Are you familiar with the Bible’s narrative? Have you ever followed it all the way through from Genesis to Revelation?
If so, one thing you may have noticed is that as the narrative progresses, the community of people who make up God’s family grows ever wider and more inclusive.
Why is that? How does it work? And what does it mean for us today?
Let’s start at the start
In Genesis 3, God interacted directly with human beings for the first time. Adam and Eve were the first humans with whom God ever communicated and made himself known.
He gave them a simple choice: trust him and enjoy eternal life or go their own way and suffer eternal death. That’s the same choice God gives to every person he invites into his family.
After a long time had passed, with Adam and Eve presumably passing down God’s message through the generations, their world was full of people but only eight of them had any interest in accepting the invitation to be part of God’s family. They were Noah and his family.
They were the only ones to survive the flood and to begin repopulating the area. Again, many years passed, until their world was once again full of people who had no interest in God, apart from one.
His name was Abram (later Abraham) and to him God made a number of extremely important promises. These included the promise that Abram’s family would become innumerably large (at the time he and his wife didn’t have any children), and even more importantly the promise that one specific descendant of his would make it possible for everyone in the world to become sons and daughters of God.
Even at this incredibly early stage in the Bible narrative, we can see that God’s intention was always for everyone on earth to be invited into his family.
Law and covenant
Again a long time passed and those promises were made to Abraham’s son Isaac and grandson Jacob. It was Jacob’s sons who made up the twelve (or thirteen) tribes of Israel. They were given a very detailed set of commandments known as “the law”.
This law included the same choice God gave to Adam and Eve (and to all of us): choose life or choose death.
It also included strict instructions that the Israelites were to remain separate from the other nations and people groups around them. There was to be no intermarriage or cultural assimilation.
This meant that the Israelites were God’s family – the other nations were not. If anyone from these other nations wanted to be a part of God’s family, they could, but only as an individual, and only if they left their own people and culture behind in order to become members of the Israelite community. (Examples include Rahab, Ruth, Ittai and Uriah).
The New Testament
When we get to the New Testament, this sense of separation or “otherness” from the rest of the world had become a core part of the Jewish identity. They’d fought a very costly war to throw off the cultural invasions of the Seleucid Greeks and were now living under the domination of Rome.
They utterly refused to engage in the religious practices of the other nations. Typically the Romans expected their conquered populations to combine worship of the victorious Roman gods with their own local deities, but at this time they were prepared to give the Jews an exemption.
The surrounding nations were known as “Gentiles” and considered to be unclean and outside of God’s family. As before, if any of them wanted to join God’s people, they could do so only through becoming a proselyte to the Jewish faith, which included circumcision and following the Old Testament law; in essence becoming culturally and religiously Jewish.
Jesus and the apostles, however, turned that entirely on its head
While Jesus himself focussed his immediate attention on teaching the Jewish people, he often scandalised Jewish society with his willingness to include social outcasts – lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes – and even his willingness to be approached by non-Jews such as a Samaritan woman at a well or a Gentile woman begging for her daughter to be healed.
Remember the promise to Abraham – that one of his descendants would make it possible for everyone on earth to be included in God’s family. Jesus was that descendant.
Ironically the Jews, despite being intensely proud of their descent from Abraham, seemed to forget that promise and were deeply opposed to the early church’s willingness to embrace people from outside Jewish faith and culture.
All over the world
The book of Acts is where we really see God’s message spreading far and wide, showing that the death and resurrection of Jesus made it possible for anyone to be invited.
In Acts 2, the message was first preached to a huge crowd of Jews from all across the Roman empire who were visiting Jerusalem for a festival. Around 3000 of them were baptised as Christians and presumably took the gospel message with them when they went back home.
In Acts 8, the apostles took the gospel to Samaria. Interestingly, although the Samaritans were not Jews and were generally not welcomed by Jews, there doesn’t seem to have been any great uproar over including them in the church. This suggests that they occupied a sort of ‘middle ground’ in Jewish thinking: definitely not Jews but perhaps not fully Gentiles either.
The uproar came when, in Acts 10, the gospel was taken (at God’s explicit command) to a Gentile household – that of a Roman centurion no less, one of the occupying military commanders. Cornelius was baptised as a Christian along with his friends and family.
This caused major ructions within the church, which was still an almost entirely Jewish community. For some it was a step too far. To become Christians and enter God’s family, they argued, Gentiles would first have to become Jews via circumcision and keeping the Old Testament law.
God himself had to make it indisputably clear that this inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles into his family was his idea, by bestowing on them the gift of the Holy Spirit before they were baptised.
After this dispute was resolved, Acts then spends most of its time describing Paul’s journeys around the Roman empire, teaching the gospel to anyone who would listen, either Jew or Gentile.
He famously wrote to the churches in Galatia: So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Us, here and now
In the almost 2000 years since then, God’s message has spread across the entire globe. There isn’t a country in the world that hasn’t heard the gospel or doesn’t have Christians, although in many places the numbers are small and the believers face intense hostility and persecution for their faith.
Just as it was in Paul’s day, God’s message is open to anyone. Regardless of race or nationality or gender or sexuality or social class or job or political beliefs or existing religious convictions, anyone can hear the gospel and become a Christian.
However, everyone who wants to become a Christian must become fully converted.
What does that mean? It means that you begin a new life in which your primary source of personal identity is your faith in and loyalty to Jesus Christ. All of those other characteristics – race, gender, social class, etc – don’t disappear. They’re still part of who you are, but all of them need to take second place to your identity as a child of God, a member of his family.
The message of God through Jesus can unite people from around the world in a way that nothing else can. In the Western world today, it’s the decline of interest in the Christian faith that has led to our societies becoming increasingly fragmented along the lines of those other forms of identity: race, nationality and politics are three of the biggest ones. Many people pit white against black against Asian, or men against women, or straight against LGBT, or liberal against conservative.
The secular worldview that most Western leaders subscribe to teaches that people from all of these different backgrounds can be united by our common humanity or our common desire for peace and justice, but you only need to turn on the news in Britain to see that is NOT working. In the absence of Christianity there is nothing to unite even native Brits, let alone people coming to live here from other cultures.
Secularism has never been able to achieve this in the past and there’s no reason to think it will be able to do so now.
If you’re a Christian, or want to become one, it’s absolutely essential that you don’t get caught up into one of these fragmented groups. You must never see yourself as different from or better than other Christians because of what they look like or where they come from or what political opinions (if any) they hold. These things can still be an important part of your identity and theirs, but not the most important part – that can only be Jesus.
God’s arms are open to anyone from any background or place who wants to truly repent and trust in his promises. As Christians, our responsibility is to ensure that we don’t put anything in their way, and that our arms are open to them as well.
Nihilist to Christian 