Beeson Podcast, Episode #660
Dr. Christopher J. H. Wright
Date

>>Announcer: 

Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. 


>>Doug Sweeney:

Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney. Today we continue our 2023 Greatest Hits podcast series with a sermon by Dr. Christopher J H Wright, preached in 2002. During the 2023 spring semester we were pleased to have Dr. Wright with us as a guest on the podcast and as a guest for our global voices lecture series. You can listen to that episode published on March 28th and get to know Dr. Wright a little better. 

Today we want to play for you a sermon Dr. Wright preached in chapel during our biblical studies lectures in 2002. His sermon is entitled, “Missiology as a Basis for Biblical Hermeneutics.” In this sermon, Dr. Wright considers how the bible is the product of mission. Dr. Wright’s conviction in his own words is that the bible is the witness of God’s missional engagement with God’s world through God’s people for God’s own purpose. Dr. Wright turns our attention to Luke 24 where Jesus himself says that what is written in the scriptures concerning repentance and forgiveness of sins being preached in the name of Jesus. 

Thus, the Old Testament scriptures point to the Messiah but the testimony of the scriptures themselves are also missiological as it relates to God’s mission. Dr. Wright talks about God with a mission, humanity with a mission, Israel with a mission, Jesus with a mission, and the church with a mission. And how each of these categories for a matrix for a missiological hermeneutic to scripture.

Without further introduction, let’s listen now to Dr. Christopher Wright.


>>Wright:

I begin with a personal word. My parents were missionaries. I was brought up in a missionary home. This is not a testimony, by the way, although in some ways I suppose it is. But I well remember going to many missionary conventions with my parents, especially with my father, as a young boy. And helping him to set up the stall for the un-evangelized fields mission that he was the secretary for in great conference centers around Belfast, Bangor, and other parts of Northern Ireland. 

And around the walls would be these great missionary texts from the bible. “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” they said in the authorized version of course in those days. “Go and make disciples of every nation.” “How will they believe on him whom they have not heard.” And, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” “Here am I. Send me.” And so on.

All these great missionary texts. I could have recited them to you easily by the age of ten or eleven. I knew all my bible missionary texts very well. 

By the age of 21 I had a degree in theology from the University of Cambridge in which those same texts had been rather curiously missing, it seemed. At least it’s curious now to me, it wasn’t I suppose then because in those days as far as I remember missiology was not even a word. It certainly wasn’t a word in the Cambridge Divinity faculty. And those who were doing theology were not particularly interested in mission. And those who were interested in mission were not particularly the ones who were doing theology. It just happened at least for one of my years that I was doing both.

But basically there was really very little link between these two. Theology was all about what God was, what God had said, what God had done, and what mostly dead people thought about all of those things. (laughter) Whereas mission, mission was about what we do. We the living. Especially we who are evangelicals know that God has sent us into the world to make disciples. Jesus sends me this I know for the bible tells me so. And we get on mission. Mission is what we do. But it hadn’t really anything to do with theology.

That was my sort of early life. After spending some years teaching in India, I came back onto the staff of All Nations Christian College, and as you’ve heard All Nations Christian College in England is a college which trains people for cross cultural mission. It is basically a missionary training college where we teach bible and theology and church history and all sorts of other things. But fundamentally from a missional angle. 

And for 13 years I have been teaching the course called “The Biblical Basis of Mission.” And again, it struck me after a while that it’s interesting that the noun in that title is “mission,” as though mission is what we do, mission is what we know what it is, what it is all about – all we need for it is a biblical basis. Biblical is the adjective. And we know what mission is, so roll out the texts from the bible, which tell us about mission and then we can all be happy because these are All Nation students. They need to have a biblical basis for their mission.

But the more I taught that course the more I used to say to the students at the very beginning that I would really like to have renamed it. Not so much the Biblical Basis of Mission as the Mission of the Basis of the Bible. Because it seemed to me that the bible itself is fundamentally a product of mission. It is the deposit, it is the witness to God’s missional engagement with God’s world, through God’s people, for God’s own purpose. 

