Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work, I'm Keith Simon.

After I preached a sermon on race a few years ago, more than one person in our congregation said something to me to the effect of, look, you're a pastor.

Why are you talking about race? You should be preaching the

gospel. Race is a social issue. It's not a gospel issue. Now I don't think those

people who said that to me are unique or unusual. That's a common view inside of American

Christianity and I admit that for several years after coming to faith in college I

would have agreed with those sentiments. I probably said something very similar to

race as a social issue, not a gospel issue. Here's the problem with that. It's a

misreading of the Bible and the gospel. Racial reconciliation is a gospel issue. It's a biblical issue. It takes

great effort to read the Bible and miss how it addresses race. Just in the New Testament, race is at the center of the differences between Jews and

Samaritans that we read about in the Gospels.

It's behind the charges of unfair treatment, the widows of the Hellenistic Jews received at the hands of the

Hebrayic Jews in Act 6. It's the reason the early church was unsure Samaritans

could become Christians in Acts 18. It's the reason Peter wouldn't eat with the Gentiles in the book of Galatians.

It's the reason that some Jews wanted to kill Jesus by throwing him off a cliff in Luke

4. In Ephesians, too, Paul tells us that Jesus tears down the dividing wall between Jew and

Gentile.

You can make a good case that the entire book of Romans was written to address the rift between Jewish Christians and

Gentile Christians. Now is the difference between Jew and Samaritan or Jew Gentile

the exact same thing as we mean by race today.

Well, no, the way we define race today is a relatively modern construct.

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