The Many Faces of DIVERSITY

 

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Dear friends, I warn you as “temporary residents and foreigners” to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against your very souls.  Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors.  Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world.  1 Peter 2:11-12

Diversity is one of those words which, when properly used, can lend itself to a holy perspective.  When used to settle an argument from a narrow, agenda-driven perspective, it leads to a divisive, and often violent end.  A preacher, for instance, could get fired just for bringing-up the subject.

There is, without question, a pervasive sense of diversity in every nook and cranny of God’s creation.  All plants share some relationship, yet even in tribes of elm trees, no two are the same.  In human beings there is a connection that sentient life shares, including the diversity of personality, shade of skin color, textures, abilities, and reactions to what they experience.  Consider the fingerprint, are they all not unique?  Yet, in their alikeness they match only one of the beings God created among billions.  We are each unique, and each alike, according to God’s creative choices.

Now, if that is the foundational truth about God’s creation, which, by-the-way, He decided was good…very good…then what is all the “rub” about?  It’s not much of a well-kept secret, the tempest in our human teapot is a matter of human judging of other’s worth.  It is no small thing that we do judge others, considering God has reserved that to Himself.  ^{Read Matthew 7}

There is a difference between judging another person’s character or intent, and simply observing differences.  When making a judgment as to WHY someone has behaved as they do, we take upon ourselves the mantle of God; that job is already filled!  On the other hand it is, without exception, patently-inaccurate to declare that all diversity is in accord with God’s intention.  The mutation of human body tissue by cancer is hardly a welcome diversity.  The desire to participate in serial murder or sexual attacks cannot compare to enjoying a spring day on a walk through the park with birds calling-out the morning songs of life. 

Of course there are shades of gray, where good and evil tend to blend.  The current deification of diversity for the purpose of advancing one culture’s power over another culture which has controlled the power, is hardly what God had in mind for human unity.  This is the battle Apostle Peter calls the war of worldly desires against [our] very souls.  Calling-out sin for what it is merely speaks truth; cancelling the worth of other people’s lives in the process is reckless murder.  Has it ever been that two wrongs add up to being right?  It is a very thin line a would-be prophet crosses when pointing the finger at another.

For You Today 

While there is hardly room in all the books of all the libraries to outline a reconciliation of the obtuse natures of prejudice and cancel culture, for a believer/follower of Jesus Christ, we must try, must think about it, must address both in our own lives and walk with Christ.  To do less is to kiss goodbye any chance we have to (as Peter wrote) live properly with honorable behavior among today’s unbelieving culture.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:   Honorable Behavior - Part 1  and  Honorable Behavior - Part 2   

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Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©