Two kinds of people populate our world: those who know God in Christ, and those who do not. Christianity makes the radical claim, and represents the remarkable reality, that through Jesus Christ, and by his Spirit, we know and enjoy the true God. At bottom, the issue is not ethnicity, but knowing God. Maybe most revealing of all, Paul writes to believers “that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thessalonians 4:4–5). Peter also warned Christians of Gentiles who “speak against you as evildoers” (1 Peter 2:12) he drew a clear line between Christian conduct and “doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry” (1 Peter 4:3). Paul wrote that Christ crucified was “folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23) and charged his converts to “no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds” (Ephesians 4:17). Meanwhile, the Gentiles, with rare exceptions, did not hear from or know the true God.Įven in the ministry of Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles (Romans 11:13 1 Timothy 2:7), the stigma held. God spoke specially to his chosen people, the Jews. God chose Abraham, birthing a special ethnic people to whom he revealed himself.

Until the coming of Christ, Gentiles (non-Jews) were, by and large, merely natural, worldly persons, born under sin and still under sin, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). In short, he calls us to live like we know God. But against our natural instincts, and through the grace of God’s word and Spirit, Jesus calls us not to Gentile love (Matthew 5:47), not to Gentile prayer (6:7), not to Gentile fears (6:32), and not to Gentile leadership (20:25 also Mark 10:42 Luke 22:25). Four separate times they are negative examples of what Christians are not to be.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus points to “the Gentiles” as those who do not know God. The truth will become plain as to whether we truly have supernatural life in our soul, or not. Given enough time, the tree will bear fruit, or not. Though false professions abound and unbelievers demonstrate remarkable virtue in society, at the bottom of our shared humanity lies one great difference: whether we truly know God himself, through Jesus, or not. A precious few do.įor now, it can be difficult to distinguish these two types of people. Many do not trust and treasure Jesus as Lord and Savior. Some were born only once others have been born again. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are simply natural and those who have supernatural life in them.

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