FROM EVERY TRIBE AND NATION

Date: Mon May 14 16:10:25 2007

We live in a day where shock jocks love to insult Jews, Christians, people of color, women, and seemingly everyone else. We live in a day where the Sunday morning church service is still the most segregated couple of hours in the lives of most whites, blacks, and Asians. Most people feel content that they havenít used a racial slur in the last twenty four hours or made a slip of the tongue which could be construed as a sign of deep evil lurking within.

The United Nations wants unity. The National Council of Churches want unity. Reconciliation groups and politicians talk unity. A while lot of effort has gone into it. Courses were started at colleges to make people more aware of diversity and the feelings of others. Yet, any visit to the internet or a stratified gathering will doubtless reveal the deep prejudices, attitudes, and hatred that lurk at or not far below the surface. Why have all these efforts failed? Why are students and adults still filled with rage and why do they still harbor such hate and feelings of separation?

I believe the answer is simple. God created Adam with the DNA to make all varieties of human beings in the world. Adam was doubtless a tan person and together with Eve produced people who were rather similar. They lived in a given area and it is likely that variations were relatively minor. There is no record of any wars whatsoever. Everyone spoke the same language. There was violence and great sin on the part of all ñ so great that judgment had to come. It was much the same way in the animal world. There were various kinds of animals, far less of a variety than is found today. They changed from being vegetarians to carnivores, as the fossil record from before the flood makes clear., Until the flood, when they all dispersed, the explosion of species likely never took place. Now, with natural selection and movement on a global scale, animals adapted and evolved in their environments.

(over)

Mankind sinned, and the world was judged with the global flood, with only eight persons preserved ñ Noah and his family. After the flood, within only a few generations in the days of Peleg, the peoples of the earth planned together to build a tower to reach the sky. God noted they only spoke one language, and that nothing would be impossible for them. Godís judgment on the unity the people strove for with no thought of God was the confusion of languages. They moved away from each other and genetics took its course with the different climes that existed on the earth after the flood. From then on, there were wars and enmity between people groups.

History is a sad record of all the hatred between people since that time. All attempts to unify the world have fallen short. The empires of the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and many others all failed. The League of Nations was a miserable failure. Many people today cannot think of even one major accomplishment of the United Nations. Why is this? God separated man because they sought to be united in their quest apart from him. God will not allow man to be reconciled again save for the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. The cross is the only solution to ethnic hatred and separation in this world.

You see, God wants to bring people together with the cross of Jesus in order to enable them to work together just like those in the days of Peleg. He wants us to build together ñ not to reach heaven as those foolish people did, but to show the world the power of God. It takes the power of God to come together. It takes supernatural anointing and supernatural power. All the sensitivity training, all the efforts toward non-offensive speech, all the speeches and all the seminars mean little without the Holy Spirit of God.

After Jesus rose from the dead, many people were gathered together at Jerusalem. There were Jews from every nation there. That is when the Holy Spirit fell. The Holy Spirit is the agent of change to bring TRUE unity. Not an uneasy ceasefire, not shallow relational improvements, but a move to bring people back together the way they were first created.

In these last days, God is uniting his church and showing his prophets that the Holy Spirit distributed gifts to men ñ different gifts to different ones. We cannot be a pure and spotless bride without the gifts that he has placed in Christians from different backgrounds. If we do not network and share with each other, we will miss the outworking of the gifts of those we have ignored and/or rejected and remain immature and incomplete. If you read Revelation, you will see how the glory of the nations comes before God and how the nations will be in heaven.

It is high time we lay aside differences of culture for the good of the Body. The DNA for the whole Body of Christ is in Jesus, and he has the gifts to bring every tribe and tongue into submission to God and into a glorious unity together. You see, Jesus had ALL the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Each of us has only one, two, or perhaps three or more. We need to work together and be formed into that glorious Bride by linking the gifts each of us has together to accomplish the full work of the ministry. The longer we wait to do it, the longer the Lord Jesus will wait to return for us. He has made it clear what he is coming for. How can we keep delaying being fully obedient to him in this and every area of life?