Imago Dei Series: Every Tribe, Every Tongue

Good evening, everyone.

We are continuing in our Imago Day series.

We've actually reaching the end of our Imago Day series.

We've done a lot of work talking about what it is and how it traces through the scope of creation to final new creation.

And now we're in an area of talking about some of the implications of the Imago Day understanding.

And we talked about the dignity of every person.

We talked about how to care for the vulnerable.

And this evening we're going to look at something every tribe and every tongue.

And I'd like to start by perhaps you picturing a person by the name of Sandra.

And Sandra grew up in the church.

Her grandmother was sang in the choir, her grandfather was an usher.

Her whole life was wrapped up around that one church experience.

And everything that she understood about Christianity was bound up in this one church.

From the way they moved in the service, uh, the songs that they sang, uh, the way the word was handled, and even how they pronounced the word amen or amen was all there.

She'd never really analyzed her church culture and never even questioned whether or not her broader culture had had any bearing at all upon her understanding of Christianity.

Until in her late 20s, she went to a home study that was hosted by a family from a completely different culture and country.

And while she was there, she was able to see a video of a Cambodian church service.

And the songs were different, the rhythms were different, the movement was different.

And before her theology caught up to her instincts, she caught herself thinking, something's just not right here.

And after that evening was over, she paused to reflect upon where that came from and asked herself, where where did that come from?

And she realized uh what her reaction came from, this idea that she had bound up her understanding of Christianity by what she had been experienced and what she had been introduced to, rather than considering that perhaps some of that had been built into her understanding over the course of her years and had been bent by some of her cultural experiences.

All of us are like that.

All of us grow up with some particular understanding or focus about everything.

I realized this very quickly when I had my sons, and I moved their toothbrush from one side of the sink to the other.

And all of a sudden, I was getting scolded by my little boy saying, Daddy, the toothbrush always goes here.

And I was like, uh, well, we could put it here or here or here up here if I wanted to do so.

And I had to show him, like, you know, we've we've got a pattern, but it's not a fixed right or wrong thing.

It's just what we do as a family.

All of us have those kind of things built into us.

We have these instincts that are framed within us that we think are right, that sound right, that feel right, and we feel comfortable in all of those areas.

And the question is: what does God have to say about the human dimension, about humanity as a whole?

And can it speak into those cultural expressions in a way that we can understand how God sees that rather than how we're used to seeing it, or how we're being told by the world we ought to see it, because there is a difference.

And so this evening we're going to see this diversity in humanity as God's design.

And we'll brush back in Genesis 1 and see it as God's declaration.

But one thing we're also going to look at is to see it as God's destiny, his destination.

So there's going to be three movements and two major texts that we're going to look at.

And the first one I want us to look at is in the found in the book of Acts in chapter 17.

Acts chapter 17.

Acts 17 · chapter mention

In this chapter, Paul is talking to the Athens about God who made all the nations.

And once you get to Acts chapter 17, you can land in verse 26 and 27.

Acts 17 · chapter mention

And Paul is already standing on the Areopagus in Athens, that ancient hill of debate, and he has something to say there.

Let's read these verses.

From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth, and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live.

He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each of us.

Well, the Athenians looked at the Areophagus, this ancient hill of debate, as the intellectual center of the most sophisticated culture in the world.

That's how they viewed it.

And they, above all peoples, were the most sophisticated people, and they came to hear these new ideas.

And so they had heard about Paul preaching about Jesus, and they'd heard about the resurrection, and they wanted to learn more.

The Athenians were nothing if they weren't curious.

And so Paul begins to argue, and he does so from the point of creation, that the God who made the world, who made everything, had given to all people life and breath and everything.

And in the middle of this argument, Paul, I think, very knowingly drives a stake right into the ground that would shake all of their roots and understanding about themselves.

He lobbed a grenade right into the middle of it all.

And we don't catch it because we don't understand exactly how the Athenians thought of themselves.

The Athenians believed that they literally sprung up from the ground of Attica, that everybody else had to migrate in, but they, this was home and had always been home.

That they were native, that they were original, that they were not like all the migratory people who had to come from other places to come to this best place on earth.

They had not arrived from anywhere else.

They were simply here.

And it was a point of pride for them.

There were the Athenians, and then there was everybody else.

And even our term barbarian comes from an ancient Greek word for barbar, which is mimicking the unintelligible language of foreign peoples.

And they considered those people as barbarians, as those babblers who spoke gibberish because they couldn't speak the refined tongue of the Greeks.

And Paul walks right into this sort of presumption about themselves and throws a bomb in the middle of it all.

And this is how he does it.

From one man, God has made all nations on the face of the earth.

Every language, every culture, every physical expression of the human race that has ever existed traced itself to one original ancestor.

The Athenians weren't any different than anybody else.

