Daily Devotional – July 13, 2020

Weather, Worship, and a Musical About Prejudice

Pleasant day yesterday, enjoyed the beautiful weather, and after the pretty hot week we had last week, a nice storm came through Saturday night to bring those cooler temps, so it was a good day weather-wise, but I also hope you had a good Lord's Day, were able to meet with God's people.

If you couldn't attend church in the building, I hope you at least were able to take in God's Word from the, you know, a live stream or some form of something of that nature. Well, have you heard of the musical South Pacific?

I mean, I know I'm dating myself here, it was actually one of my dad's favorite musicals of all time, but there's a song in South Pacific that struck me yesterday as I was reviewing for Sunday Evening's Message, which had to do with slavery and what slavery had to, you know, what the Scripture has to say about slavery, but there's a song in South Pacific, it's entitled, You've Got to be Carefully Taught, and if you haven't heard it, here are the lyrics.

It says, you've got to be taught to hate and fear, you've got to be taught from year to year, it's got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you've got to be carefully taught, you've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a different shade, you've got to be carefully taught, you've got to be taught before it's too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you've got to be carefully taught.

The Bible’s Approach to Slavery and Social Reform

I thought about that song in relationship to the whole subject of slavery and what the Bible has to say about it, where slavery shows up in the Scriptures, and we discussed that last night in the Sunday Evening Service, and you can actually see a recording of that on the church website, but in that study, one of the things we pointed out is that the Bible acknowledges the existence of slavery and never sets out to overthrow the institution.

So the Bible is not a manual for revolution, the Bible is not a manual for the followers of God and the followers of Christ to rise up against their government and try to overthrow government-mandated institutions of that nature, but what the Bible does, especially in the subject of slavery, is it seeks to undermine slavery, to kind of eat away at the core problems of slavery, and there are several ways it does it, and we discussed some of these last night.

I just want to share a few of these thoughts with you this afternoon, but one of the ways it does it is how Paul tells believers who are either slaves themselves or masters, but he tells them how they are to relate to one another.

So in Ephesians chapter 6, he tells servants, bond servants, and there can be a variety of types of slaves in the first century. There were slaves who were indentured servants. There were slaves who were bought on a slave market, and they could be on that slave market for a variety of reasons.

So there were actually different categories of slaves, but Paul doesn't distinguish between them. He just addresses bond servants or slaves, and he tells them to obey their masters and to do so with a good attitude and to do so not as men-pleasers, not with eye service, but to serve their masters as if they're serving Christ.

But on the other hand, he tells the masters to treat their servants, their bond servants, with dignity, with respect, to treat them as they would want to be treated. So in essence, what Paul is doing is he's undermining the type of slave-master relationship that could be fairly common, where the master is kind of an authoritative, authoritarian, cruel, treating the servant as if he's some kind of a piece of property, just chattel, as subhuman or something of that nature.

He says, no, you can't treat him that way. You can't treat him that way. Now, underlying that exhortation in Ephesians 6 is what Paul also says in Galatians chapter 3, where he says, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, so ethnic differences don't matter.

There is neither bond nor free, so in Christ there is an erasure of the distinctions that society puts upon people as far as their role in the economy. He says, no, in Christ you are all one. You are one in Christ.

One Human Race in Acts 17

And if you think about it, that reinforces what Paul also said when he spoke on Mars Hill in Athens, and he's speaking to a bunch of philosophers, and he's addressing the...he's talking about this one idol that he came across, and remember Athens was a pantheon of idols, of gods, and all these different idols are set up, and these statues to the different idols, but there was one set up to the unknown God.

So Paul starts talking about that unknown God. We read about it in Acts chapter 17, and he speaks of the one true God who is the creator of everything. He created the earth and everything in it, and then he says this.

He says that this God, the creator of all things, made of one blood all men. He made of one blood all men. So what Paul is getting at there is that there isn't a multiplicity of races. There's one race.

It's the human race. I encouraged the people last night, if somebody asks you, you know, what race are you? You tell them human. Human. And so there's one race, and God made us one race. Now, if God made us one race, then it is absolutely, it is absolutely wrong, morally, spiritually, biblically wrong, to look at a person of another color, of another skin color, or whose eyes are shaped a little differently, and treat them as if they are somehow inferior, to not treat them with love.

Now, this song that was written for the South Pacific musical many years ago, really addressed the problem of society where children grow up in a home where they learn to distrust somebody of another color, or somebody whose eyes are shaped differently.

And I don't know if you know anything about that song or about that musical, but there's a military officer who falls in love with, you know, an American military officer, white Caucasian guy, who falls in love with a South Pacific woman, so of a Samoan kind of ethnic background.

And, you know, this is taboo. This was taboo, and so hence that song. You've got to be taught to hate a person of another color, a person of another skin, eyes shaped in a different way, and so forth.

And you've got to be taught that from a very early age. Well, I pointed out last night is that the Bible undermines that notion, and teaches us instead to recognize there's one human race, and that people are to be loved simply because they're a person, they're a human being, they're a human being made in the image of God.

So Christian parents teach their children not to hate, but to love, and they teach them it doesn't matter what color their skin is, you love them because they're human beings. It doesn't matter the shape of their eye, you love them because they're human beings.

And this is the approach to the problem, the institutional problem of slavery that the Scripture that the Scripture enjoins. Treat each other with respect and with love, and the institution will crumble from within.

The Leaven of Love and the Christian Witness Against Racism

And, you know, Jesus, in one of Jesus' parables, he talked about how the kingdom of God is like this very thing. It's like leaven that a woman puts in her bunch of dough, and the leaven spreads throughout that batch of dough, and it causes the dough to rise, and she bakes her bread.

Well, the kingdom of God is like that leaven. And so the whole, you know, Paul's approach here to the problem of slavery, the issue of slavery, is like the same thing. It's like leaven. You introduce the leaven of love to the institutional problem of slavery, and by God's grace in time, that institution will be undermined from within.

And that's exactly what we see in history. The institution of slavery in Great Britain was undermined and destroyed by Christian principles, and same with the institution of slavery in America. So here we are in the 21st century, and it seems like the whole issue has been brought to the fore again.

But nevertheless, the biblical exhortation to Christians is to love fellow human beings simply because they are human beings made in the image of God. In reality, no, there is no true Christian who loves Christ, who loves God's word, who will indeed be a racist.

No matter what is being said out there in the public, no true Christian who loves Christ and who is following God's word will be looking down on somebody, will have a negative attitude towards somebody, just because of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes.

So if you're a believer in Christ, please do not fall prey to the rhetoric that we're hearing today that says, if you're a white believer in Christ, that says if you're white, you're a racist. No. If you're a follower of Christ and you love Christ, and you therefore love others just simply because they are fellow human beings, part of the human race, that is, you are not a racist.

You are a Christian. Be a Christian. Be a Christian in this crazy, mixed up, messed up culture in which we live. So let's pray and ask God to help us with that attitude. And so, our Father in heaven, we do thank you for the encouragement of your word to treat others with respect, with dignity, and with biblical love, regardless of skin color and eye shape.

Teach us that, and may we teach the next generation and the one after it to be truly Christian in our approach to others. This we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Well, Lord bless you and give you a good rest of this Monday, and I trust your work week gets off to a good start, and look forward to seeing you again very soon tomorrow at this time.