The bible is the product of mission. It’s not so much that we got the bible and then we get to the end of the gospels and, oh dear, Jesus says, “Go and tell the nations,” so we’d better do that as well. So that mission becomes a kind of afterthought on top of theology and biblical studies, but rather that the bible itself is in that much abused phrase what the bible is all about. In other words, it is missiological through and through. 

That is a conviction which has grown on me over the years. Which I have tried to develop in my teaching of that course. And which I want to some extent to try to share with you today and tomorrow. 

Now of course to say that there is a missional basis for the bible or that mission is what the bible is all about may seem a very exaggerated kind of claim to make. You couldn’t turn any other ordinary phrase around like that. I mean, you could say that there is, say, a biblical basis for work. But I wouldn’t say that work is what the bible is all about. Or that there is a biblical basis for a marriage, but you wouldn’t talk about a marital basis for the bible. 

So, how can it be then that you can take a word like mission and say that, as I would want to affirm, that mission is fundamentally the core, the hermeneutical core of what the bible is about – that it is a missional document in origin, in transmission, and in its authority over us. Well, I take my authority from a reasonably reputable source named the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And you will see on my second point on the handout, that phrase “this is what is written.” And I would direct you to the closing words of Luke’s Gospel (Luke 24) where it seems to me that Jesus in fact does do something very like this. That is to say that this mission is what the scriptures are all about.

Luke 24 is very interesting as a chapter because twice over in the story of Luke 24 Jesus gives a lecture in Old Testament hermeneutics. Once on his feet, on the road to Emmaus to the two disciples, and then again on the evening of the same day to those two plus the other disciples who were gathered in Jerusalem. 

Luke records for us, Luke 24:44. I’ll just read this, after they had gotten over their shock and Jesus says, hey, I can’t be a ghost if I can eat fish in front of you. Very interesting theological conundrum for you there. Where are the molecules of the fish that Jesus ate in his resurrection body now? (laughs) Nothing to do with this lecture at all (laughter) ... But it puzzles me somewhat to know the relationship between this physical world and the resurrection body of Jesus that the risen Jesus ate a fish. So, there you go.

No, that’s not the point. Jesus then opened the scriptures to them and he says, “This is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms.” Which of course is the way of expressing what we would now call the Old Testament canon, the scriptures of Jesus and his disciples. “Then Jesus opened their minds so that they could understand the scriptures.” That’s what I mean by saying he’s giving a lecture in Old Testament hermeneutics. He’s saying, guys, this is the way you should read your bibles now. This is how you must understand the scriptures – in the light of the fact that (v. 46) “This is what is written, that Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem and you are witnesses of these things.” 

Jesus says you’ve got to read your scriptures in the light of, first of all, the fact that they speak about me, the Messiah, that I would come, suffer, die, rise again on the third day. And as evangelicals we are very familiar with that. That’s the messianic interpretation of the Old Testament. We’re good at it. We know our messianic texts. We list them. We put them in books. We tick them off. And rather like the magi inquiring after Jesus, we get the answers we want, we look up the Old Testament and we find the scriptures that point to Jesus.

But you notice that Jesus did not stop with the identification of the Messiah and his suffering and death. Jesus went on to say, “This is what is written. Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in the name of Jesus the Messiah to all nations. And you are witnesses.” And that is a missional interpretation of the scripture. 

Now as I was saying to the class I was teaching just an hour or two ago, if I had been one of the disciples of Jesus there with my pen and notebook out for this lecture, taking notes, I might well have said, “Excuse me, Jesus, can you give me a reference for that? Where does it say, where is it written that repentance and forgiveness will be preached to all nations in the name of the Messiah beginning in Jerusalem?” Is that somewhere in Isaiah? Or what?

And of course what Jesus is not doing here is he’s not actually quoting a specific text of the scriptures, though he could perfectly well have done so, because he probably knew most of them by heart, he isn’t quoting a text, he is in fact saying this is what is written. This is what it’s about.” This is the intention of the scripture. This is where it is leading. This is the whole thrust of the scriptures. Not only Messianic but also missiological. Not only that I would come as the Messiah of Israel, but ultimately that the gospel, repentance and forgiveness, would go to the nations. That is not just here and now, it’s not just something new that Jesus was telling his disciples as a kind of afterthought, it was in fact what the scriptures had said all along.

