're going to boost up our self -esteem.
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MacArthur knows this is defiance against God. There's no other explanation for it. Their rebellion is motivated by the fact that they know what
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God wants, and they refuse to do it. So they're making up this religion that probably includes the
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Zodiac. They're sectioning off the stars that they could see. They're creating gods out of the sections of the sky.
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And they're living by this mystical movement of the stars and trying to determine their own destinies.
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And he says, this is a devilish, satanic religion. Then he says, don't ever get near any of that astrology.
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And I'm like, okay. Now he notes, after God confused their languages, after he mixed them all up, he says he did something else in verse 8.
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He scattered them abroad from over the face of the earth, the whole earth.
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And he says, now how did he do that? I don't know. But he did that. It doesn't say how he did it.
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MacArthur says, well, why am I even bringing it up? Because somebody will come up to me and say, well, how did he spread them out over the whole earth? And his answer is,
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I don't know. He did that. It was a miraculous event, and he just did it.
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So what about, as we look around the world, the different racial groups? Well, what happens if you're in a small group of people and you keep intermarrying?
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What happens genetically to those people? What's that?
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Well, they're all messed up. Okay, Charlie. You get the loss of information in the genome, or a more positive way to say that is maybe some of the information is emphasized, right?
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I mean, in other words, genetic traits are lost, true, but the ones that are there just kind of grow more and more defined, more and more definite.
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So MacArthur argues, and I think there's reason to think this is right, if there's a certain area of the world that is a certain group that has a tendency towards an
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Asian appearance, and they intermarry over and over and over again, those genetic traits are emphasized over time.
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And he says that's where you get your ethnic groups. So I don't know. I'm no geneticist, but I think there's a certain amount of logic in that.
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But certainly you know this, that those groups, those language groups, now are going to be more closely knit, because first of all, there's not going to be anybody, if everybody was gathered together at Babel, which by the way, another note he said at one point was, basically you can trace every false religion and its origins back to Babel, which
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I thought was pretty cool. But anyway, if everybody's focused in this little area, Shinar, Babel, whatever you want to call it, and then
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God spreads them out over all the earth, well, we know there weren't that many people. How many people there were, we don't know.
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I mean, you could probably do the math and figure out if every woman had X number of kids, and there's no kind of birth control.
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That was the word I was looking for. And then they have kids, etc., etc.,
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etc. How many people would there be after 100 years? I don't know. Fascinating study, go at home and do that yourself.
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But there wouldn't be billions. I don't know how many people there could be, but however many there were, just imagine now, instead of all being focused in one little area, now you take, say, a few thousand and you put them in Australia, or you put a few thousand on the island of Japan, or you put a few thousand here, there, and everywhere.
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Well, what's going to happen? There's nobody else around. So what do they do? For a long period of time, they're just going to be, you know, in their little locale, intermarrying, and then gradually spreading out, and we would see eventually what we see, which is a long time in between, you know, contacts, or significant contacts between people groups.
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But we would also see those languages kind of develop and become sort of an identity, and that's exactly what happens over time.
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So there was one race, the human race, and then
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God basically forces the creation of these different ethnic groups by spreading people out all over the world.
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Why? Because they're in rebellion against him. So then how should we view, you know, again,
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I just think, how should we view all this? Well, no one's any better. No one's any worse.
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We're all equally condemned. You know, there's a good way of thinking about it. Instead of thinking some group is better than another, well, we're all equally condemned.
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We're all equally in need of salvation. I'd like to have us turn to Philippians chapter 3.
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And I think this is key, and I wanted to just kind of address this too. You know, sometimes people get hung up about why isn't maybe the
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American flag more, you know, front and center in our worship or whatever. Why aren't we singing the
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Star -Spangled Banner or, you know, whatever, whatever hymns, you know, nationalistic kind of music.
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Let's look at Philippians 3, verses 17 to 21. Verse 20 is really key.
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But our citizenship is in heaven. And from it we await a
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Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body by the power that enables
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Him even to subject all things to Himself. And the thing
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I just want to emphasize for a moment before I move on a little bit is this, our citizenship is in heaven.
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Again, the idea of being in Christ, it represents a change. There should be a change in your thinking.
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It's not about being American. It's not about being Mexican or Japanese or German or fill in the nationality.
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Ultimately, if you're in Christ, there really is no other citizenship that is as important as that, certainly.
