That One Time in LA

The death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement officers, has drawn the attention of not only our nation, but the world. It ought to draw our attention as well. By every account I’ve seen or heard, this death was inexcusable. For many it represents more than an isolated incident; it represents a piece of a larger puzzle of injustice and suffering. There are realities and perceptions in our culture with which we must grapple, and this is part of my attempt to grapple with them. It isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject, so please reply and interact and help us all grow and sharpen our thinking. Or, if you want to skip my rambling and hear an excellent sermon on these issues, I encourage you to watch Voddie Baucham deliver his message entitled Irreconcilable Views of Reconciliation.[1]

It was starting to get dark. I was on a freeway in Los Angeles, and I was lost. This was not an uncommon experience for me at the time as a college student. I pulled off at an exit and made my way a few blocks to a gas station. Pulling in, I fumbled about for a map and begin to try to orient myself. Then I noticed the stares. A handful of men were spread about the gas station. They were neither employees nor customers, and they were all staring at me, and they were all black.

The staring made me feel uncomfortable. I felt like I had trespassed somewhere I wasn’t welcome. One of the nearer men approached my car and confirmed this suspicion. “You’re lost,” he declared. I rolled my window down and agreed. I was in the middle of asking directions when he cut me off and told me very simply that I needed to leave, and leave immediately. I was not safe, he explained, and he gestured to indicate the quickest route back to the freeway. “Go down a couple more exits, find a gas station there – then figure out how to get home,” he concluded. I thanked him for the warning and the directions and made my way back to the freeway.

It’s a small anecdote, but it’s stuck with me. It was my first real sense of cultural strife in my own country – the strange sensation of not being safe in a neighborhood simply because I was white. It felt wrong, and frustrating, and sad. For me, however, that experience could be left behind by driving two blocks and getting on a freeway. For many in our country, and right now we are particularly focused as a culture on the experience of black Americans, that sensation of being unwelcome or vaguely in danger is carried with them wherever they go. That too, is wrong, and frustrating, and sad.

Laying aside debates about all the contributing factors for a minute, it is simply a fact that many black men, women, and children in America rarely feel truly safe, rarely feel wholly accepted, rarely feel they are living in a culture of equity and justice. And from many of these fellow Americans we have been hearing the urgent plea – black lives matter. This phrase can be, and has been, politicized, weaponized, and abused, but let us, as Christians, listen to the authentic sincerity behind these words that cries out from the heart of so many around us right now.

Then, let us consider how the Lord Jesus would have us think this through and act in response.

Re-thinking Racism

There are so many facets that could be discussed, but I would like to comment briefly on the subject of race, how to affects our understanding of reconciliation, and how the answer to our dilemma lies solely in Jesus. On Sunday we looked at Jesus defending His relationship with the Father. In the course of doing so, He reminded the Jews, and us, of two very important realms of authority over which He alone is sovereign. Giving life, and rendering judgment.

John 5:21-24

21 “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes.
22 “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son,
23 so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.
24 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.

Life in Christ and the discretion to judge men are both critical to the tragedy playing out before us. To appreciate how, we need to move backwards in this conversation before we can move forwards.