It’s interesting that the apostle Paul recorded in Acts of course perhaps not entirely surprising since Luke wrote Acts as well as the gospel of Luke, that Paul says the same thing effectively in Acts 26:22-23. During one of his trial speeches, and in Acts 26 Paul, defending himself before King Agrippa on this occasion said, “Look, I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen.” Same basic thrust, “the fulfillment of the scriptures namely, that the Christ would suffer and as the first to rise from the dead would proclaim light to his own people and to the nations, the Gentiles.” 

Now, Jesus never went and preached to the nations in his post resurrection life. He entrusted that to his disciples. And so Paul is also saying that the mission of the church to the nations is as much part of the thrust and teaching of the scriptures as was the coming of the Messiah himself. 

So, therefore it seems to me that it is right to say that the scriptures of the Old Testament have this missional dimension as well as a Messianic dimension. And they are related to God’s mission. And this is where I suppose I need to make this distinction by asking the question: Well, whose mission is it, really?

If we are stuck with the kind of paradigm of mission as basically something that we do – mission is us responding to human needs and lost-ness and all this stuff. Mission is what we do and then somehow invite God to back up from biblical text. I think we’ve got it the wrong way around. Biblically it is that mission is what God is doing in God’s world into which he invites us to participate in his purpose. And so that leads on, then, to what I want to spend the rest of the lecture doing, which is looking at God with a mission. You can see the point there. Humanity with a mission. Israel with a mission, although that will be predominantly tomorrow. Jesus with a mission. The church with a mission. And then what it means then to read the whole bible in the light of these things.

So, you can see quickly running through the handout that that is the sort of direction that I’m going to take. We’re looking at mission then as something running through all these threads of the scripture or revelation, rather than thinking of mission simply as to do with the sending of missionaries to some strange parts of the world. 

So then, first of all, God with a mission. The God revealed to us in the scriptures of the bible and especially in the Old Testament is a God of purpose – is he not? He is a personal, purposeful, goal orientated God. That is revealed about him in the very opening chapters of creation. He is a God who sets himself a goal and works towards it. Systematically, carefully, in a planned and structured way – as Genesis 1 shows us. 

He completes his purpose in creation and then he rests in satisfaction and in blessing and approval, content with the result of what he has purposed to do and what he has done. But then this story of this purposeful God moves through the rest of the biblical narrative. And I’ve just laid it out in a kind of straight line there for you. You’re probably well familiar with that – the great linear dimension of biblical history. The grand biblical meta narrative, as it might be called, with its four main points of creation, fall, redemption/history, and new creation. 

And in all of this, apart of course from the fall itself as the act of human rebellion, God is actively committed to achieving his purpose. After Genesis 1-11 and the story of the fall and rebellion, we have God’s call of Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3. From which we learn that God is covenantally and eternally committed to the blessing of the nations. We will say more about that in greater detail tomorrow. And then as history proceeds we find this God constantly declaring an objective and moving towards it. The biblical God is a God with a mission. A God with a purpose in creation. A purpose in redemption and a purpose in achieving it. All the way through this is the God we are presented with.

So, in a sense, what you would call this is that a missiological interpretation of the scripture is to recognize, again forgive the long, technical words, to recognize the teleological monotheism of biblical revelation. There is one God only. And this one God has a purpose within human history, a purpose with the whole of creation, which he will ultimately accomplish for the glory of his own name. He is a missionary God in that sense from the very beginning. So, God with a mission.

Secondly, the scriptures of the Old Testament reveal to us humanity with a mission. On the day of their creation, human beings were actually given a mission. God said, “Let us create human beings in our image and in our likeness,” and he does so. And the essence of being made in the image of God is that we are then entrusted with the task of caring for creation. It’s put right next door to it in Genesis 1:27-28, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every living creature that moves on the ground.’” And so God entrusts the creation into the authority of the human beings that he has made in his own image. And then as a kind of complimentary state of that in 2:15 when man has been created God puts him into the garden in 15 and says to him that he is to work it and to take care of it, is the English translation. The literal translation of the Hebrew might be to serve it and keep it. Those are the two verbs that are used.

