Is God Colorblind?

A few weeks ago I found out my good friend Brent Watson is colorblind. I’d known the guy for years and had no idea. So naturally, being the curious type, I asked him about it. “What’s that like for you?” He explained that he sees the same things I see — he just has a hard time telling reds and greens apart. His eyes work fine. They just process color differently than mine do.

That conversation with Brent has been rattling around in my head ever since, because it got me thinking about a much bigger question: is God colorblind?

I know, I know. Preacher question. Stay with me.

I want to answer that honestly, which means I’m going to answer it two ways — because the real answer is both yes and no. And getting there means telling on myself a little.

Where I’m From

I grew up in the Moxa trailer park in South Zanesville, Ohio, for my first seven or eight years. Southeastern Ohio, Appalachian country. We eventually moved up to a little three-bedroom ranch and thought we were living large. I was with my sisters this past Friday visiting my mom in Zanesville, and we got to laughing about how they shared the same double bed until they graduated high school. My dad had ten kids in his family — three of the boys shared one bed. That’s just how it was.

When I left for college with everything I owned in the back of a pickup truck, people made jokes. Coming down from the hills, from Appalachia. And honestly? I loved it. I leaned into it. Jeff Foxworthy was huge back then, and we had our own version for Zanesville. You might be from Zanesville if you find three cars in your yard while you’re mowing it. You might be from Zanesville if you make change out of the offering plate. We picked on ourselves constantly, and it was fun, because we were the ones telling the jokes.

Here’s the thing, though — Jesus took the same heat. He was from Nazareth, a nothing town tucked in the hills of lower Galilee, nowhere near the sophistication of Jerusalem or the Roman polish of Tiberias. When Philip told Nathaniel he’d found the one Moses and the prophets wrote about — Jesus of Nazareth — Nathaniel’s response was basically, “Nazareth? Can anything good come out of that place?” I like to imagine he said it with a little sparkle in his eye, half-joking, the way we used to rib each other about Zanesville. Maybe it was gentle. Maybe it wasn’t.

Because there’s a world of difference between kidding around when everybody’s in on it, and using words as weapons to devalue somebody. One is community. The other is cruelty. And when cruelty organizes itself into systems, it becomes something else entirely: racism. Ancient as the hills — Egyptians and Philistines, Syrians and Hittites, all the way through the Inquisition, the Crusades, slavery, and plenty of chapters much closer to home than any of us would like to admit.

So — Colorblind or Not?

Here’s my two-part answer.

First: no. God is not colorblind, because God is not blind, period. God made you — every detail, on purpose, no mistakes. You were knit together in your mother’s womb exactly as you are. Your color isn’t a flaw God is politely overlooking. It’s something God authored and called good. God sees you fully and delights in what God made.

But then flip the coin: yes, in the sense that God does not rank people. No favorites, no elite tier, no group that matters more than another — not by race, not by culture, not by how educated you are or how much you give. First Samuel says people look at outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. Paul tells the Galatians there’s no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female — we’re all one in Christ. That’s not erasing difference. That’s refusing to rank it.

What’s Actually Behind It

If I had to name what fuels racism, I’d point to three things.

The first is the people who raised us. It rarely comes as an announced lesson. It comes sideways — an offhand comment about “them,” a joke that gets repeated until it hardens into a worldview. I remember growing up hearing folks argue about Michael Jordan being the greatest ever, and someone piping up, “Don’t forget Larry Bird.” Or Tiger Woods hitting a 300-yard drive and someone muttering, “They’re taking over that game too.” Kids hear that stuff on repeat. It sinks in whether we mean it to or not.

The second is fear. They’re taking our jobs. Moving into our neighborhoods. Cutting into my kid’s playing time. Underneath all of it is one question: what does this mean for me? And Scripture is pretty blunt that God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of love and a sound mind.

The third — and this is the one that stings — is pride. When I’m honest about my own junk, I realize I’m guilty enough to have put Jesus on the cross myself. That’s not false humility; that’s just true. And the strange gift of growing in faith is that the more I sit with that, the less room I have left to feel superior to anybody else. My critical spirit toward other people shrinks in direct proportion to how honestly I face my own.

Coming and Seeing

So what do we actually do with this?

Philip never argued Nathaniel out of his prejudice. He didn’t build a case for Jesus’ résumé. He just said, “Come and see.” That’s still the move. Not lecturing people out of their assumptions, but inviting them into an actual relationship long enough for the assumption to fall apart on its own.

I experienced this firsthand playing goalkeeper on my college soccer team. Guys from nine different states, plus international teammates from Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia. I hadn’t heard much Spanish spoken growing up in a trailer park in South Zanesville, and suddenly I was hearing it every day at practice. But we united around something bigger than our differences — a shared love for the game, a shared opponent on the schedule, and for a lot of us, a shared love for Jesus. That’s the pattern. Find the common cause big enough to make the differences a gift instead of a threat.

That’s still true for anywhere real diversity happens well — a soccer team, a church, a neighborhood. Nobody pretends the differences aren’t there. They just stop being the thing that divides.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Turns out — yes. The love of God, wrapped in human skin, from the last town anybody expected. That should tell us something about where we’re too quick to assume nothing good can come from.