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I mean, if you want to say, well, I'm an American Christian, okay, be Mr. Hyphen. I don't care, but I think the key is this is not my home.
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The world is not my home. I have someplace else to go.
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And I don't think in heaven we're going to be rallying around the flag or that we're going to be sitting around going, okay, all you
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Americans over here, all you Lebanese over here, it's not going to be like that.
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In fact, I would argue that one of the almost, there's a truism, what?
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That the most segregated hour in the United States is Sunday, Sunday morning.
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I really wonder about, well, I don't wonder, churches that are based on ethnicity.
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You know, maybe it's understandable. A group of refugees come in from Syria. They form a church, a church in the
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United States. Well, I'd say it's understandable for a while. Why? Because nobody speaks English.
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But over time, wouldn't it seem reasonable that a right understanding of this passage and other passages would lead you to do what?
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Integrate, you know, spread out. Get into churches where everybody doesn't look like you and they don't all have the same ethnic background as you.
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Because that's really not, it's not material. We're here to worship Christ not as, you know, white
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Americans, Anglo -Saxon Protestants, but as Christians, as those who are redeemed.
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It doesn't matter where you're from. If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, we're all equal. We should all feel the same way.
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It should never be, it really bothers me when I hear people say that. It's only the most segregated hour in America because Christians don't think rightly.
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And then people who want to call themselves Christians really profane the name of Christ with their churches.
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If you're at a church just because of its ethnicity, you're sort of missing the point. Other comments or questions about that one?
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I mean, again, I think it's, you know, I actually preached at a Chinese church in L .A.
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And they had two services, one in Chinese and one in English. I, of course, preached the
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Chinese one. But I don't know why you people are laughing.
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But they had one service for the younger people who spoke English and they had another service for the older people who spoke
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Chinese. Well, it's somewhat understandable, right? I mean, I'm sure there were really some folks there who never learned how to speak
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English, but you would hope that over time that sort of church would cease to exist.
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It probably shouldn't exist. Or that it would absorb other people and eventually they would change their name because they'd look around and go, okay, we're not really all that Chinese anymore.
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But this whole idea of, you know, ethnic churches is really kind of an odd one if you view things through the
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Bible. Yes? Well, and that's possible, but I think, and I didn't excerpt,
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I couldn't do all of, I mean, because it was two sermons. But he says at one point, he goes, you know,
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I think he even put that idea out there. And he goes, but it makes the text itself makes it pretty plain that it was a miraculous work by God where he just goes, and he goes, now, how did he do that?
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I don't know, but it was just a work of God. You people, you know, kind of like me at the risk table, you know, just kind of my armies are moving from, my favorite one, you know, from Brazil to, what is that,
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West Africa. It makes no sense at all, but you can just, there's just kind of a land bridge there, and there you go.
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You know, that's what he said, and I'll just, I'll go with his word on it, that it's, the
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Hebrew makes it indicative of a miracle, but that's what he said. So, but yeah,
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I mean, we could look at it from a naturalistic standpoint and think they certainly would separate. Why?
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Because it would be, you know, he says over the short run, I think if, just recalling what he said, over the short run, certainly there would be some angst, you know, because people who've been able to communicate no longer would be able to, you know, so there would be a natural separation, and maybe there would even be the beginning of tension, and then
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God just ends all that by separating these people out, so there was no war. He just moves them out all over the place.
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You people aren't going to do what I said, which was cover the whole earth, so I'm going to do it for you. Okay, I like what
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O 'Brien says here when he's just talking about, you know, again, in Philippians 3 here, the idea that our citizenship is in heaven, and he talks about how we are, the verb means that we are eagerly awaiting, eagerly awaiting the
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Savior. So if we're thinking rightly, again, this whole idea of,
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I mean, here's something that drives me crazy. Well, getting away from O 'Brien for a minute.
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This whole idea, if you go to churches' websites and they say, what? That we are a diverse church, or that we value diversity.
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What should we make of that? Does it mean anything?
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Yeah, John. It probably means that, right? That they're, hey, we're just open.
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Anybody can come. You know, rainbow. It's the Rainbow Coalition. It's like a rainbow. Okay, I think that probably is, a lot of churches mean that, yeah?
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Gary? They might be diverse in ideas or doctrine, which, you know, again, if you're going to talk about what a church should be about, it should be about unity of mind, which would be kind of unity of doctrine too.
