4. Diversity Undercuts Pride
By focusing on all the people groups of the world, God undercuts ethnocentric pride and throws all peoples back upon his free grace rather than any distinctive of their own.
This is what Paul emphasizes in Acts 17:26 when he says to the proud citizens of Athens, “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.” F.F. Bruce points out that “the Athenians … pride themselves on being … sprung from the soil of their native Attica. … They were the only Greeks on the European mainland who had no tradition of their ancestors coming into Greece; they belonged to the earliest wave of Greek immigration.”
Against this boast Paul countered: You and the Barbarians and the Jews and the Romans all came from the same origin. And you came by God’s will, not your own; and the time and place of your existence is in God’s hand. Every time God expresses his missionary focus for all the nations, he cuts the nerve of ethnocentric pride.
The Double Joy of Diversity
It’s a humbling thing to discover that God does not choose our people group because of any distinctives of worth but rather that we might double our joy in him by being a means of bringing all the other groups into the same joy.
Humility is the flip side of giving God all the glory. Humility means reveling in his grace, not our goodness. In pressing us on to all the peoples, God is pressing us further into the humblest and deepest experience of his grace and weaning us more and more from our ingrained pride.
In doing this he is preparing for himself a people—from all the peoples—who will be able to worship him with free and white-hot admiration.