What is racism? We all know it is bad, right? Well, yes, it is. Racism is evil and some people are really racist. In another sense, however, racism isn’t real. We should all agree, for example, that someone who would hate an elf just for being an elf is wrong. But, and this is an important clarification, elves do not exist. Similarly, I do not believe God would recognize the category of “race” as we use it today either. In other words, a racist – one who believes the innate superiority of one race over another – is wrong both morally and biologically. He is appealing to a category of human distinction that simply does not exist in actuality.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[2] defines race as being a “biological foundation” based on “Aristotelian essences or modern genes.” It then immediately tells us, that the entire “historical concept of race has faced substantial scientific and philosophical challenge with some thinkers denying both the logical coherence of the concept and the very existence of races.” As a theory, dividing humanity into races has proved hopelessly subjective. “The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of racial categories have provoked a widespread scholarly consensus that discrete or essentialist races are socially constructed, not biologically real.” Did you get that? Race, according to the general consensus of scientists today, does not actually describe any objective biological reality – just a label we arbitrarily assign. Racism, is sticky-note-ism. Different people, with different sticky-notes, with different labels written on those notes, are just running around sticking them on the foreheads of whoever they want. This race game hasn’t even been played for very long. Race as a category of thought showed up for the first time in the 1600s, and then it was largely undeveloped. The famous philosopher of the 1700s, David Hume, would pick up the thread and develop the idea of race even further. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin would view the work of David Hume as central to his development of the theory of evolution. In fact, the entire history of race theory, and the subsequent rise and then denouncement of racism, has unfolded on the field of battle between two competing views of creation. On one side, you have the monogenetic account – the account we read in Scripture. All men, everywhere, are the descendants of a common ancestor in Adam. We are, therefore of a single kind, a single race. There are not various races into which you can divide humanity. On the other side is the polygenetic view – that mankind arose in a series of geographically distant evolutions from various hominids. It is the polygenetic assumption that allows for the division of humanity, and it is also that assumption that has been used to justify asserting one “race” as superior to another. Racism, as an actual thing, relies on races being actual things.

God’s Word flatly denies this. God created man in His image, from the dust of the ground, and from this man have come all the peoples of the world. We are one in our humanity, and therefore one in our dignity.

Finding the Heart of Conflict

So then, if race is not a biblical concept, why is there so much tension between different groups of people? It is undeniable that conflict occurs. Even if race isn’t a true category, racism has an actual body count. Well, there are two dominant explanations for the problem we see around us. One option is materialistic – we have oppressors and oppressed because the system is broken. Institutions erected by the dominant group in a society are inherently oppressive to the sub-dominant groups in that society. This is the approach of Karl Marx, and it is the dominant narrative driving our current race struggles today. The only hope for peace is to have the oppressed rise up and destroy the institutions of the oppressors. And, having burned down the system that maintains inequality, move forward into a utopia of equality.

But that isn’t the diagnosis of Scripture. The Bible doesn’t condemn our structures as the source of bitter strife, it condemns our fallen natures. It is a spiritual problem. The problem can be summed up in a single word – sin. It can be further summarized in another biblical word – enmity. Enmity is a summary term for hostile feelings and actions towards another. Towards another…what? Well, sometimes, it is towards another person. But sometimes it is towards another group of persons. Not another race, but another nation, tribe, tongue, or people. A group that very well may look different than you, but more significantly, a group that talks differently than you, has different cultural customs and values than you, and perhaps has a history of strife with whatever group you happen to be a part of. Sinful people, and that’s all of us, are full of bitterness, pride, vainglory, greed, envy, strife, jealousy, anger, malice, and more. Such sin can manifest at the individual level, and it can also manifest at the community, state, national, or ethnic level. This is the battle we currently are facing. This is the legacy of conflict in America between black and white people. A history of sin and wickedness. Most profoundly in our country, it is the legacy of sins against the black people in our country.

So what do we do about it? The tragic answer is that there is nothing that can be done, by any of us, to fix this problem. Sin creates a debt, and we have debts that cannot be paid back with all the currency of the world, nor with all the systemic adjustments that governments can fashion, nor with all the apologies we can offer on bended knee. There may be temporary catharsis. We may come together in a circle and share a moment of liberated emotions, but the sin itself, the debt itself, remains. We feel it all around us. Two groups moving on, but not moving past the sin which has occurred. The level of emotional outburst that washes over our country again and again bears witness to the reality that true healing, true reconciliation, has not yet happened.

A True and Living Hope

All is not lost, however. There is a hope that remains, but it is a hope that is, and must be, found outside of our human striving. That hope is in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for sinners. His sacrifice is sufficient to make rebel men be at peace with a holy God. His sacrifice is also sufficient to make rebel men be at peace with one another.

