Doug McMasters: Good evening, everyone.
Doug McMasters: We are continuing in our Imago Day series.
Doug McMasters: We've actually reaching the end of our Imago Day series.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And now we're in an area of talking about some of the implications of the Imago Day understanding.
Doug McMasters: And we talked about the dignity of every person.
Doug McMasters: We talked about how to care for the vulnerable.
Doug McMasters: And this evening we're going to look at something every tribe and every tongue.
Doug McMasters: And I'd like to start by perhaps you picturing a person by the name of Sandra.
Doug McMasters: And Sandra grew up in the church.
Doug McMasters: Her grandmother was sang in the choir, her grandfather was an usher.
Doug McMasters: Her whole life was wrapped up around that one church experience.
Doug McMasters: And everything that she understood about Christianity was bound up in this one church.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Until in her late 20s, she went to a home study that was hosted by a family from a completely different culture and country.
Doug McMasters: And while she was there, she was able to see a video of a Cambodian church service.
Doug McMasters: And the songs were different, the rhythms were different, the movement was different.
Doug McMasters: And before her theology caught up to her instincts, she caught herself thinking, something's just not right here.
Doug McMasters: And after that evening was over, she paused to reflect upon where that came from and asked herself, where where did that come from?
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: All of us are like that.
Doug McMasters: All of us grow up with some particular understanding or focus about everything.
Doug McMasters: I realized this very quickly when I had my sons, and I moved their toothbrush from one side of the sink to the other.
Doug McMasters: And all of a sudden, I was getting scolded by my little boy saying, Daddy, the toothbrush always goes here.
Doug McMasters: And I was like, uh, well, we could put it here or here or here up here if I wanted to do so.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: It's just what we do as a family.
Doug McMasters: All of us have those kind of things built into us.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And the question is: what does God have to say about the human dimension, about humanity as a whole?
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And so this evening we're going to see this diversity in humanity as God's design.
Doug McMasters: And we'll brush back in Genesis 1 and see it as God's declaration.
Doug McMasters: But one thing we're also going to look at is to see it as God's destiny, his destination.
Doug McMasters: So there's going to be three movements and two major texts that we're going to look at.
Doug McMasters: And the first one I want us to look at is in the found in the book of Acts in chapter 17.
Doug McMasters: Acts chapter 17.
Doug McMasters: In this chapter, Paul is talking to the Athens about God who made all the nations.
Doug McMasters: And once you get to Acts chapter 17, you can land in verse 26 and 27.
Doug McMasters: And Paul is already standing on the Areopagus in Athens, that ancient hill of debate, and he has something to say there.
Doug McMasters: Let's read these verses.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Well, the Athenians looked at the Areophagus, this ancient hill of debate, as the intellectual center of the most sophisticated culture in the world.
Doug McMasters: That's how they viewed it.
Doug McMasters: And they, above all peoples, were the most sophisticated people, and they came to hear these new ideas.
Doug McMasters: And so they had heard about Paul preaching about Jesus, and they'd heard about the resurrection, and they wanted to learn more.
Doug McMasters: The Athenians were nothing if they weren't curious.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: He lobbed a grenade right into the middle of it all.
Doug McMasters: And we don't catch it because we don't understand exactly how the Athenians thought of themselves.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: They had not arrived from anywhere else.
Doug McMasters: They were simply here.
Doug McMasters: And it was a point of pride for them.
Doug McMasters: There were the Athenians, and then there was everybody else.
Doug McMasters: And even our term barbarian comes from an ancient Greek word for barbar, which is mimicking the unintelligible language of foreign peoples.
Doug McMasters: And they considered those people as barbarians, as those babblers who spoke gibberish because they couldn't speak the refined tongue of the Greeks.
Doug McMasters: And Paul walks right into this sort of presumption about themselves and throws a bomb in the middle of it all.
Doug McMasters: And this is how he does it.
Doug McMasters: From one man, God has made all nations on the face of the earth.
Doug McMasters: Every language, every culture, every physical expression of the human race that has ever existed traced itself to one original ancestor.
Doug McMasters: The Athenians weren't any different than anybody else.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: One source, one family.
Doug McMasters: The Athenians came from one man and one woman, just like everybody.
Doug McMasters: And so he tells them that they need to listen to this message because it was a message for them and to everybody else.
Doug McMasters: But he has more to say.
Doug McMasters: Take a look at verse 26.
Doug McMasters: He's determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live.
Doug McMasters: And that term boundaries of where they live is the word from which we get our word horizon.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: They're actually a wonder and a part of God's divine intentions.
Doug McMasters: And as someone said, it's not the leftover chaos from the Tower of Babel that God is trying very desperately to mop up.
