DIVERSITY AS A BLESSING
How can diversity be a blessing? To begin with, there are over 8 billion people living in the world, and none of them look exactly like you. You may have seen your doppelganger (a biological unrelated look-alike), but probably not because of diversity.
When you read or hear the word, what do you think of? Jesus wanted his disciples to be “one” and when he prayed for them, he said, “I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” He wanted the disciples (and anyone who believed in him) to be like him in purpose and in love for the Father, but he was not opposed to diversity.
In Genesis 11 we read, “At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words.” There was no diversity, but God decided to change that. The result of Babel was the big bang of language dissemination, because God said “Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them all over the earth…” and there was diversity, shown by the multiplicity and mixture of languages and cultures.
Today, there are over 7,000 distinct languages in the world (Ethnologue.com) and according to Genesis 11, Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth were the forefathers of three divisions of languages. However, these groups represent only a fraction of today’s languages. Genesis 11 is only a sampling of them.
I was raised on a small farm in NE Pennsylvania, isolated from other cultural and ethnic groups. I was only out of the State once until I attended college in Delaware and knew only of Blacks by the distasteful N word. However, God decided I was to live among black people, and they would be my friends. Going outside my own cultural group changed me. I married Joice, who was from Michigan, so I had lived and worked there. I studied for a year in California. We attended several summers at the U. of Oklahoma. We lived in Mexico, PNG, Australia, NZ, and a short time in England. I became the director of WBT and SIL in PNG for 6 years and supervised hundreds from 15 nationalities. l was on International Boards and experience great diversity.
My friends were diverse, from many countries and ethnic backgrounds. Now I live in a retired gated village with mainly old people, and I attend a Bible study, with men of varied backgrounds but all expressing a desire to know God and Jesus by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.
Diversity is everywhere in the plant and animal kingdoms: For example, there are 11,000 species of birds, and yet God is aware of sparrows in trouble. There are 5,000 species of snakes and in Australia almost all are poisonous (and protected).
Why protect snakes or the southern rockhopper penguin and olive ridley turtle? Or the Canadian prairie grasslands? Or the small Baibai and Bamu tribes in PNG?
Because God’s creation promotes incredible diversity on this earth. We may expect heaven to be similar.
Isaiah 28.11 says with “foreign lips and strange tongues God will speak to this people,” and in Revelation 5.9, we read that “with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.”
Diversity is a word that does not occur in my English Bibles. However, as in Acts 2, we will understand all the tongues and tribes and be a part of them. Our men’s Bible study is a small token of this promise.
Jesus was raised in cultural hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans. However, He healed a Samaritan woman and a Samaritan leper, and, to the astonishment of his disciples, he asked a Samaritan woman at the well for a drink.
He broke down the wall of hostility and he showed us that diversity can be a great blessing.
Karl Franklin
