Racism, like so many things in today's upside down America, has come to mean the opposite of what it once meant. For instance, a first-grader in California was recently disciplined for writing "any lives matter" on a Black Lives Matter (BLM) drawing. Unlike yesterday's America, where it would have been considered racism to declare that only the lives of a particular race matter, in today's America, first-graders are castigated for declaring that all lives, not just those of a particular race, matter.
At the same time this first-grader in California was disciplined for being colorblind in her conviction of what lives matter, BLM protestors in Minneapolis, who were protesting the police shooting of a black gunman, were confronted by the mother targeted by the gunman. According to the mother, the black gunman fired bullets into her apartment endangering not only her life, but the lives of her two children. "He tried to kill me in front of my kids," Arabella Foss-Yarbrough yelled at the protestors, adding "This is not a George Floyd situation.”
Why must we say that only black lives matter? Why is any police shooting of a black man immediately condemned as a George Floyd situation? The answer to these questions, though politically incorrect and inciting the instant ire of today's woke culture, is that race has become the idol of many Americans. It is always first and foremost in their minds. It comes before everything else, including truth and justice. Regardless of everything else, these idolizers of race bow before their colored idols and insist that the overriding determining factor in everything should be skin pigmentation.
For instance, when it comes to many modern-day African Americans, if any member of their race has a run in with police or is convicted of a crime, the cry of racism is immediately heard. Police brutality spawned by bigotry and prejudiced jurisprudence administered by judges with racist motives are always to blame. The possibility of criminal actions by someone of their color is never considered a viable alternative. Instead, every police shooting and court ruling against people of color is immediately chalked up to our country’s irredeemable institutional racism.
Modern-day America has fallen prey to many terminal ills. One of them is “white guilt.” White guilt is the belief that white Americans must ever bear the inescapable guilt of our forefathers’ crimes against people of color. The past atrocities of slavery and segregation must now be perpetually paid for by white Americans, despite the fact that present-day white Americans had nothing to do with the perpetration of these crimes and that our country has long since repented of them and made great strides to rectify them. Still, nothing can resolve white Americans from our forefathers’ guilt nor cleanse our “racist” hearts of the evil of inbred “bigotry.”
All of this is predicated on the assumption of America’s irremediable institutional racism. Ironically, such an assumption is based on the classic definition of prejudice. The word prejudice is defined as a preconceived idea about someone on the basis of their race. Institutional racism is therefore a classic example of prejudice, since it is the preconceived idea that every white person is a racist because all white people are inherent racists. Granted, there may be no evidence of racism in a white person’s life and the white person may believe himself/herself to be free of prejudice, nevertheless, the evil of bigotry is ever crouching at the door of every Anglo heart.
I’ve always found it interesting that many of the racial demagogues in this country claim to be men of the cloth. The cloth in their case, however, is a cloak used by them to conceal their race baiting. They continuously attempt to incite one race against another in an attempt to promote themselves and to make personal profit. What makes their crime even more egregious is the fact that they perpetrate it under the guise of being ministers of Christ.
It seems to me if these race baiters were really Gospel preachers they would be preaching what the Gospel teaches. For instance, they would not be inciting resentfulness between the races, but instructing forgiveness between the races. They would teach that we should forgive one another as Christ has forgiven us (Matthew 6:12; Ephesians 4:32). Furthermore, they would teach that our forgiveness of those who have wronged us, not the guilt of those who have wronged us, should be perpetual (Matthew 18:21-22). How can these race baiters claim to preach a message that has redemption at its heart when all they ever do is incite resentfulness and sow discord among the races?
In the famous “Love Chapter” of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul teaches us that love “thinks no evil” and “believes all things.” The Amplified Bible translates “thinks no evil” as “takes no account of the evil done to it.” It also translates “believes all things” as “believes the best of every person.” According to the Bible, if we really cared about one another in this country, we would stop taking account of past wrongs done to us and stop ascribing to each other ulterior and sinister motives.
Of course, one has to understand that the love Paul is speaking of in 1 Corinthians 13 is the new kind of love that Jesus brought into the world. It is God’s love. It is not “eros” or self-love—I love myself. It is not “philos” or brotherly love—I’ll love you if you love me. It is “agape” or unconditional love—I’ll love you no matter what.
This love is only received when the Holy Spirit deposits it in our hearts (Romans 5:5). The Holy Spirit does so when we place our faith in Christ for salvation. Until we turn from our sin to trust the Savior for our salvation our hearts will be void of the love of God. In other words, until we come to know Christ, we’ll know nothing of this kind of love, which explains why this Christ-rejecting world’s universally touted tolerance keeps breeding more and more intolerance among the races. Apart from Christ, we will never be able to really care for one another, and the animosity between ethnicities will continue to escalate to monstrous proportions.
One of the signs Jesus predicted would precede His Second Coming was that “nation [will] rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom” (Matthew 24:7). The Greek word for “nation” is “ethos,” which is the Greek word we get our English word “ethnic” from. The Orthodox Jewish Bible translates Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:7 in a most poignant way: “For there will be an intifada of ethnic group against ethnic group.” Are we not seeing this sign clearly displayed in our society today, as well as throughout our world? Furthermore, can anyone deny that our Christ-rejecting world’s attempts at eradicating this ongoing problem have done nothing but exacerbate it?
The bad news is, dark and difficult days lie ahead, since there is no way our Christ-rejecting world can prevent the coming biblically predicted “intifada” between the races. The good news is, the time has come for us Christians to “lift up [our] heads for our redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).