And we're not tracing our humanity back to separate acts of creation, some of them home, and others just passing by the best place on earth.

One source, one family.

The Athenians came from one man and one woman, just like everybody.

And so he tells them that they need to listen to this message because it was a message for them and to everybody else.

But he has more to say.

Take a look at verse 26.

He's determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live.

And that term boundaries of where they live is the word from which we get our word horizon.

The specific places where people have settled, the specific eras in which they flourished, the specific cultures that are placed in various places around the earth.

None of it random, all of it under the sovereign determination and intent of God, who had moved through human history and taken people in different times and in different places by his own sovereign hand.

Which means that everything that we see and understand about humanity and all of its complexities and all of its cultural variations and national distinctives are not a problem to solve.

They're actually a wonder and a part of God's divine intentions.

And as someone said, it's not the leftover chaos from the Tower of Babel that God is trying very desperately to mop up.

This is something God has made with good intention and good purposes.

And so he says also in verse 27 about them, so that they might seek God and perhaps they might reach out and find him.

It's an interesting comment that God has scattered people across the full range of human experience and given them all of their culture and all of their history and all of their creative and cultural traditions so that they might turn themselves as they are toward Him and worship.

A remarkable thing.

That from the angle of their own particular experience and background, individually and even culturally, that they might be able to give God glory from that perspective.

That there's something about the fullness of worship that comes from the diversity of humanity rather than singularity of humanity.

Now, just for a second, let's stop and think about what all that meant about the Athenian perspective of being the best of the best, or ideas about racism in our world today.

It means that racism is not just a social ill.

It means that it's not simply an injustice or that it's a certainty.

What it means at its core, that it's claiming that God's sovereign design to move people around the world and to set them in their places so that they might build their culture was wrong.

It's a theological heresy, not just a social ill.

This expression that some people are inherently superior is an affront against God because He built into the human family the kind of diversification that we know.

And he didn't build us in a hierarchical place, but as a people of one blood, one man and one woman.

And to use theological terms, it's more ontological than it is functional in its focus.

It is about that special connection that God's made in stamping every single human, regardless of their abilities, with the fact that they bear the image of God.

And so people have tried to take the image of God and define it by rule or rationality, our relationships, our righteousness.

And when they get into that functional perspective, what it does is it sets up a ladder.

I am more rational than other people.

Or others are more relational than other people.

And when they do that, they build the ladder in which there are people on top and there are people who are not.

But when we see the definition of the image of God as something that God has made for all people, regardless, then there is a commonality that we can honor and a dignity that we should share and offer to others.

And it has its basis even in our country, these ideas.

Frederick Douglass made a comment that the defense of chattel slavery required as a theological core the claim that the enslaved bore the image of God less fully than the enslaver.

You see how that theology had turned them into a justification for the kind of behavior that they continued.

And he said, if they bore the image of God equally as a theological foundation, the whole system would collapse.

And so we need to understand that we are made in the image of God, as is everyone else.

And if God made nationality and cultures by his sovereign design and placed people in all the places that we are with his intention, then there's no culture at all that is the default best one.

It might be the one we're more familiar with, the one we're more at ease with, and we might find ourselves in some sense of curiosity or perhaps even discomfort when we come into relationships with people from different cultures.

But to call it better or worse, or more of the image God, or less, is to go into a theological category in which we are denying God's sovereign hand.

Because God made every nation from one man, and he's going to eventually gather every nation before his throne.

But we'll get there in just a moment.

So we are to honor God's diversity or honor human diversity at God's design.

And we're also to honor it as his declaration.

So let's go back to Genesis 1 just for a moment, and we'll land there for just a second and take a look at this.

I don't want to repeat everything that I just said, but everything that I said is founded on this passage in Genesis 1.

We've been here several times.

Verse 26.

God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

And they will rule the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, the livestock, the wild animals of the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

He created them male and female.

Now, Adam here is not just a proper name, and it is a proper name, but it's also the word for humanity.

And you see this bled together here.

You see Adam spoken of as an individual, but Adam used also as an expression of human humans broadly.

And God declares his image over it all.

His question here is not about how much reason do they carry, or how much rationality is expressed in their civilization, or how great their moral attainments are.

Not talking about things that can be quantified to varying degrees.

What he's saying is, is every single person has been given this special connection by God, an inherent quality that is not maintained by what we do or lost by what we do.

That measurement cannot be quantified in the degrees of functionality.

But he also talks about image as a destiny.

Take a look at what he said here: that they are to go and they are to move all around the world.

Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.

Fill the earth.

That people were to be in different places, all for the glory of God, doing probably very different things in those different places.

And by those different expressions, able to show in all of the variations of human expression something about the greater glory of God in its collective activity.

So let's go now to another passage in Revelation chapter seven.

Revelation chapter seven.

