Ethnic Benefits and Realities - 15
Shared and unshared history of different people groups.
God put you in your family. And your family descended from previous families: your mother’s family and your father’s. This makes your grandfather and grandmother and your great-grandfather and great-grandmother, and great-great and so on, your ancestors. And those ancestors weave their way all the way to Shem, Ham and Japheth - and ultimately to Noah and Adam.
The word “relatives”1 describes these relationships. And the word “genealogy” is the study of family origins or the listing of one’s ancestors. The first clue to the meaning of the word genealogy is in the root "gene," as in "passed on through the genes." Add to that the suffix -logy, which means "study," and you get genealogy, the study of one's origins.2
This means your family and ancestors are going to be different from mine. It is in the genes. And yet, our ancestors are still three brothers in the Ark of Noah. Furthermore, we trace our lineage directly back to the Garden of Eden as well. So we are all still related.
Nevertheless, God means for us to benefit from our familial and ancestral relations and to value its heritage.3 He has given to each family an ancestry and a place in history. He has moved them about geographically. He has gifted all the different peoples specially in order that each might provide for the rest of mankind and bring glory to Him.
Thomas Sowell, an American economist and social commentator, in his book Race and Culture, provides examples of ethnic groups being proficient in a trade or skill. For example the Chinese are known for being effective retailers, the Germans for making pianos, the Italians for architecture and as fishermen, the Jews in the garment industry. The interesting point that Sowell makes is that though many would call this “stereotyping” the ethnic groups he cites have actually exhibited the skills over many generations and internationally having no proximity to the same ethnic group (relative) from the other parts of the world in which they are located. They share only a heritage.4
We see an example of this in Exodus 31:1-4.
1The LORD said to Moses, 2“See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, 3and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, 4to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, 5in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.
We need not read into this description some kind of miracle, as if God took a useless person from off the street and gave him wonderful abilities in a minute. Rather Bezalel is the son of Uri. Uri was the son of Hur. Hur is descended from Judah. When God tells Moses, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship…” in design, cutting carving and every craft, using gold, silver, bronze and wood, this should be seen as specially craftsmanship built into him by God throughout his life. And surely Bezalel’s father and grandfather and ancestors played some part in God’s preparation of the man.
This specialty given to a man, his family, and his ethnic lineage does not prevent other people from sharing in the knowledge and skill. We learn from one another and share from each others heritages. Marriage, migration, trade, education, even war and conquest, create a melding of peoples and their gifts, skills and interests.5
The United States of America has long been called The Great Melting Pot, as it welcomed into its land many different peoples: English, Dutch, Irish, German, etc. Even us Nordic types. All of these came in as groups. They settled among their own, because their own cared for them. They settled among their own because it is right to pay back your parents, grandparents, etc. They settled among their own because they spoke the same language. These factors are God-given and to be appreciated.
This was recently illustrated to me as I looked at my mom and dad’s high school yearbook. They attended Superior Central High School way up north, in Superior Wisconsin. Superior was a shipping port. It was heavily populated by Swedes and Norwegians.
In their 1956 Yearbook I saw that the school mascot was the Viking. And the last names of the boys on the varsity basketball team were: Lundgren, Anderson, Olson, Erickson, Sanderson and the like. Remember, my dad was a Nelson and my mom was a Carlstrom. All Nordic.
Again, this is good. You would expect people to congregate with family.
Nonetheless, the interaction of these many ethnic groups, over time, in a shared national cause, has broken down ethnic barriers to the benefit (and to the loss) of individual ethnic groups. The challenge is ever to garner the gifts God has given to each ethnic heritage without cutting off any ethnic group from the greater family of God.
After all, as Revelation 7 shows us:
9After 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, 10and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
So each family (or ethnic tradition) has a shared and unshared history with all other families of the earth. God intended it to be that way.
A relative is a person connected by blood or marriage.
From vocabulary.com
Heritage is simply what you have inherited from your particular ancestors. This can come in the form of physical property, but also as cultural traditions, or historically developed skills.
Sowell, Thomas, Race and Culture, Basic Books of Harper Collins, New York, 1994, pp 2-14.
Sowell points out how the Japanese took advantage to learn from British technology. What began as a fearful awe of the West’s railroad’s locomotive engine, transformed itself into Japan’s “bullet train” one hundred year’s later. (Race and Culture, p. 19.)