THE NEXT PASSAGE is rich beyond words: “There [in Christ] is neither Jew nor Greek [race distinction], there is neither slave nor free [social and economic distinction], there is neither male nor female [sex distinction]; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Another pair of distinctions are added in Colossians 3:11: “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scyth´ian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.” Circumcised and uncircumcised (outer religious distinction), barbarian, Scythian (cultural distinction)—in Christ there cannot be race, social, economic, sex, outer religious signs, or cultural distinction. Note the “cannot”—if there are these distinctions Christ is absent. All things that divide men are gone. A new society has arisen, where a person is a person—a person for whom Christ died.
Had that blinding vision been kept, a new world would have arisen instead of the mess we are now in. This blinding vision is not based on sentimentality; it is based on hard fact. There are no permanently inferior or superior races. There are underdeveloped races and developed races, but none permanently inferior or superior. Given the same stimulus and the same incentive, the brain of humanity will come out about the same. In Nairobi, Kenya, an African school run by six missions, there have been, since 1947, only two failures in the Cambridge examinations, the percentage being about 99.9 percent of passes. The white schools taking the same examinations pass 80 percent. The Indian schools pass 30 percent. The Indian young people have no economic, political, or religious incentive, hence they sag; the Africans have the incentive to show they are not inferior, hence they overcompensate and surpass. The Christian vision has its feet on very solid ground—there are infinite possibilities in everybody, everywhere.
O Jesus, Thou art called the Son of Man, as if all mankind were in travail to bring Thee forth. We bow at Thy feet and find in Thee our brother wrapped in many colors, but our brother still. We are all one in Thee. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: In Jesus I am a man of one book and one humanity, because I am a man of one Person.
