Origin Should Bind Us

Origin+Should+Bind+Us

Isaiah 59:2 says that “your sins have separated you from your God.” I think it would be safe to say that sin, from the beginning, has done quite a bit to separate human beings from each other as well.
Sin tore apart the first family when Cain killed his brother Abel. Sin resulted in separation of language groups at the tower of Babel, which in turn necessitated a geographical separation. The geographical separation became wider and wider, which resulted in the language groups living in vastly different climates and conditions. As generations passed, the separation into differing climates and conditions caused skin color to darken and lighten, facial features to take on new shapes, and hair to develop new consistencies and colors. As people began to become more separate in where they lived, how they lived, and how they looked, separate cultures were defined. Somewhere along this progression, the man-made notion of race was conceived – and the devil smiled.

Millennia passed, and humanity forgot all too willingly from whence we all came. Wars over man-made boundaries, man-made religions, and man-made prejudices eradicated any semblance of the unity that existed in the beginning. Remembrance of our true Origin was so completely scrubbed out of our consciousness that it became possible for one human to see another human as a totally different animal altogether. Sin separates – and God weeps.

We have become so separated and so accustomed to our separateness that we prefer to take pride in the things that separate us instead of rejoicing in the Origin that should bind us. Man-made racial lines have been indelibly drawn by genocides, apartheid, and slavery of all types. Some brave souls have scrubbed away at those lines with their voices, their votes, and some with their blood. One of these brave men had a dream. His dream was not for an equality that would be separate, but a unity that would be restorative. He had a dream that divinely created human beings with lighter shades of skin would hold hands with their brothers and sisters with darker shades of skin. He had a dream that the arbitrary lines of separation drawn by the hand of sin, darkened by the illusion of race, and etched by the juggernaut of pride, could be exposed and obliterated. It’s an incredible dream. It is yet to be fully realized. The only thing that continues to separate us is our sin, our delusions, and our pride. We are the same biologically, estimably, spiritually, and otherwise. May it be one day that we all recover from our origin amnesia and cease to perpetuate our separateness with our words, our attitudes, our cultures, and our lives.