In Revelation chapter seven, we find not only that diversity is God's design and God's declaration, but it is also expressed as part of his destination.

In Revelation chapter seven, we see something wonderful here.

In verse 9 and 10.

After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

They were clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and they cried out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb.

Here John is exiled on the Isle of Patmos, isolated, the last of the original apostles, and God gives him a vision that he's to record.

And as he takes it in, he describes what he sees.

Verse 9: a vast multitude gathered before the throne.

And he tells us what he sees.

Not a crowd from which every particular origin that they're from has been erased.

He's not showing us a uniform humanity that's indistinguishable from one another.

He's seeing every nation, every tribe, every people, every language.

Because that is the content of gospel gathering.

The worlds coming together in the only way the worlds can come together, and that is through Jesus Christ and the gospel.

And what God made in creation, and what the fall weaponized in our sort of cultural presumptions and hubris and pride, the gospel now takes and is the only thing on earth that pulls it together.

They all have the same white robes, they all carry the same palm branches, and they're all before the one lamb, and their voice is one.

But the nations and the languages and all of the tribes from which they come are not dissolved into some undifferentiated mass.

They're declared with their diversity intact.

What a remarkable thing that is.

And what it says here is that God is not producing one ethnicity or one culture.

He's not making uniformity by the gospel.

He's making unity by the gospel, and that's a far, far, far greater thing.

Let's take a look at Ephesians chapter two for a moment and just see this in action.

Did I say Acts two?

I meant Ephesians too.

Ephesians did Ephesians chapter two.

Paul here is writing about what was probably the most combustible ethnic division that the first century church had experienced.

The wall of division between Jewish and Gentile believers.

It was a wall that was so deep that they both had theological justification to armor their position.

And it was a wall that was so strong that it threatened the body of Christ before it had even really begun to emerge.

And you can see it in the book of Acts, and we'll look at it when we go through our Acts study, where there's this bewildered wonder that a Gentile could believe.

Paul goes into that discussion here in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 14.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

And there he says, For he is he is our peace who has made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility in his flesh, and he made of no effect the law consisting of commandments and expressed in regulations, so that he might create in himself one new man from the two.

It doesn't say that he's eliminated the two peoples, but what he has done is he's created something new that contains both of them, so that they might find something that transcends their cultural, national, and even religious backgrounds, so that they might find a unity in Christ that supersedes it all.

And that new humanity is visible, visible.

So let's go to Acts chapter 13, and we'll see it here in some of its visibility.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

In Acts chapter 13, we're introduced to the leadership of the Church of Antioch.

Acts 13 · chapter mention

The first congregation in the New Testament where believers were first called Christians.

And there were introduced some leaders.

Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manion, a close friend of Herod the Tetriarch, and Saul.

I don't know if you've paused and thought about those names for a second, but just listen to this.

Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus, Simeon called Niger, Niger being the Latin word for black, so perhaps his origins are from Sub-Sahara Africa.

Lucius of Cyrene, so from the coastal areas of North Africa.

Manion raised with Herod the Tetrarch, a man of Jewish background connected to the ruling Herodian class, and Saul of Tarshus, a Roman citizen, a trained Pharisee, a man of multiple worlds, and none of them easy.

Five leaders, multiple ethnicities, multiple cultural histories, and multiple reasons for suspicion or separation.

And yet, one body, one leadership, one congregation, working in unison with each other.

It was from this community with all of its diversity and its multi-ethnic gathering that God says, separate out a couple of those guys, because I have them to do something.

What you're experiencing as a church, I want the peoples to be a part of.

And so here we have the first missionary sent out from a multi-ethnic congregation to build multi-ethnic congregations so that there might be churches on earth that reflect something of what Revelation's talking about, where it sees the gathered people before the throne.

Because the end of the story is meant to be seen before we get to the end of the story.

So the response here is very clear that the church ought to be looking forward to what we will be in the eternal day before the throne of God.

That we should become even now the community that Revelation chapter 7 talks about.

Revelation 7 · chapter mention

And we we see as we'll look at when we go through the book of Acts together on Sunday mornings, just very, very soon.

But I want to take you to one place where the church had to wrestle with this a bit.

And so let's go to Acts chapter 6.

Acts 6 · chapter mention

Acts chapter 6.

Acts 6 · chapter mention

We're soon to close here, but I want to give a couple, just a couple examples.

Here in Acts chapter 6, in Jerusalem, the first generation after the Pentecost, the disciples are increasing in number.

Acts 6 · chapter mention

And you'll notice that there's some tension going on here.

The Hellenistic Jews have a complaint against the Hebraic Jews that their widows were being overlooked and the daily distribution.

So what was happening is they were all from Jewish backgrounds, but there were Greek-speaking Jewish backgrounds and there were Aramaic-speaking backgrounds.

And the Hebrew women or the Aramaic-speaking widows were being cared for while the Greek-speaking ones were not.

