Thoughts on Diversity

I tend to do a lot of deep thinking in the shower, and this morning, the topic in my head was a dinner conversation from several days ago. My family was discussing the recent push for “diversity” in everything at the dinner table, and this sparked some of my own contemplations.
What is most odd about this new movement in our world is that it is often—not always, but often—directed at denouncing and downplaying the “Western Christian World”. The world in recent years has claimed it’s trying to create diversity—within schools, businesses, organizations, etc—but the thing is; diversity was not first created or envisioned by us. The world ignores and denies that diversity has ever existed before; oddly enough, it has forgotten, even refuted, that diversity was first created by God, and first re-created and exemplified within Christianity itself.
God was the first creator of the diverse—the creation of the world. Genesis begins the story of the world by telling how God created everything by splitting things in twos:

“He separated the light from the darkness…So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky” (Genesis 1:4-8).

God continues with His binary fission throughout Genesis 1, finally culminating in the creation of man (Adam) and woman (Eve). We see that the very first evidence of diversity isn’t a conception by man, but by God. The world was created as an extension of His kingdom, and He created it to be diverse. The beauty of the Garden of Eden was in that it was diverse, but in harmony; it was part of God’s Kingdom, and it was the world as God meant for it to be.
And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years later, diversity was first re-created—again, not by man—but by God. Specifically, by Christ. Our world has painted Christians as Caucasian, White, southern Americans, when really, that’s only one tiny, miniscule percent of the population of Christians across the globe. Diversity in Christianity, in fact, goes back to the very beginnings of Jesus’ ministry. Others like Mohammed, or Confucius, preached primarily to one group of people. Christ specifically sought out the marginalized. The “others”. Lepers, diseased, paralytics, Samaritans. Christ set the second example of the diversity of God’s Kingdom; He re-established how diversity was supposed to be manifest in God’s redeemed Kingdom, in the new Garden of Eden.

But the difference between the Kingdom Christ was beginning to re-create, and the one that our world is fruitlessly trying to mimic, is that Christ was not selecting the people He did for their language, or their ancestors, or their culture. He hand-picked them for their individuality—for their unique reflections of God’s image. Just as he hand-made and picked Adam to take care of His new word. Christ, and Christian evangelism as it should be, seeks out, not a GROUP of people, but an individual, who has a completely unique image of God within them, and seeks to love that person and bring out those characteristics of God.

What’s even more interesting is that, if we look at the second time diversity is addressed in the Old Testament, the story of the Tower of Babel, we see God trying to send a message about His Kingdom. The people, our ancestors, decide they want to reach God’s Kingdom; that they want to build something as tall as God. Which, we know today, is ridiculous. [But wait a minute, because in a second I’ll show how we’re being just as stupid.] God’s people, in essence, try to create their own image of Him, depicted in His HEIGHT. They think that if they can be as tall as God, then they can be more like Him, and be able to achieve, to, quite literally, reach, His Kingdom.
And God gets angry. Not because He’s threatened, or scared, or intimidated that they could actually reach His Kingdom, but because THEY JUST DON’T GET IT. His people fail to see that they ARE HIS PEOPLE because HE CREATED THEM IN HIS IMAGE. Every one of those men that tried to build a tower to God was so focused outwardly on trying to be like God, that they completely missed God’s image within one another. THAT is the true Kingdom of God, and God’s true image.
So God divided them linguistically. He was trying to make a point that they can’t make themselves fully like God, and they can’t re-create God’s Kingdom. They were wholly imperfect and couldn’t get close to God through their own means, their own works. God was going to have to find a way to them instead.

So here we are today, two, perhaps three thousand years later, again missing the point. We’re trying to create mini-models of God’s diverse Kingdom by hand-selecting people from every corner of every culture, putting them in a bottle, and shaking it up; hoping that what comes out looks like God. We’ve taken the story of the Tower of Babel and instead of using it to understand that God wants us to see Him in each other and value and love one another for that, we’re coming to the conclusion that God wants us to build an image of Him through as many different languages, races, and religions as possible. We’ve again REMOVED the importance of loving the individual that God emphasized to Adam in the Garden, and that Christ emphasized to the ancient world, and instead have put absolute statistics in the place of unconditional love.