I remember my first Impactus conference many years ago at the FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, Ontario.
(It was “Promise Keepers Canada” back then, and for that matter, the arena was “Copps Coliseum” back then as well.)
My father had been involved in the ministry for years and had been asked to oversee and manage the conference as a volunteer, which he did (with excellence, I might brag). He brought my brother and me along for the event, along with a large contingent of men from our mostly white church.
I only bring up ethnicity because the conference was markedly different. There were tons of guys there, of all different races, in a striking contrast from my typical Sunday morning worship experience.
I will remember forever the praise that kicked off the conference and the sound of thousands of deep, manly voices singing out loudly in worship:
A mighty fortress is our God
A bulwark never failing…
As I looked across the arena and saw the diversity of faces and voices worshiping God at the top of their lungs, I had a thought:
This is exactly what Heaven will be like.
(Except, of course, there will be women there too!)
There, in that moment, there was no division, no tension, no racial divide. Our differences were not ignored, but were simply swept up and united in glorifying worship of the One who is Lord over all.
Scripture speaks of a day when this will come to pass perfectly. In John’s vision of Heaven, he records:
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
‘Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.’” (Revelation 7:9-10)
There are certainly multicultural churches in our world that experience a foretaste of this picture of Heaven every Sunday. Other churches tend to stick to a particular racial identity, for various reasons.
But what is undeniable is that the Gospel comes to redeem what has been broken by sin—including the disunity and division that afflicts humanity (Ephesians 1:7-10).
This is not to say that race is immaterial or should be minimized. In John’s picture of Heaven that we just looked at, everyone in Heaven maintains their racial identity for all eternity. Our race is a crucial part of who we are and how God has intentionally created us, which does not get diminished in any way in Christ.
What God does seek to do is remove the division that is so common to humanity (Ephesians 2:14-18). It’s not that race is unimportant, but in Jesus, every race is equally invited to come to His table and equally invited to join His family (Matthew 28:19).
For Christians, part of our testimony is that the Kingdom of Heaven is not something that will happen to us someday down the road—when Jesus arrived on earth, He told us that the Kingdom of Heaven on earth was starting right now (Matthew 3:2). There is a fullness of the experience of Heaven that will indeed come later (Revelation 21), but eternal life doesn’t mean “later” life; our new eternal life in Jesus has already started, and the Kingdom of Heaven has already arrived on earth.
The members of this Kingdom are also called “the Church.”
Our role, as the Church, is to live out the ways of this Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. As citizens of this heavenly Kingdom (Philippians 3:20), we live our lives in this world by a different standard, a different ethic, and a different motivation.
One of those different ways we are to live is racial. In the Kingdom of Heaven, all races unite in perfected unity, joining together in worship with one voice to the One King above all.
In Jesus, and because of Jesus, the racial barriers and walls between us come crashing down (Galatians 3:28). There will be no racism in Heaven. In the meantime, until the day we see Jesus face-to-face, we, the Church, live out and celebrate this unity amidst diversity, starting right now.
I’m very aware that this is far from our lived-out reality. I’m also very aware that, as a white man talking about racial issues, I am ignorant of much and miss so much of what my brothers of other ethnicities can and should bring to this conversation.
But that is part of the point. Regarding race, the Church should be the most stunning example of acceptance and unity the world has ever seen, not glossing over our differences, but uniting them in Christ. We are to display to the lost world around us what God’s perfect design for humanity was meant to look like. Where we are not doing so, we still have work to do.
Obviously, there are crucial conversations needed to do this, including people from all ethnicities, and there are racial issues facing the world that are not easily resolved. This article was not so much written to solve problems as to paint a picture.
In the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lordship of Jesus Christ draws all nations to Himself, and Christians get to demonstrate to the rest of Creation that the Lord is greater than any of us and is worthy of our worship, demonstrated by the unity that we experience when the nations join together to worship and follow Him.
How good and pleasant it is
when God’s people live together in unity!
It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down on the collar of his robe.
It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore. (Psalm 133:1-3)
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