intermarriage

I am growing in my understanding and appreciation with regard to human marriage being a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church. In Bloodlines, John Piper writes on intermarriage:

The Bible Forbids Intermarriage between Unbeliever and Believer—but Not between Races

One of the most celebrated marriages in the Bible, and one that gave rise to the line of king David, and finally to Jesus, was the marriage between a Jew and a Moabite—the marriage of Boaz and Ruth (Ruth 4:21–22). Ruth was the Moabite (Ruth 1:4). They were not only ethnically and religiously foreign; they were the offspring of incest: “Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. The firstborn bore a son and called his name Moab. He is the father of the Moabites to this day” (Gen. 19:36–37).

But in spite of these serious divisions, Ruth was a lover of the true God and came under the wings of his covenant with Israel (Ruth 2:12). This faith and this marriage and the offspring that came from it were so remarkable that the New Testament Gospel of Matthew included Ruth as one of the four women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:5).

What the book of Ruth illustrates is that there was no absolute rule in God’s Word forbidding marriage across racial and ethnic lines. What the Bible does forbid is the marriage of a believer and unbeliever. The apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:39, “A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord.” Whom she wishes, only in the Lord. The man she marries must be in the Lord. He must be a believer in Jesus Christ.15

This was the main point of the Old Testament warnings about marrying those among the pagan nations. The point was not to protect racial purity. The point was to protect religious purity. For example, in Deuteronomy 7:3–4 Moses said:  

You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you.  

The issue is not color mixing, or customs mixing, or clan identity. The issue is: will there be one common allegiance to the true God in this marriage or will there be divided affections? The prohibition in God’s Word is not against interracial marriage but against marriage between the true Israel, the church (from every people, tribe, and nation), and those who are not part of the true Israel.16 That is, the Bible prohibits marriage between those who believe in Christ (the Messiah) and those who don’t. “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14).

This is exactly what we would expect if the great ground of our identity is not our ethnic differences but our common humanity in the image of God and especially our new humanity in Christ. Which leads to the third biblical observation.