God promised Abraham that in him “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). From the very beginning, God’s promise to Abraham encompassed every ethnic and racial group.
Jump ahead 1,800+ years.
When Paul wrote Galatians 3:7-8, Jesus had already completed his redemptive mission by living, dying, and being raised from the dead.
The result of Jesus’ redemptive achievement is the fulfillment of God’s promise that in Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed: “Know then that it is those of faith who are sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Galatians 3:7-8).
If we’re not careful, we can step right over the significance of Paul’s words. Because of the work of Jesus to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham, a principal identifying mark of God’s family is that it is decidedly multi-ethnic — as multi-ethnic as it’s possible to be!
Because of Jesus, the church is the theater of transracial adoption. It is the place where the drama of redemption — God’s work to adopt children from every ethnicity — is played out over and over again. The church is, as Kevin Vanhoozer writes, “the theater wherein the world sees God’s love played out time and time again” (The Drama of Doctrine, 400).
As Christians, we have the privilege of playing out this drama on both the macro and micro levels. The macro drama, of course, is the church itself. The universal church continually displays the drama of the multi-ethnic family of God for all the world to see. There’s nothing like this macro drama to be found in all of human history.
But there is also a micro drama in which families within each local church can participate. No, God does not call every Christian family to adopt, transracially or otherwise. But the families God does call to adopt transracially have the privilege of being a micro-theater of the macro-drama of redemption for their communities to see.
The earthly practice of transracial adoption is much more than a way to build a family. It’s an opportunity to display the grand story of redemption before a watching world.
Very well said.
Ever since I was a very little girl I have felt I was meant to have a large family of adopted children from around the world. I felt it in the same way that other women have that general feeling that they are meant to be mothers. When I became a Christian 11 1/2 years ago I thought that the Church would be the perfect place to find the kind of man who would share my passion. Then, one day, a (male) friend of mine told me, almost apologetically, that althought there were many Christian guys who would be okay adopting, that maybe I should be a little less forthcoming about my passion to adopt children of different ethnicities. He told me that all guys, Christian or not, wanted to have children that were there own, and that even the ones who were “okay” with adopting, wouldn’t necessarily want children from multiple ethnicties that were so obviously “not their own”. I was heartbroken to think that this could be true, especially of men who were stiving to live like the Lord. All this time later, I am not any closer to finding that man with a heart for ALL of the Lord’s children, but I am holding out for him. And knowing that there are organizations like this out there, and that there are so many Godly men who have already embarked on the adventure of bringing children from around the world into their families gives me the strength to keep holding out and trusting inGod to provide him when the time is right. Thank you for opening the eyes of people who might not have understood that loving the world tuly means loving ALL of the peoples of the world, regardless of race, ethnicity or where in God’s beautiful world they came from.