November 19, 2013 – Revelations 7 – 8

When I read this the first time I thought about writing about the 144,000 and things I have heard about that #, but I didn’t really have any deeper thoughts on this.  I was reading it again and got to verse 7:9.  “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation RACE, people”.  I know that during slavery, many people in the south were very religious.  Many people used Biblical references to support the idea of slavery.  And yes, slavery is in the Bible and not totally bad.  But I think what was going on in our country and with African slaves is different than some of the slavery in the Bible.  That was usually a conquered nation or person indebted to someone.  Slavery might have become in that fashion, with European countries conquering Africa, but during the Civil War and leading up to it, the idea of slavery was not about a conquered or indebted person, it was the idea that black people were an inferior race.  That is what sparked my thought.  The Bible says every type of “race” will be in Heaven, counted among the uncountable number.  Didn’t those religious southerners not see that a black person, a person of a different race, is included in that great multitude or is it something that they ignored because slavery was such a benefit to them.  What did they think was a different race if not the Africans.  Did they also not realize that this is a former Jew, Israelite, Arab, writing it.  To the author, American Caucasians are a different race of people.  I understand that we still have racism in this country, maybe as bad as then in some places, but I also think for most of us we cannot fathom the attitude southerners had towards their slaves or how slaves felt.  Seeing human beings as something that is less than human is just beyond our comprehension today.  (As I was writing that, the last couple lines should be read slightly sarcastic because I thought of what abortion supporters define as human.  That was not the point of the reflection and literally didn’t come to mind until I was typing the last sentence.)