7 John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.
John the Baptist comes pronouncing prophetic warning and woe. One matter he attacks is the Jewish mindset that believes it is special unto God just because it is Jewish. John ends all that nonsense by pulling the props from just that mindset. The Father does not love people solely upon the basis of their ethnicity or race. When the Father loves someone He loves them upon the basis of their identity in Christ.
Now, none of this is to say that having Abraham as their Father was unimportant or insignificant completely. St. Paul himself can later say in speaking of the descendants of Abraham, “Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises.” Paul speaks here of the great privilege of being Jewish. But what Israel had done is they had absolutized their biological ethnicity marker and said that nothing else mattered. John the Baptist informs this that such thinking is the thinking of a fool. It matters not what your lineage is if you do not look to the greater one that John is Heralding and if you do not bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance.
Being part of the covenant community is a great privilege but if you absolutize that membership in such a way that all one is resting in is biological connectedness you are lost.
This tendency to absolutize ethnicity as a marker of God’s automatic favor is not unique to Jews. People groups have done it repeatedly. As just one example in recent history is the Black Liberation Theologian James Cone who has written,
“Therefore, God’s Word of reconciliation means that we can only be justified by becoming black. Reconciliation makes us all black. Through this radical change, we become identified totally with the suffering of the black masses. It is this fact that makes all-white churches anti-Christian in their essence. To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!”
“Black Theology and Black Power” by James H. Cone (1969) — pg. 151
This kind of specious thinking goes on among White people as well,
Bertrand Comparet, writing in the American Institute of Theology’s “Bible Correspondence Course,” observes:
“Of course, one of the purposes [in Christ’s coming] was to pay the penalty of the sins of every person who believes and accepts Him as his personal Savior. But this is not all: another purpose of His first coming was to redeem His people ISRAEL which we know are not and never were composed of Jews; but today they are known as the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Germanic nations.”
This is a strange quote because it seems to draw a distinction between Christ coming to offer salvation to all while only redeeming white people. Regardless, of its strangeness it is suggesting that ethnic markers limit who can be redeemed.
We see in both these quotes is the same thing here that John the Baptist was warning against in his preaching to the Jews in Luke 3. We see here an absolutizing of ethnic markers so that nothing else matters besides ethnicity.
That is something we must warn against and be on guard against. Our hope, in terms of our salvation, must not rest in ethnic markers, though we can and should thank God for those markers and understand what a great blessing they are. Our hope is anchored in being properly related to the Lord Christ who saves men from every tribe, tongue, and nation, in their tribes, tongues, and nations.
