One Race, One Blood

To understand what the Bible has to say about race, we must start at the beginning. In this lesson, we look at the creation of mankind. Mankind was created directly by God, in his image, and on the sixth day of history. All people are born into the one race - the human race. We all have a common ancestor, a truth which has great implications for how we view and treat other people.

We are all one biological race. In this lesson, we will see how all mankind is unified by our sin nature and, thus, our need for the Savior. Before we can address the sin problems in our culture, we must examine the sin in our own lives.

Our starting points inform our perspectives on social issues. Racism is entirely inconsistent with a biblical starting point, but it is a reasonable consequence of an evolutionary perspective. We must be careful to evaluate the claims of man according to the truths of God's Word. In this lesson, we will focus on how starting points impact our perspectives and on correcting our thinking to remain consistent with the authoritative truth of God's Word.

In this lesson, we will look at the historicity of the account of Babel. The dispersion from Babel explains what we see in the world today. Our video will answer many of the questions surrounding the tower of Babel and explain how a single population spread out to fill the earth and form all the people groups we see today.

We've sen how all mankind share an origin and a sin nature. Today we will focus on how the Bible view diversity. Genetic variation, along with the history found in Scripture, explains the ethnic distinctions we see today. Even our differences point to our unity as God's creation.

We are inundated with information everywhere we go. How do we know whether or not to believe a source and the claim it is making? In this lesson, we will be using the ASK method to evaluate truth claims. We will examine the authority, starting point, and knowledge of a source, and then determine whether we can accept the claim as reliable.

Understanding the biblical origin and unity of mankind is vital for the gospel. Jesus came to die for people from every nation, tribe, people, and language. God delights in diversity and has embedded it into his creation and into his church. In this lesson, we will distinguish between the two spiritual races - the only racial division that exists. We will also see why the issue of racism is so important to the gospel.

The distinction between Jews and Greeks is one that we often see in Scripture. Although the Jews pointed out their cultural distinctions, the New Testament writers applied the distinctions to their evangelical efforts. Today we will see how the gospel message was preached to both Jews and Greeks but presented differently based on their context.

Now that we've established a biblical foundation for our thinking, we will begin to look at how to apply these truths to the problem of prejudice and bigotry in our society. Using Dr. Charles Ware's Grace Relations DREAM outline, we will be developing a plan to engage the issue in our context. Today we will focus on the dream and realities portion of the outline.

Today we will focus on the expectations and applications sections of Dr. Ware's DREAM outline. After crafting a dream, an ideal to work toward, and examining the realities of our context, we must evaluate our expectations and develop practical, biblical applications.

The Bible has real answers to the problems in our society. This lesson will begin to examine how we evaluate our DREAM to ensure that our dream and our applications are consistent with biblical perspectives. We must also assess the effectiveness of our applications and revise our realities and expectations as we encounter changes in our understanding of our context. In this video, Dr. Ware introduces and biblical framework for evaluating the DREAM.

Our video will finish explaining the biblical assessment tool that we began to look at in the last lesson. Then we will complete the expectations and applications sections of our action plan. By the end of this lesson, students should be challenged to intentionally engage in the conversation around them, and they should have a plan with specific, realistic applications to guide them.