Now here they are in Jerusalem.

And I just wonder if the oversight wasn't just accidental, perhaps built into sort of underlying prejudices.

And so there's this ethnic conflict that's happened here.

And the people that are running the distribution are from one cultural world, taking care of the people from their cultural world, while the other widows are saying, Hey, wait a second, what about us?

And so the voice of complaint rises.

And the apostles come together.

The twelve summoned the whole company of the disciples and said, and off they went and they talked.

And they talked about setting up a new office to take care of this problem because they needed to focus on the word of God.

Now notice this new office that they filled.

Listen to the names Stephen, Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenius, and Nicholas.

Every one of those names comes from a Greek-speaking background.

So what they did here is very specific and yet also very costly.

They took the leaders from the overlooked group and said, We're giving you an office of responsibility to care for those widows so that they might receive the daily distribution just like everyone else.

And so they recognized they needed to apply gospel truth overlaying the top of some of these ethnic divisions.

So what does that look like for us today?

Well, what it looks like is we need to put the gospel at the higher priority of our cultural understandings and comfort zones.

That we need to build friendships that go across the lines at which we would at first find to be the default, and to be able to enjoy the diversity of that.

A willingness to be changed by the presence of a people whose expressions are different than our own, and to not judge it, but to welcome the truth of God's word and the gospel in their hearts, spoken or evidenced in a slightly different cultural expression, and to realize that God is getting his glory there as well.

And it means that we don't talk about diversity programs with metrics and initiatives or perpetual guilt like our culture tries to talk about.

But we talk about it as something that is centered in the gospel, that is focused by God's original design and declaration, and it is an earthly expression of what will be a heavenly and an eternal destination.

Before we close this out, I just want to say something very specific about us.

Take a look in the room.

Just take a look, right?

Take a look at our elders.

Our elders are from all over the world.

Every one of us are from a completely different place.

And we didn't do it because we wanted to have some sort of diversity program among the leadership.

What we were looking for are gospel-centered men, irregardless of what their cultural expressions or backgrounds might be.

And the elders only begin to describe what's happening here.

To walk among our church family is to walk among a people whose families have roots in nearly every corner of the earth.

We don't have any New Zealanders, but my son is married to one, so by some very loose connection, we've got at least a brush.

Naomi will show up once in a while and we can claim a New Zealander for a visit.

So just think about that.

What does that mean that's happening here?

What that means is the gospel is being preached without cultural favoritism, right?

It means that we share a common commitment to the Word of God that's not bound by a particular cultural focus.

That we have a willingness to receive people who can express something about their origins and their histories and their heritage that is different than ours, and to hold it with the same esteem and dignity and care and welcome.

This congregation is not a picture of what every congregation should be.

We're a very imperfect one, but we are moving toward that Revelation chapter seven picture.

We're not there yet.

We won't be there until we are the fullness of the stature of the measure of Christ, as Ephesians 4 says.

But we are a partial picture of Revelation chapter 7, and that needs to be welcomed and it also needs to be guarded.

Revelation 7 · chapter mention

We need to look at it and not let it become ordinary in our eyes.

We need to understand that what is developed as a naturalness of our worship here really does stand as a contrast to what most people experience and understand in this world.

And so we shouldn't mistake our ease here with inevitability or with comfort, but to applaud it and to protect it, because the gospel's doing a work that no human could engineer and the world can't even begin to understand.

So, how do we do that?

How do we guard it?

By continuing to receive people who come to the gospel from every place, by naming the fact that every single person is made in the image of God, and that our different histories don't mark whether one's closer to that image or less.

We can guard it by bringing people into the church who are have yet to ever see anything that's normal for us week by week.

These people who come from our neighborhoods where their experiences are very much divided by their ethnic origins and where they maintain what they think is the superiority of it, but to come here and define themselves just a sinner, saved by grace, like the rest of us.

And so what we're to do is to show people on earth that Revelation chapter 7 is possible on earth.

Revelation 7 · chapter mention

And the only reason it appears in Revelation 7 is because the gospel is here, speaking to the nations and the people from every nation in our neighborhood.

That's why this talk needs to come into our understanding of the image of God.

It's God's design, it's his declaration, and it's included in the final destination of the renewed humanity.

Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you that at the center of all of this is not a celebration of diversity, but a worship of the Lamb, the Lamb who's at the center of the vision.

To him, the reconciler, the one who breaks the dividing law of hostility, the one who created in himself one new man, he is the one we worship, because he is doing his work, not only here in this room, but everywhere, because the gospel is for every tribe, and worship will be from every tongue.

And we thank you that you who made us all are not distant from any.

As Paul told the Athenians, he is not far from each one of us.

Father, thank you for enfolding us into your family and doing so in such a way that we can give you even greater praise by what you accomplish.

And we pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.