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But, yeah, I mean, it could mean that, because a lot of churches, you know, it's just, it's so harsh to say that somebody's right and somebody's wrong, regardless of what the
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Bible says, right? So, yeah, it could mean that. But I think a lot of times they're talking about, you know, ethnic diversity.
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And I think, you know, if you're going to say we are a diverse church, well, if you are a diverse church, guess who made you that way?
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You know, if you're actually a church, which is to say there are many things that would call themselves a church, many people who call themselves
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Christians. It doesn't mean that they are. Many places that would call themselves churches that are nothing more than, you know, a club where people get together on Sunday and talk about the good things that they've done during the week and how wonderful they are.
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That's not a church. But a diverse church is diverse because Jesus Christ, who is building his church, has determined that different people from different ethnic backgrounds are going to come together in a church.
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And that's fine. But this idea of diversity and that being an end of itself, that's wrong.
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If a church is diverse, it should be because God did it, not because of anything we've done by design.
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I mean, how, you know, I mean, it would get a little foolish. You know what?
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We've got too many people of European background here, so we're going to start recruiting or, you know, kicking out some of you folks, and we're going to be recruiting people who look, you know, different.
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We need more people from the subcontinent, or we need more people from Asia here, or we need more people from this side or the other thing.
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We want exactly the people that God designs to be here. You know,
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I mean, ultimately, what would be the best thing? The best thing would be for a church to reflect the area in which the church exists.
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Right? So if you're close to Worcester, then you would expect the church to look more like Worcester does.
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And over time, Lord willing, that'll happen. But that should be the, you know, there's no goal.
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We don't, we're not going to just, we'll just, we need to stop here anyway.
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But I just remember, this comes to mind, because I was just thinking about evangelizing specific people groups.
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We're only going to talk to people of a certain group or whatnot. So a guy came into a seminary chapel, and he was from,
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I think, Friends of Israel or something like that. And his text was, you know, that Romans 1, you know, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the
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Jew first, and then to the
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Gentiles. So he said, you know, basically our first obligation was to go and evangelize Jews. So besides bad exegesis and everything else,
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I just thought, okay, now just think about that. So, you know, in our evangelistic meetings, we need to sit down and we need to strategize, how do we reach the
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Jews? That's our priority. Now, I'm happy when a Jew gets saved.
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I'm happy when, you know, anybody of any ethnicity. We don't even see that kind of thinking or language anywhere in the
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Scripture. It's been well in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, all that kind of talk is condemned.
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The goal is to save souls, to see people saved. Red, yellow, black, white, brown, it doesn't matter.
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We want them all to hear about the Lord Jesus Christ. We want them all to be convicted of their sin, to flee to the cross.
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That's what we want. And again, just in closing here, if we're thinking rightly, it doesn't matter what the person looks like that we're talking to, whether we're on the bus, we're at school, we're at work.
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It doesn't matter if they're male or female. It doesn't matter what their religious background is. There is one substantive, definitive need that every single person has, and that need is forgiveness of sins.
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And that's only available in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's His perfect life.
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It's His place in exchange for our sinful life.
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It's His substitutionary death. And it's His resurrection. And we need to preach Christ in Him crucified to everyone.
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That's the essence of how we should view racial relations, right?
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My relationship to everybody of every race is, you're a sinner in need of a
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Savior. That's my relationship. I am the missionary to you. Whatever your ethnicity is, you need to hear about Christ in Him crucified.
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Can I tell you how to be forgiven of your sins? That is our charge. That is racial reconciliation.
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It doesn't matter about that. What matters is reconciliation between God the Father. Anyway, we'll talk more next week.
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Or no, we won't, because next week is Easter Sunday, and next week we'll all be feeding. I think that's what happens on Easter Sunday.
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All right, well, let's close in prayer. Father, Lord, teach us to think rightly about our fellow men and women, human beings, every man, woman, and child in need of Jesus Christ.
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Lord, give us that burden. Help us understand that it doesn't matter how the world talks about race, how the world talks about ethnicity, how the world talks about nationality.
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What does Your Word say? It makes it very clear that each and every person here is born into a bondage of sin, and they need to be delivered.
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They need to know the Deliverer. Lord, make us a people who view others not by their outward appearance but by their need for Jesus Christ.
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Just make us a people that are quick to say the name Jesus, to preach
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His good news, that people of all colors, of all nationalities, of all origins might come to believe in the