And so human authority over creation is to be expressed through the service of creation. Which is a delightfully god-like way of acting. It’s precisely what you also find in the life of Jesus, who is master and Lord exemplified through servant hood. And so humanity with a mission has the mission of the care and the keeping of the creation that God himself has placed within. We have a mission simply by being human. And as I often say to my students, God will hold us accountable for our humanity as much as for our Christianity. Because when we became Christians we did not cease to be humans. Although sometimes you wonder when you look at some Christians. But we are still human beings. God has not revoked this mandate, this commission, to care for the earth. And therefore I would suggest to you the bottom two lines on that first page of the handout – that ecological responsibility as well as economic responsibility are a part of a legitimate concern for Christian mission simply because they are part of the mission of what it means to be human. God told us to care for the planet. We have no authority to say, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m going to be doing any longer.” (laughs) Simply because we are now redeemed.

So, the ecological issue I would want to locate within my theology of mission and have done so in more detail as well. So, humanity then with a mission. 

Now, the next main section is what we will be largely concentrating on tomorrow. Israel with a mission. I’ll simply summarize this stage so that we can have a sense of the completeness of this particular part of the lecture. But as I say, tomorrow we’ll be looking at some of these points in greater detail, particularly with textual reference and support. 

In the bleak context of Genesis 3-11, which as you’ll remember is the story of the fall, followed by the story of Cain and Abel, followed by the story of the flood, followed by the story of the scattering of the nations at the Towel of Babel. The reader of the bible for the first time might well ask, “What can possibly happen next? Where is this story going - except down the tubes?” Or up the tower, but certainly not very far. I mean, where can this story go? What can God do with a human race that is so determinately fighting against him in jealousy, violence, anger, arrogance, and in division? 

So, by the time of Genesis 11 we have a picture of a humanity living under God’s judgment, scattered and divided, living upon the face of the planet earth which God has cursed. And what God does next only God could have thought of. Because he looks down and he sees this old man and this old woman. Abraham and Sarah. And he says, “There they are. I’ll have them. And they will be the beginning of my great project of world evangelization.” No mission executive would have ever thought of that, but then God isn’t a mission executive.

And so God begins with the call of Abraham, this enormous project of mission, this enormous project of blessing the nations, which ultimately will come to completion, the scriptures tell us, in Revelation. When the day comes where there will be people of every tribe and nation and language and tongue gathered before the throne of God to praise and worship the land. And I have a mental picture of God digging Abraham in the ribs and saying, “There you are. See, I kept my promise which you only just about managed to believe, but just enough to be justified,” as you might say. 

So, with Abraham we have the beginning of God’s purpose of election, the choice of Israel and through Israel the blessing of the nations. That was what Israel was called into existence for. That was what Yahweh, their God, were doing with them all through their history. And as you can see and we look at it in more detail tomorrow, this then involves the interaction between Israel and the nations, the eschatology of the nations, what was God’s purpose for the nations, but it also involved an ethical agenda as well. As we shall see. That Israel were called to be different, to be a holy people, to be a priestly people, to be the people of Yahweh, the God of Israel, in the midst of the nations whom God had also created.

So, Israel then, this whole story of the people of Israel in the Old Testament, a story as it were with a long term vision in mind. Not just a story for Israel alone. I sometimes try to illustrate this with my own students back in All Nations, by using a photographic analogy, which you might bear with at this point. To try to make this point that God’s concentration on Israel in the Old Testament has always got to be seen in the light of God’s wider concern for the nations. And that’s fundamentally missiological. 

When my two sons who are now just approaching 30 were little toddlers, sort of nippers running around, they played for their local football team for the Boys Brigade. And as a doting father I used to go along and watch them, support them, and take my camera to take pictures of them. And I would take along the longest telephoto lens I had, which was 200 mil and a doubler behind it so I could actually get a 400 mil reach. And I developed this sort of technique of holding the camera in such a way that I would look through the lens with one eye, but keep my other eye open rather than shut. So that I had a kind of split vision. And with one eye I could fill the frame of my camera with my son, usually Tim because he was the one who was nearly always on the ball or at least somewhere near it anyway. And so I could watch him. Why? Well, because Tim is my firstborn son. We have a relationship that goes back a long way. And so I’m there watching Tim because of the relationship between us. He is there as my son. I’m concerned about him. I’m watching him. My frame of my reference is filled with him and his progress in the game and so on.

