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| Mike Hosey, An Elder |
If you take a moment to look around your environment and
think about it, you will quickly see that you are surrounded by diversity –
meaning that our world is not monochrome, monolithic, or mono-anything in its
general physical composition. Consider animal life for a moment. There are
many, many kinds of animal species, and within any given animal species, there
are many, many different kinds of that particular animal. This is true of plant life, bacterial life,
or almost any kind of life on earth. The
planet itself is diverse. There are
rocky mountains, forested mountains, muddy rivers, clear rivers, deserts, rain
forests, arctic tundra, swamps, plains, hills, meadows and just about any kind
of environment you can imagine. This is
because the God who created it is a God of diversity. If none of that is enough to convince you that
God is a God of diversity, just contemplate on how he designed humanity’s
reproductive process. Every time two people mate, the process takes genetic
information from one person and combines it with the genetic information of the
other person to produce a brand new unique individual who will then repeat that
process when he or she comes of age.
This ensures that there is a never-ending and always changing supply of
new people who are diverse in some respect from the people from whom they came!
God so much loves this diverse world of men that he created,
that he redeemed it at the cost of his son Jesus, the only sinless and perfect man
to make it off of the planet (John 3:16). For those who might be tempted to
think that it is not true that he has a bias toward diversity, take a review of
Revelation. Revelation 5:9 tell us that the blood of Jesus ransomed people from
every tongue, tribe, and nation. And Revelation 7:9 depicts a great multitude
of people from every tongue, tribe and nation clothed in white robes and standing
before the throne! It’s a very good guess that Heaven will be a diverse place
as well.
But God is more than just a God of diversity. God is also a
God of unity. His intention was never
that all of this diversity on earth, and in humanity be at odds with one
another. Instead, his intent was that
everything be unified around him. When Adam and Eve fell after the original
sin, that unity was broken. But it is
God’s desire that it return. In
Galatians, Paul tells us that in the church there should be neither male nor
female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave or free. Instead, Paul tells us we should all be one
in Christ. In other words, you may have diversity of form, but you should not
have diversity of spirit or allegiance. Jesus reinforces this by example in the profound and famous prayer that he
makes for his followers (John 17:1-26). In the midst of that prayer, he asks
that they be made one just as he and the father are one (John 17:11).
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