Faith-Lines Versus Blood-Lines

Turbo-Charged Bloodlines

Bloodlines are very important.  Any Christian who doubts this should turn to the opening chapters of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew and read there the bloodlines of the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the world.  Who your ancestors were, your blood lines of descent are clearly material--both genetically and spiritually.  The Kingdom of God is constructed around bloodlines.

The Unbelieving world is deeply ambivalent about bloodlines.
  On the one hand, the ultimate sin for many is racism--making race or bloodlines the ultimate, determining reality of life and culture.  Yet for secular humanists, most of whom are materialists, believing that the only reality, the really real, is matter--electrons, protons, neutrons and quarks--race has to be the most profound determinate of human being, since "Nature" or genetics, or molecular structures, are all determinative.

The secular world is, on the one hand, implicitly and fiercely racist--yet, on the other, emphatically opposed to it, believing it to be an anathema.  The modern secular world is just arrogantly stupid.   

The Christian, however, believes strongly in the significance of bloodlines, but ironically not because of blood.  Genetics and blood are not the all-constitutive reality.  God is.  Therefore, genetics and blood and descent, and whakapapa are highly influential and very important because God has created and made them--and made them to be determinative.  But not all determinative.  It turns out that faith is far more fundamental, constitutive and determinative.  But as soon as true faith in God and His Christ is present, bloodlines become more important than ever.

As someone once said, whilst it is true that blood is thicker than water, faith is thicker than both.  How does this work?  It works because the God in whom we believe enters a solemn covenant, sealed by His holy oath, not just with the one who believes, but with his children and descendants.  The covenant, embracing descendants, enhances the significance--the eternal significance--of bloodlines.  When God swore to Abraham, "I will be a God to you and to your children after you" (Genesis 17:7) and Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6),  God's promise and oath, and Abraham's faith in God and therefore in His promise and oath, suddenly made bloodlines much, much more important.

Now, it is faith which makes bloodlines determinative, not the reverse.  This is immediately apparent, because the sign of entering into covenant with God was extended to all of Abraham's household, estimated to number around about one thousand souls at the time--including those born in the household, and those who had been bought as household servants.  All of the males were circumcised--thus indicating their acceptance of, and submission to, Abraham's God (Genesis 17: 27; on the numbers in the household, Abraham could muster 318 armed and trained men from his extended household, Genesis 14:14).  From that point on, their bloodlines also became important and constitutive.

The women Ruth, of Moab and Rahab (and her household) of Canaan--not originally of the bloodline of faith--were added into it when they became believers in the God of Israel  (Hebrews 11:31).  Faith always remained more important than blood. Faith established the significance of bloodlines, not the reverse.  Consequently, when Israel rebelled and disbelieved and broke God's covenant, bloodlines did not save them: they were eventually cut off and cut out (II Kings 17:18).

Modern pietistic evangelicals have sought to disconnect faith and bloodlines.  They discount the latter as now unimportant.  They understand that in the New Covenant, the importance of bloodlines has lapsed.  It is now faith, and faith alone.  They have broken apart the foundation of faith and the superstructure of bloodlines. They are badly mistaken.  By divorcing faith and bloodlines they effectively cut themselves off  from the Scriptures, from culture, from humanity, and from the Scripture itself.  So much of Scripture becomes meaningless or irrelevant to them.

Transformation of culture and the salvation of the world cannot be achieved without the creational power of bloodlines (otherwise known as the conditioning power of nature and nur ture) being subjected to, and turbocharged by,  faith.  A faith which has no bloodline power is a culturally impotent faith; it cannot save the world.  It flies in the face of , "for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son . . . . ".  A faith that ignores the covenant promise to bloodlines is alienated from the redemptive power and scope of God and His Christ.