But with my other eye I was watching the rest of the match. Seeing where the game was, where the ball was, where the teams were and so on. How things were ebbing and flowing. The wider angle vision. Because my son Tim is only there because there’s a game going on involving other players. Because the whole of the game is important and Tim is there because there is a match to be played. Now in a sense, the Old Testament is rather like that. Of course its focus is primarily on Israel as the people of Yahweh; their history, their institutions, their failures and successes, their prophets, their worship, and so on. 

But, as God said, Israel is my firstborn son. And Israel is called by God to be a light to the nations and Israel only exists because there is a historical match going on. The match of human history in which God is involved with every people on the face of the planet. The whole of human history is under his control. And God is sovereignly moving it towards his ultimate purposes of the blessing of the nations.

So, what God is doing in Israel has to be set within the context of the sovereignty of God worldwide. That’s what I mean by talking about Israel with a mission. So, a missiological hermeneutic of the Old Testament really finds its center point here. The election of Israel, not as the implied rejection of the nations, but as their election for their sake. Ultimately for the missionary purpose of blessing the nations. More of that tomorrow.

So, God with a mission, humanity with a mission, Israel with a mission, and then of course Jesus with a mission. The one thing we can say about Jesus is that he didn’t just arrive. He didn’t just drop in. He wasn’t the kind of ET who suddenly got lost and appeared on the planet. One of the things that Jesus says often about himself is that, “I have been sent.” Which is actually not a normal way of talking about yourself, is it? We don’t sort of going around saying that about ourselves. “Well, you know, I’ve been sent for this or that.” Unless you actually have been for some purpose. But it’s not the normal way a human person describes the course of their life. Unless they have a really very clear sense of mission above most of us. 

But Jesus did talk that way. He had a clear conviction that he was sent by his father with a purpose with a mission to fulfill. That is even recognized when he was an infant. And again, it is to Luke that we owe this particular incident, the narrating of it, and also I think the significance of it being fitted into Luke’s overall work. That is, the story of Simeon and Simeon’s recognition of the significance of Jesus when he held the baby Jesus in his arms. Luke, I think, quite deliberately puts this story right there upfront in his gospel in order to portray something of the significance of the Jesus whose story he is going to relate, not only through his earthly lifetime but also through the early life of the church in the Book of Acts – when Luke goes on to say these are the things which ... Well, he says I’ve told you the things Jesus began to do and teach in my gospel, now I’m going to tell you about the rest of the things Jesus has been up to through his Holy Spirit among the nations.

But Simeon recognizes this ... do you remember the story? Joseph and Mary bring Jesus for his proper dedication and so on in the temple and there’s this old prophet Simeon whose been there all his life longing and waiting for the redemption of Israel and expecting it, and having been told by God that he would not see death until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah, the Lord’s Christ. And the Lord’s Salvation. And so when he goes to the temple on this particular day, and it must have been crowded, lots of little families around. And he sees this particular one – Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. And he goes up to them and the Holy Spirit reveals it to him and he takes the baby in his arms and he asks Mary, “What is this child’s name?” Can you imagine it?

I’m using a bit of imagination here, of course, it’s not in the text. But you hear Mary saying, “Well, actually, we call him Jeshua – Yahweh’s salvation. The Lord is Savior.” And Simeon said, “Wow, this is to die for.” (laughs) You know? “Okay, God, now I can die in peace,” he says. “Because my eyes have seen your Jeshua, your Salvation.” And he then goes on to say, “Not just this salvation for us, the people of Israel, but you have prepared this in the sight of all peoples. A light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” So, Simeon in his prophetic words here at the beginning of Acts recognizes the double significance, the double mission of the baby that he held in his arms, the one who would be the person who would seek to restore Israel to God and then his death and resurrection would do so even in the teeth of the opposition of many of his contemporary fellow Jews. And the one who was sent by God to be the light to the nations. Quoting of course from Isaiah. 

