GOD BEYOND ALL BOUNDARIES

When we speak of God, we must be careful not to shrink Him to the size of our own mirrors. Every culture has tried to paint His face with its own colors, to imagine Him as “looking like us”—but Scripture will not allow such a small and earthly picture. God is not white or Black, not Middle Eastern or Asian, not bound by the categories that divide humanity. He is the Creator of all races, the Father of every nation, the Maker of every shade of skin and every shape of face.

If every human being is made in His image (Genesis 1:27), then the image of God is not captured by any one ethnicity; it sings through all of us. His beauty is reflected in the beautiful variety of humanity—one God, endlessly refracted through the prism of His creation. When we try to imagine Him, we should see a God who transcends color and incorporates every color, a God whose glory is too vast to be claimed by any single tribe or nation.

Heaven will not be populated by one kind of people but by a “multitude which no man can number, from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue” (Revelation 7:9). And if heaven looks that way, then the God on the throne must be the God of all.

We do not worship a tribal deity but the Lord of the universe. His face cannot be painted with human pigment; His image shines through the collective splendor of His children. The more we learn to see God as the God of every race, the more we learn to love people of every race. For prejudice shrivels under the weight of a God who embraces all peoples, and bigotry dies where the image of God is honored in every human soul.

If we want to envision God rightly, we must lift our eyes from the smallness of our categories and behold a God whose glory is too bright to fit within the borders of any human group—a God who is not the possession of one people, but the hope of all humanity.

BDD