“For I say that Christ became a servant of the circumcised on behalf of God’s truth, to confirm the promises to the fathers, and so that Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, ‘Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and I will sing praise to your name.’ Again it says, ‘Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people!’ And again, ‘Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles; let all the peoples praise him!’ And again, Isaiah says, ‘The root of Jesse will appear, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; the Gentiles will hope in him.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The Gospel is for everyone. No one is exempt from it. No one gets left out of its offer of life if they will receive it. But because of our natural tribalism, this broad availability hasn’t often been so easy for us to wrap our minds and especially our hearts around. We want the Gospel to be for us and people who are like us. Other people…not so much. And yet, as much as we might be inclined in this direction, the biggest obstacle to our walking this way is the New Testament itself and passages like this one. Let’s talk about it.

Most churches across America (and, I suspect, across the world) are incredibly homogeneous. When you walk inside, everyone looks alike. Martin Luther King, Jr. often called 11:00 AM on Sunday mornings the most segregated hour in America. Now, on the one hand, this isn’t entirely a bad thing. We group ourselves together for worship based on worship preferences and styles. And, generally speaking, the culture associated with different skin colors has very often developed with its own, unique worship styles and preferences. To put that more directly, worship in a black church isn’t the same experience as worship in a white church.

On the other hand, God’s kingdom will be a decidedly heterogeneous affair. It will include people from every nation, tribe, people, and language. Skin color won’t matter a bit in Heaven. We’ll all worship the same God together as a perfectly united group. Which worship style will dominate? Heaven’s worship style will. And that will surely include bits and pieces of all of them. No one will be excluded from the fun if they are willing to join through Jesus. If we try to pretend now like that won’t be the case, we’ll run the risk of not being prepared for it when it finally arrives. Or, worse yet, we’ll spend our lives preparing for the wrong kingdom and find ourselves missing out on the real one when it gets here. In other words, worshiping only with people who look like you is okay as long as you remember that across the world not all believers do, and in Heaven they most definitely won’t. If you forget that, you’re headed for trouble.

This kind of a multifaceted kingdom has always been God’s aim even though the Israelites could have been forgiven for not understanding that. God told Abraham that He was going to make a great nation from his descendants. Well, the descendants of one man are all going to tend to look alike. They’ll all share the same basic culture. They’ll all have the same skin color. They will, in other words, be a pretty homogeneous group. And, as Abraham’s descendants developed over the course of their history, their group-think became pretty strong.

They could be forgiven for this development as well. God gave Israel the Law through Moses and it made pretty clear that if someone wanted to be right with Him, they needed to keep it faithfully. And, since Israel was the one who possessed the Law, becoming a follower of God who was in a right relationship with Him meant becoming an Israelite. You could be from somewhere else, and there are a handful of stories of people (mostly women) who were originally part of another people, but you had to join the people of Israel if you wanted to experience the benefits and blessings of the Law and a right relationship with God.

Over time, the people began to think that the only way someone could be in a right relationship with God was to be an Israelite. That was a status that was not available to the rest of the world. The trouble with this entirely understandable way of thinking is that God kept telling them otherwise. Even as they developed an increasingly xenophobic mindset toward Gentiles, God kept telling them through the prophets that He planned to one day throw open wide the doors to a relationship with Him and let everybody in. He was going to create a new covenant that would allow anyone and everyone to enjoy a right relationship with Him. It was going to be restricted to just people who kept the Law any longer.

With the ministry of Jesus, His death and resurrection, and the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the time had finally come to throw open those doors. Paul himself had been appointed as an apostle to the Gentiles. He wanted to make sure the people he was ministering to understood well that the Gospel really was for them too. It may have been first introduced to the people of Israel as God had always promised it would be, but it was not long limited to them. They got first crack, but the doors were soon thereafter thrown open to the rest of the world in a move that was perfectly consistent with what He had always been telling people was His plan.

Paul demonstrates this here by citing several verses from the Old Testament in quick succession, all pointing to God’s intention to include Gentiles in His kingdom. “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and I will sing praise to your name.” “Rejoice, you Gentiles, with his people!” “Praise the Lord, all your Gentiles; let all the peoples praise him!” “The root of Jesse will appear, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; the Gentiles will hope in him.” Over and over and over again God kept making clear that this was what He intended to do. His kingdom was always intended to be for everyone. He started with a few, and quickly thereafter expanded to all.

The reason Paul says this now is because it serves as a fitting conclusion to his long-running set of instructions for how the church could get along together in spite of their differences. The cultural differences that were giving them fits were mostly rooted in their two different backgrounds. The Jewish-background believers held that the idol meat couldn’t be eaten in good conscience, while the Gentile-background believers didn’t see any issue with it. There was no doubt more than a little racism on both sides motivating and shaping the nature of the debate. Paul wanted them to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this wasn’t okay. This wasn’t God’s plans. Unity was always the goal.

Jewish-background believers couldn’t rightly exclude the Gentiles or treat them as second-class citizens. Gentile-background believers didn’t need to have an inferiority complex. Both were wanted by God. His plans were always for everybody to be in His kingdom.

What this means for us is the same thing it meant for them. God’s kingdom is a diverse affair. There are believers around the world from every nation, tribe, people, and language. Well, maybe not all of them yet, but there are missionaries called by God who are working diligently to fix that. The Gospel is being translated into new languages all the time. People who have never had a chance to hear the good news in their heart language are gaining that ability almost daily.

If you worship in a church community where everyone looks pretty much like you do, you don’t need to feel any guilt about that, but you do need to constantly remember that God’s final kingdom won’t be like that. Perhaps consider occasionally incorporating worship elements from other cultures. Go on mission trips to other places so you can experience worship in their style and language. Talk to pastors from different churches to do pulpit swaps on occasion to give each body the experience of someone else’s style. Organize community worship events that intentionally incorporate the worship styles of multiple different churches. Pursue opportunities to experience more of the fullness of God’s kingdom than you usually get to experience. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll worship more in Spirit and in truth. You’ll be more ready for Heaven.