We rejoice that we have been saved by grace, through faith, and this not of ourselves but as the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-10). But Paul wasn’t finished explaining the good news of what Jesus accomplished in our salvation when he got to verse 10. He kept going.

Ephesians 2:13-22

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
14 For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall,
15 by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace,
16 and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity.
17 AND HE CAME AND PREACHED PEACE TO YOU WHO WERE FAR AWAY, AND PEACE TO THOSE WHO WERE NEAR;
18 for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father.
19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household,
20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone,
21 in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord,
22 in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.

This is the answer, the only answer, to the heartache at the core of black and white communities in America. Here we have a cure, and not a bandage. When Jesus took our sins upon Himself on the cross, He enabled the canceling of all sin-incurred debts – between God and man, and between man and man. In Christ, we finally have the opportunity to be, all of us together, one new man. This new unity is not the mutual acceptance negotiated between different branches of the evolutionary tree, this new unity is the blessed peace enjoyed by those who have all left the race of the First Adam, and been made alive as new creatures in the race of the Second Adam. These are the only two “races” the Bible admits. All descendants of Adam have reproduced after his kind. We share a fundamental biological unity, and a fundamental spiritual unity. Sadly, both are subject to the curse of sin. Enter Christ. As the old hymns says, Jesus “bled for Adam’s helpless race: ‘Tis mercy all, immense and free; For O my God, it found out me.” In Him all things are become new, and the old has passed away. This is the salve for the nations. This is the Good News for what we see on the nightly news.

Come Christians, white or black or otherwise, see the great gashes sin has left across our country. Hear the voices of those sorrowing, and sorrow with them. But sorrow as Christians.

2 Corinthians 7:9-11

9 I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us.
10 For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.
11 For behold what earnestness this very thing, this godly sorrow, has produced in you: what vindication of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what avenging of wrong! In everything you demonstrated yourselves to be innocent in the matter.

A sorrow that cries out for institutional change only, or for cultural understanding only, or for racial equity only, or for anything other than repentance and forgiveness because of the finished work of Jesus Christ is a sorrow that leads only to more death. Turn on the news today and you will see parable after parable writ large proving this truth.

But for those of us who have bent the knee to Christ, we can live in true unity with one another. If our hearts harbored wickedness to another group of people, we can vindicate ourselves in righteous living. We can show true indignation against sin. We can demonstrate fear of God. We can model longing and zeal in our love and service to others. We can avenge the wrongs done. Finally, and this is the Gospel here, we can be innocent. Innocent because old sins are washed away. This is also the Good News for those who have been sinned against. Divine justice has not taken sinful suffering lightly, but rather has determined to vindicate the innocent and pour wrath on the guilty. For those outside of Christ, this wrath will be an eternal future reality. For those in Christ, the wrath of God is an infinite past reality. The Son has already born as a substitute the wrath for sin, and that opens up for us the opportunity and necessity of real forgiveness, and true reconciliation. Reconciliation is not simply the canceling of a debt, that’s forgiveness. Reconciliation is restoring the heart of a relationship.

This must be practical. As Christians we have a responsibility to love our neighbors. We have a responsibility, if we see injustice, biblical injustice, displayed towards any human being – we must step in with zeal to defend the wronged. We also have a responsibility to forgive as we have been forgiven. This is hard. Indeed, for man it is impossible. But in Christ, all things are possible.

Black Lives Matter

As human beings, we all share the image of God, but it is an image overshadowed by the Fall. In the first Adam, our common bond is our sinful nature – a nature born of division and leading endlessly to more division. In Christ, the Second Adam, a new race is constituted by covenant in the blood-soaked soil of total forgiveness. We no longer need to seek the means of reconciliation, we already possess it. We need only to live out that reconciliation, one with another, every day.

Today we affirm that black lives do, indeed, matter. In the community of the church this must not only be an axiom of our doctrine, but an experienced reality of our fellowship.

Galatians 3:26-29

26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.
27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.

[1] https://youtu.be/1qZdIseCkZc

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/