The Unfinished Work: Scripture, Race, and Today

Today's Scripture

Revelation 7:9-10 — "After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'"

Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Ephesians 2:14 — "For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility."

The Big Idea

The Bible's story begins with every human being made in God's image and ends with every nation gathered around God's throne. The church is meant to be a living preview of that ending — here, now, in actual congregations. The abolitionists finished their chapter; this last day asks about ours.

Reflection

Back to the beginning

Ten days ago this plan started in Genesis, and the ending sends us back there. Genesis 1:26-27 — God created humanity "in his own image." Every claim the abolitionists made finally rested on that one sentence. Not on economics, not on politics, but on the stubborn fact that the person in chains bore the image of the King, and so no price tag could ever be honest.

Slavery's defenders needed that sentence to be false, or at least flexible. So they spent centuries arguing, in effect, that some image-bearers counted less. The lie did not die at Appomattox in 1865 when the war ended. It outlived emancipation — in segregation laws, in terror, in the quieter habits of contempt. Lies about the image of God are like weeds: cutting off the visible part is not the same as pulling the root.

But the truth has its own long patience. Sojourner Truth — who had been bought and sold as property in New York before walking to freedom — summarized her whole confidence in five words:

"Truth is powerful and it prevails." — Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth

She did not say truth is quick. She said it prevails. Genesis 1:27 has now outlasted pharaohs, plantations, and every empire built on its denial. It will outlast whatever denies it next.

The end of the story

Where is the whole story going? The apostle John was given a preview. Revelation 7:9-10 — "a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb... crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God.'"

Look closely at that crowd. The differences are not erased — John can still see that they come from every nation, tribe, people, and language. Heaven is not a place where everyone becomes the same; it is a place where difference finally stops meaning danger. The nations bring their colors with them, and every color faces the throne.

This is the very book, remember, that the Slave Bible's editors cut out entirely. They were wise in their generation: nothing is more dangerous to an empire of human hierarchy than a vision of every people standing equal before the Lamb. And the scene only deepens. Revelation 21:3-4 — "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Every tear — including the ones history never recorded, wept in the holds of ships and in the cabins of plantations. God saw them all, and he intends to dry them all.

Augustine, watching the Roman world crumble around him, ended his greatest book by leaning into that future:

"There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end." — Augustine, The City of God

But here is the question this plan has been building toward: is that future only something to wait for? N.T. Wright says the resurrection answers with a no:

"Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The Revelation 7 crowd is not just a destination. It is a blueprint.

A preview people

Think of how a movie trailer works. It is not the film; it is two minutes cut from the film, released early, so you can taste what is coming. That is what the church is supposed to be: footage from the future, playing now, in ordinary neighborhoods. 1 Peter 2:9 calls believers "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" — a new kind of people, drawn from all the old kinds.

The cross is what makes this possible. Ephesians 2:14 — "For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility." Paul wrote that about the deepest division of his world, Jew and Gentile. The wall came down not through a program but in his flesh — Jesus absorbed the hostility into himself and left it buried in his tomb. So Paul can say, Colossians 3:11 — "Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all." Notice "slave, free" sitting right in that list. The early church seated masters and slaves at one table; the abolitionists were not inventing something new but excavating something ancient.

Which makes the church's failures here so serious. Martin Luther King Jr. — a pastor before he was anything else — named the painful irony of American church life:

"I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America." — Martin Luther King Jr., 1960

The hour set aside to preview Revelation 7 had become the hour that least resembled it. And Jesus told us exactly what is at stake in that gap. John 13:34-35 — "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Then he prayed it the night before he died: John 17:20-21 — "that they may all be one... so that the world may believe that you have sent me." Christian unity is not church décor. According to Jesus, it is evidence — his chosen proof, presented to a skeptical world.

Francis Schaeffer called this "the final apologetic," the last argument left when all the debating is done:

"We cannot expect the world to believe that the Father sent the Son, that Jesus' claims are true, and that Christianity is true, unless the world sees some reality of the oneness of true Christians." — Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian

Read that the other way around and it explains centuries of damage: a divided, race-sorted church preaches, loudly and weekly, that the gospel does not actually work. A reconciled one preaches that it does — before anyone opens a Bible.

Hope that gets to work

So where do we go from here? Not to vague guilt, and not to a shrug. To a ministry. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 — God "through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation." Reconciliation is an old word for turning enemies back into family. Notice the order: first we receive reconciliation — while we were God's enemies, he made peace with us at his own expense — and only then are we given it as a job. People who know they were welcomed when they deserved a closed door make terrible doorkeepers and wonderful welcomers.

This is why King could stand at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, a century after emancipation, and still talk like a man who had seen the ending:

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." — Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream"

That image is not borrowed from politics. It is the Lord's Table, and behind it the wedding supper of the Lamb. King was doing what the enslaved singers of the spirituals did, what Wilberforce did, what John the apostle did from his prison island: pulling the future into the present and refusing to let go.

Some worry that staring at heaven makes Christians useless on earth. C.S. Lewis checked the record and found the opposite:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The abolitionists could outlast decades of defeat because they had already seen how the story ends. Hope is not the enemy of work; it is the fuel.

And so this plan ends where the gospel always ends — not with "try harder," but with what God has done. The Lamb at the center of Revelation 7 is there as a Lamb — slain, risen, bearing the marks. He purchased that multinational multitude "with his blood," Revelation says, becoming for one dark afternoon the most oppressed person in history so that every oppression would one day end. The unfinished work is real, and it is ours. But it sits inside a finished work that is his. We do not labor toward a hopeful maybe. We labor backward from a certain dawn — every nation, every tribe, every tongue, one throne, no more tears.

Truth is powerful, and it prevails.

Going Deeper

This week, take one small step across a line that Revelation 7 says will not exist forever. Share a meal or a long conversation with a brother or sister in Christ from a different racial or cultural background — not as a project, but as family. If your circle has no one to ask, let that fact itself become a prayer, and find a recording of a worship service in another language to pray along with once. Previews are made of small scenes. Be one.