Biblical Principles about Race: Creation

Let’s now go back through the Bible and better understand how race came to be. It is important to note that the Bible does not explicitly describe the origin of the different races of mankind. One possibility is that when God confused and differentiated languages at Babel, He may have also made some racial/physical differentiations as well (Genesis 11:1–9). Alternatively, the very act of God’s creating human languages may have caused the peoples to disperse and become ethnically and racially distinct. Either way, this divinely created confusion was to divide and disseminate their rebellious unity against Him.

According to the Bible, then, all of humanity comes from the very same family tree. In both Adam and Noah, we all have a common ancestry. Isaiah the prophet proclaimed, “You Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter;

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we are all the work of your hand” (Isaiah 64:8). The prophet Malachi asked, “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?” (Malachi 2:10).

In the New Testament, Paul preached, “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (Acts 17:26). Therefore, by creation everyone belongs to the same racial group—the human race.

Even though there is just one family tree, there are many different racial limbs and ethnic twigs on that same tree. Even so-called “mixed races” tend to identify with one group or the other, or they synthesize into a totally new branch of the family tree. Examples include Samaritans in the Bible; Coloureds in South Africa; Amerasians in Vietnam; Mulattos in Haiti, etc.

So, we need to look to the Bible for our true racial identity—not to secular history or to contemporary culture. Neither anthropologists nor social scientists can dig up and reconstruct our racial

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origins. Only the Bible gives us God’s revealed Word on the origin of man, the nature of man, and the destiny of man.

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