Doug McMasters: This is something God has made with good intention and good purposes.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: A remarkable thing.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: That there's something about the fullness of worship that comes from the diversity of humanity rather than singularity of humanity.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: It means that racism is not just a social ill.
Doug McMasters: It means that it's not simply an injustice or that it's a certainty.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: It's a theological heresy, not just a social ill.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And he didn't build us in a hierarchical place, but as a people of one blood, one man and one woman.
Doug McMasters: And to use theological terms, it's more ontological than it is functional in its focus.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And so people have tried to take the image of God and define it by rule or rationality, our relationships, our righteousness.
Doug McMasters: And when they get into that functional perspective, what it does is it sets up a ladder.
Doug McMasters: I am more rational than other people.
Doug McMasters: Or others are more relational than other people.
Doug McMasters: And when they do that, they build the ladder in which there are people on top and there are people who are not.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And it has its basis even in our country, these ideas.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: You see how that theology had turned them into a justification for the kind of behavior that they continued.
Doug McMasters: And he said, if they bore the image of God equally as a theological foundation, the whole system would collapse.
Doug McMasters: And so we need to understand that we are made in the image of God, as is everyone else.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Because God made every nation from one man, and he's going to eventually gather every nation before his throne.
Doug McMasters: But we'll get there in just a moment.
Doug McMasters: So we are to honor God's diversity or honor human diversity at God's design.
Doug McMasters: And we're also to honor it as his declaration.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: I don't want to repeat everything that I just said, but everything that I said is founded on this passage in Genesis 1.
Doug McMasters: We've been here several times.
Doug McMasters: Verse 26.
Doug McMasters: God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: So God created man in his own image.
Doug McMasters: He created him in the image of God.
Doug McMasters: He created them male and female.
Doug McMasters: Now, Adam here is not just a proper name, and it is a proper name, but it's also the word for humanity.
Doug McMasters: And you see this bled together here.
Doug McMasters: You see Adam spoken of as an individual, but Adam used also as an expression of human humans broadly.
Doug McMasters: And God declares his image over it all.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Not talking about things that can be quantified to varying degrees.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: That measurement cannot be quantified in the degrees of functionality.
Doug McMasters: But he also talks about image as a destiny.
Doug McMasters: Take a look at what he said here: that they are to go and they are to move all around the world.
Doug McMasters: Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.
Doug McMasters: Fill the earth.
Doug McMasters: That people were to be in different places, all for the glory of God, doing probably very different things in those different places.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: So let's go now to another passage in Revelation chapter seven.
Doug McMasters: Revelation chapter seven.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: In Revelation chapter seven, we see something wonderful here.
Doug McMasters: In verse 9 and 10.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And as he takes it in, he describes what he sees.
Doug McMasters: Verse 9: a vast multitude gathered before the throne.
Doug McMasters: And he tells us what he sees.
Doug McMasters: Not a crowd from which every particular origin that they're from has been erased.
Doug McMasters: He's not showing us a uniform humanity that's indistinguishable from one another.
Doug McMasters: He's seeing every nation, every tribe, every people, every language.
Doug McMasters: Because that is the content of gospel gathering.
Doug McMasters: The worlds coming together in the only way the worlds can come together, and that is through Jesus Christ and the gospel.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: But the nations and the languages and all of the tribes from which they come are not dissolved into some undifferentiated mass.
Doug McMasters: They're declared with their diversity intact.
Doug McMasters: What a remarkable thing that is.
Doug McMasters: And what it says here is that God is not producing one ethnicity or one culture.
Doug McMasters: He's not making uniformity by the gospel.
Doug McMasters: He's making unity by the gospel, and that's a far, far, far greater thing.
Doug McMasters: Let's take a look at Ephesians chapter two for a moment and just see this in action.
Doug McMasters: Did I say Acts two?
Doug McMasters: I meant Ephesians too.
Doug McMasters: Ephesians did Ephesians chapter two.
Doug McMasters: Paul here is writing about what was probably the most combustible ethnic division that the first century church had experienced.
Doug McMasters: The wall of division between Jewish and Gentile believers.
Doug McMasters: It was a wall that was so deep that they both had theological justification to armor their position.
Doug McMasters: And it was a wall that was so strong that it threatened the body of Christ before it had even really begun to emerge.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Paul goes into that discussion here in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 14.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And that new humanity is visible, visible.
Doug McMasters: So let's go to Acts chapter 13, and we'll see it here in some of its visibility.
Doug McMasters: In Acts chapter 13, we're introduced to the leadership of the Church of Antioch.
Doug McMasters: The first congregation in the New Testament where believers were first called Christians.
Doug McMasters: And there were introduced some leaders.
