The Scourge Of Racism
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Considered uncivilized like other natives of the islands and lands in the Western hemisphere because they lacked the knowledge and customs of Western Civilization as well as the heavy clothing due to living in a much warmer climate, my West African ancestors were at first intrigued by the white skinned visitors. They engaged in trade with these men that also initially involved the selling of usually captives from rival tribes in territorial wars as slaves. They welcomed the Catholic and later Protestant missionaries who found them to be as spiritually unregenerate as the formerly mentioned barbarian tribes of Europe which after a millennium, had apparently been forgotten about.1
Indeed, just like the Europeans and every Gentile nation on the face of the earth, my West African forefathers had been guilty before God of practicing all manner of spiritual wickedness. This includes worshipping the creation--demons as themselves and masquerading as gods they deceived human minds to invent and construct with their hands as idols, the heavenly bodies, nature, sinful mortal flesh and ancestors long deceased. They too practiced witchcraft, sorcery and blood sacrifice in rituals of ignorance. Many tribes were also violent, ruthless and predatory; biblically defined sexual immorality, widespread. All of this is true while they also built great and rich empires.
Nevertheless, as with all other Gentiles since the first century, the grace of God in restoration came to West Africa as initially the Gospel was preached and Christianity introduced to many by the European missionaries. However, the simmering wrath of God longsuffering and forbearing in judgment, who had with all other nations post-Noah’s flood been good to Africa also while He waited to judge their sins (Acts 14:8-18, 17:29-31), brought it through the imperialistic Europeans as His instruments when they violently launched their transatlantic slave trade. Again, the prophets of God foretell His judgment on the Gentile nations for sin (Isaiah 14:22-16:14, 18:1-19:17, 21:11-16; Ezekiel 25-26, 29-31).
Besides death and destruction, among the judgments God foretold through His prophets He would visit upon the Gentiles is captivity and bondage (Isaiah 20). For those heroically minded individuals cut from the Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death” mold, I remind you that any one that dies without faith in Jesus Christ or perfect obedience to God’s law, perishes eternally with no hope of deliverance from Hell whether Jew or Gentile (Jeremiah 9:25-26; Romans 1:18-3:20; Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 20:11-15).2 Therefore, in a biblical worldview being a living slave with hope is better than being hopelessly double dead in sin (Isaiah 38:9-20; Ephesians 2:1-10)!3
While lamenting his people he watched go into Babylonian captivity as divine judgment, the prophet Jeremiah found hope renewed in God’s mercy, compassion and impeccable character (Lamentations 3:19-38) asking, “Why should a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins,” (Lamentations 3:39, NKJV)? Though a number of West Africans were killed on their soil resisting the Europeans and others in transit to slavery, the survivors who became Christians experienced God’s restoration in chains. They came to appreciate Jeremiah and Daniel’s conclusion that slavery as God’s judgment was righteous and merciful (Lamentations 3:40-42; Daniel 9:1-15)!4
What is God’s will for those He restores in grace and mercy through the Gospel and delivers from bondage of any kind? Is it not to go tell it (Exodus 10:1-2, 12:21-28; Luke 4:16-21, 8:26-39, 22:14-20, 24:13-49)? Surely, my Christian slave forefathers did tell it in a rich legacy of work songs and spirituals I will not cease to remind the generations behind me are there for their benefit first, then, the entire world! They chose not to run away or escape on the Underground Railroad and instead, stand by faith in God. Satan has deceived many into scoffing at them, but they are heroes in God’s eyes because like Daniel, they willingly submitted to His judgment; trusting in His goodness, grace and mercies new every morning when joy comes after any night of weeping (Psalm 30:4-5)!
Though the release from bondage brought still more adversity, those that clung to God by faith in Jesus Christ walked in the victories of restoration and testified, while waiting for new deliverances and His majestic coming (1 John 5:4; Revelation 1:4-8, 2:8-11, 3:7-13)! For as Paul, the Jewish apostle to us Gentiles consoles, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us,” (Romans 8:18, NKJV). And again, it is written, “The just shall live by faith,” (Romans 1:17, NKJV). But the numbers of those living by faith among black Americans today are certainly relatively small since the heavy hand of divine judgment hangs over our communities like the soupy mist of settled fog; a clear sign of God’s displeasure (Hebrews 11:6).
1 In a nod of appreciation to the days of radio drama, I was blessed of the Lord to write, produce and voice my personal search for biblical understanding of the black
experience in an award winning docu-drama entitled, From Slavery To Victory: One Man’s Journey now a Webcast on The From Slavery To Victory Education Project
Web Site.
2 Quoted from Patriot, Patrick Henry’s speech made to the Second Virginia Convention held at the St. John’s Church, March 23, 1775, Wikipedia.
