Church, There’s No Such Thing as Blood Poisoning
We gathered for worship at my church Sunday just as we do every Sunday. Although we live in a mostly homogenous community (Oldham County, Kentucky is 87% white), the Lord has blessed our church with ethnic diversity. We have church members from Mexico, Colombia, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zambia, and Algeria. When we gather for worship on a typical Sunday, our physical gathering illustrates on a small scale God’s power to save all peoples. Jesus died and was raised to reconcile the nations to God and to one another, and we get a preview of that every week.
We don’t therefore believe diversity in the church is a coincidental accident; it is God’s priority. God’s original promise to Abraham included the assurance that through Abraham’s family “all the families of the earth” would be blessed (Genesis 12:3). Indeed, this promise keeps getting repeated through the witness of the prophets. The arrival of Jesus in the womb of his virgin mother Mary was “good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10). Before he ascended, the resurrected Jesus made sure his followers knew the promise to Abraham still stood when he commanded, “Make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:16).
The apostle Paul celebrated the gospel’s triumphant international march and devoted his life to ensuring all peoples heard about it. Indeed, he wrote the Ephesian church that the “mystery” of the gospel revealed through Jesus is “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise of Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6). When we get to the end of our Bibles, we see a future scene of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9).
The message of the Bible is clear and uniform: The same God who created all men and women in his own image is committed to saving men and women from every nation on the earth through Christ. We celebrate the diversity of Christ’s eternal kingdom and praise God when he allows us to get a glimpse of it here on earth in our local churches. The loud chorus of the whole counsel of God eliminates confusion on this issue. If you follow Jesus, you are following the Savior of all races. To presume the inherent superiority of any race or nation is to oppose what God is doing in Christ.
This past weekend, at a rally in New Hampshire, former President Donald Trump rallied his supporters by warning that immigrants to the United States from places like “Africa” and “Asia” are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Later that same evening, he went on Truth Social and repeated the claim in all caps: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions—from all over the world.”
I’m sure that many of the people cheering these comments did so thinking that they were merely agreeing with tough immigration policy. However, the image of “poisoning the blood” goes much further than one’s preference about building a wall. As many commentators have noted, it’s the same dangerous rhetoric employed by Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” For a solution to blood poisoning, Hitler initiated a program of systematic genocide and murdered over six million European Jews.
I’m not insinuating that President Trump has similar goals in mind, nor do I know if his decision to parrot Adolf Hitler was intentional. What I do know is that the horrific historical precedents associated with such rhetoric should leave no doubt in the minds of Christians about how to respond. You can have strong positions on border security and immigration reform without resorting to racist Nazi propaganda. Christians, we must not tolerate insinuations that American blood is somehow superior to the inferior blood of other races. We follow a King already, and unlike President Trump or any other president or government, he alone deserves ultimate allegiance.
There’s no such thing as pure blood on earth because all blood has been tainted by sin. We’re all poisoned, and our only hope is the pure atoning blood of Jesus. Don’t get so caught up in the political moment that you lose sight of the real goal. We’re on this earth under marching orders from our resurrected King to make disciples of all nations. Be careful that the rallying cry of American partisan politics doesn’t lead you to poison the mission of the church.
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