Doug McMasters: Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manion, a close friend of Herod the Tetriarch, and Saul.
Doug McMasters: I don't know if you've paused and thought about those names for a second, but just listen to this.
Doug McMasters: Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus, Simeon called Niger, Niger being the Latin word for black, so perhaps his origins are from Sub-Sahara Africa.
Doug McMasters: Lucius of Cyrene, so from the coastal areas of North Africa.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Five leaders, multiple ethnicities, multiple cultural histories, and multiple reasons for suspicion or separation.
Doug McMasters: And yet, one body, one leadership, one congregation, working in unison with each other.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: What you're experiencing as a church, I want the peoples to be a part of.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Because the end of the story is meant to be seen before we get to the end of the story.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: That we should become even now the community that Revelation chapter 7 talks about.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: But I want to take you to one place where the church had to wrestle with this a bit.
Doug McMasters: And so let's go to Acts chapter 6.
Doug McMasters: Acts chapter 6.
Doug McMasters: We're soon to close here, but I want to give a couple, just a couple examples.
Doug McMasters: Here in Acts chapter 6, in Jerusalem, the first generation after the Pentecost, the disciples are increasing in number.
Doug McMasters: And you'll notice that there's some tension going on here.
Doug McMasters: The Hellenistic Jews have a complaint against the Hebraic Jews that their widows were being overlooked and the daily distribution.
Doug McMasters: So what was happening is they were all from Jewish backgrounds, but there were Greek-speaking Jewish backgrounds and there were Aramaic-speaking backgrounds.
Doug McMasters: And the Hebrew women or the Aramaic-speaking widows were being cared for while the Greek-speaking ones were not.
Doug McMasters: Now here they are in Jerusalem.
Doug McMasters: And I just wonder if the oversight wasn't just accidental, perhaps built into sort of underlying prejudices.
Doug McMasters: And so there's this ethnic conflict that's happened here.
Doug McMasters: 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?
Doug McMasters: And so the voice of complaint rises.
Doug McMasters: And the apostles come together.
Doug McMasters: The twelve summoned the whole company of the disciples and said, and off they went and they talked.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Now notice this new office that they filled.
Doug McMasters: Listen to the names Stephen, Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenius, and Nicholas.
Doug McMasters: Every one of those names comes from a Greek-speaking background.
Doug McMasters: So what they did here is very specific and yet also very costly.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And so they recognized they needed to apply gospel truth overlaying the top of some of these ethnic divisions.
Doug McMasters: So what does that look like for us today?
Doug McMasters: Well, what it looks like is we need to put the gospel at the higher priority of our cultural understandings and comfort zones.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Before we close this out, I just want to say something very specific about us.
Doug McMasters: Take a look in the room.
Doug McMasters: Just take a look, right?
Doug McMasters: Take a look at our elders.
Doug McMasters: Our elders are from all over the world.
Doug McMasters: Every one of us are from a completely different place.
Doug McMasters: And we didn't do it because we wanted to have some sort of diversity program among the leadership.
Doug McMasters: What we were looking for are gospel-centered men, irregardless of what their cultural expressions or backgrounds might be.
Doug McMasters: And the elders only begin to describe what's happening here.
Doug McMasters: To walk among our church family is to walk among a people whose families have roots in nearly every corner of the earth.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: Naomi will show up once in a while and we can claim a New Zealander for a visit.
Doug McMasters: So just think about that.
Doug McMasters: What does that mean that's happening here?
Doug McMasters: What that means is the gospel is being preached without cultural favoritism, right?
Doug McMasters: It means that we share a common commitment to the Word of God that's not bound by a particular cultural focus.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: This congregation is not a picture of what every congregation should be.
Doug McMasters: We're a very imperfect one, but we are moving toward that Revelation chapter seven picture.
Doug McMasters: We're not there yet.
Doug McMasters: We won't be there until we are the fullness of the stature of the measure of Christ, as Ephesians 4 says.
Doug McMasters: But we are a partial picture of Revelation chapter 7, and that needs to be welcomed and it also needs to be guarded.
Doug McMasters: We need to look at it and not let it become ordinary in our eyes.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: So, how do we do that?
Doug McMasters: How do we guard it?
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And so what we're to do is to show people on earth that Revelation chapter 7 is possible on earth.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: That's why this talk needs to come into our understanding of the image of God.
Doug McMasters: It's God's design, it's his declaration, and it's included in the final destination of the renewed humanity.
Doug McMasters: Let's pray together.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And we thank you that you who made us all are not distant from any.
Doug McMasters: As Paul told the Athenians, he is not far from each one of us.
Doug McMasters: 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.
Doug McMasters: And we pray this in Christ's name.
Doug McMasters: Amen.