3 I do realize there are many different worldviews black Americans have of our historical experience that are mostly rooted in victimization. A biblical worldview of the
black American experience is only possible by the mind renewing work of the Holy Spirit when a man has been truly converted. I am led by the Holy Spirit to explore
eleven major worldviews black Americans have of our experience and compare them for benefit to us with the biblically formed worldview consistent with God’s
now, nearly two millennia long cause to restore men and punish the sins of Gentile nations in a seven-part 2006 article entitled, The Renewing Of Our Minds. Read it
in the Journal Archives on the From Slavery To Victory Education Project Web Site. 4 Read through the presentation beginning on the Home Page of The From Slavery To Victory Education Project Web Site that uses art and graphics to make these im-
portant points as well.
The Lord’s cause to restore men through Jesus, Son Of Man is from eternity (1 Peter 1:20) and was announced in Eden for all to hear (Genesis 3:15)! From that garden announcement the sovereign God has moved in His timing and in accord with His plan to bring His cause to restore willing men from among every ethnicity, race, tribe and language spread across the earth to fulfillment beginning with Israel, His chosen people (Isaiah 49:5-6; Matthew 4:18-22; Acts 1:1-8, 9:10-16, 17:22-31). The absolute fruitfulness of the Lord’s work from the first century until now is known only to Him, but even early on the apostle Paul spoke of it (Colossians 1:3-6).
In learning about church history, I have consistently come across how advantageous the Roman Empire--the general peace it brought and its paved roads at the right moment--was for the arrival of Christ, His life, death by crucifixion, burial, resurrection and the eventual spread of the Gospel about Him through His apostles to all the world it dominated. This was, of course, a matter of divine foreknowledge, will and strategic plan that in those early years the Gospel should go forth in peace to all the lands the Jews of the pre-Christ, punitive dispersions resided among the Gentiles that they might hear it and believe if they would (Romans 9-11:10).
Many Gentiles into Rome itself also heard and believed the Gospel during that first century, though the men Christ sent to preach it throughout the empire were often violently set upon by Jew, Greek and the Roman politico-military establishment as He foretold (Matthew 10:16-26; John 15:18-16:4; Acts 13-14; Romans 1:1-17, 15:17-24). God graciously gave Israel in its land and dispersed a generation to hear and respond to the Gospel. After this period in AD 70, His foretold wrath led again to the nation’s destruction and this time their global dispersion (Deuteronomy 28:58-68; Isaiah 28:9-19; Jeremiah 25:1-11; Daniel 9:20-26; Hosea 5:8-15; Matthew 23:37-39; Luke 20:9-19, 21:20-24).
Although the Lord has continued preaching the Gospel to His scattered people with the foretold limited results and in recent times after over 1,900 years restored them to the land in ongoing prophetic fulfillment, during that same period He turned His two-fold attention to us Gentiles (Acts 13:42-49). As with the Jews, the Lord first graciously sent forth men preaching the Gospel to all four points of the compass among the Gentiles beyond the Roman Empire. Many disciples were made and churches established as the Lord moved to fulfill His cause to restore men to the ends of the earth. Meanwhile, the Lord was also fulfilling a second foretold objective among the Gentiles.
As He had announced through His prophets, the Lord has also been moving through the earth meting out long delayed judgment on the Gentile nations for their wickedness sometimes prior to as a softening up, but mostly after they had heard the Gospel (Jeremiah 25:12-28). Indeed, the Lord of hosts says to the Gentile nations, ‘“For behold, I begin to bring calamity on the city which is called by My name, and should you be utterly unpunished? You shall not be unpunished, for I will call for a sword on all the inhabitants of the earth,’” (Jeremiah 25:29, NKJV). Thus, even Rome was felled by its gross immorality and European tribes known then as “barbarians” in the 5th century AD.
After this, as with the demise of Jerusalem as the vibrant birthplace of Christianity, so, every city of the former empire such as Antioch, Corinth and Ephesus where it had thrived for a time faded, was later destroyed or overrun by Islam. Greatly diminished in influence after four heady post-apostolic centuries, Christianity in variant forms as “orthodox” religion was and has remained dominant in the Greek East as it spread North into Asia and in the Middle East, North and East Africa. It was the influence of Christianity as a settled religion worked like yeast in Western Civilization as dough and overseen by Roman Catholicism in the West, however, that led to the Gospel being preached to the farthest reaches of the planet.
For the next thousand years Roman Catholicism’s preservation and teaching of Western Civilization (Greco-Roman thought and ideas with Christian morality etc.) brought the tribes of western Europe out of their barbarism to more refined tastes, renaissance, enlightenment and the ambitious quest to be enriched by and take possession of the whole earth! By the time German priest, Martin Luther, had launched his attempt to reform the Catholic Church in 1517, many previously unknown lands had already been reached and in divine providence, the Gospel proclaimed to the inhabitants. Among the lands and upon shores the sea brought Europeans and Catholic missionaries was West Africa from whence came my black forefathers as slaves.
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