So, that’s in his infancy. Later in his adult life, at his baptism, the second point under that heading, Jesus of course himself received the identity from his father using two texts from the Old Testament scripture. Some of us are looking at this in the New Testament class at 9:00. That the father 	quotes from Isaiah 42 and from Psalm 2:7. It’s always struck me as fascinating that when God the Father comes to identify God the Son in the presence of God the Holy Spirit, he doesn’t come up with some brand new fresh word of revelation never heard before by the ear of man. What does God the Father do? He quotes the bible. He actually takes the scriptures of the Old Testament and he uses them, combines them, in order to give to Jesus not only an identity but also a mission.

Because Isaiah 42:1 introduced the servant figure. “Here is my servant, in whom my soul delights.” That’s where that particular phraseology comes. When God the Father says, “This is my Son in whom I love and whom my soul delights, or with whom I am well pleased.” It’s actually quoted from Isaiah 42:1. The identity of the servant figure whose mission would be to restore Israel to God and to bring the light of God’s salvation to the ends of the earth. The mission of the servant in Isaiah 40-55. Also quoting from Psalm 2:7, said to the Davidic King, “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” And this was the adoptive language of the Son of David, the Kings of Israel, who were called sons of God but in this sense the son of David and therefore sons of God, not in the sense that they were thereby divine, but that they were called to a relationships of obedience to God, but God says the Davidic King, “You are my son, today I have begotten you, now ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritance.” 

And so here is Jesus also being identified as the Messianic Davidic King who would not only rule over Israel as the Messiah, but who would also ultimately come to have universal sovereignty over the nations of the earth. And so in both of these quotations from Isaiah and from Psalms, God the Father is using the scripture to give to Jesus both an identity and a mission. A mission in relation to Israel and a mission in relation to the nations of the earth. 

No wonder that when Jesus reflected on the reality of this identity and this mission and went off into the wilderness for a month to struggle with it and to wrestle with it and to think it through that the Devil came to him to tempt him in any alternative direction you could think of. If you really think you’re the Son of God do you have to go this way of suffering and death? No, go the way of glory and spectacle. After all, Jesus, what do the psalms say? Ask of me and I will give you the nations of the earth. Well, just ask of me, says Satan, I’ll give you the world if you want it. And there’s this incredible struggle that goes on as Jesus reflects upon the agenda that God had sat before him. 

So, Jesus has the sense of mission. His aims, his motivation, his agenda, his objectives, which were for Israel and then ultimately through Israel for the Nations. And it’s drawn from the scriptures. And so finally in the great commission, as you can see there, the third point under Jesus With A Mission. Jesus then passes on his own mission to his disciples. And he does so in characteristically Old Testament language. Not many people point that out when they use the great commission in sometimes very superficial ways in current missionary thinking. 

But you remember that there Jesus of Nazareth is the man that they had lived with, walked with, talked with, eaten with and then seen crucified and then witnessed rise again stands there on the mount of ascension. And virtually quotes from Deuteronomy. And says, “All authority, all power in heaven and on earth is given to me.” Just as Deuteronomy 4 says that the Lord Yahweh is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath and there is no other. And Jesus claims that reality, that divine authority and power. 

And then he says, “Therefore, look, as you go, because you’re going to go,” that’s taken for granted, it’s a participle, it’s not even a command in the great commission, he says, “As you go from here now you’ve got to disciple the nations. Make the nations what you are.” Learners, disciples, followers of the Messiah. And how are you to do that? Well, baptizing them of course in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then another bit of pure Deuteronomy, “Teaching them to observe all the things that I have commanded you.” Exactly what Moses repeatedly told the people of Israel. Observe everything that I command you. Observe everything the Lord your God commands you. 

And Jesus says, “Look, this is what it was for Israel, now this is what I have accomplished. This is what you are to take to the nations. Make them into communities of obedience. Communities of discipleship, observing God’s law and God’s commands as I have given them to you.” So, Jesus passes on his mission to be the blessing of Israel, to be the blessing of the nations. He now passes that mission on to his disciples after him. 

And therefore finally we have in our bibles the church with a mission and this is where many people would come in as it were to the subject, rather than the final point. I hope at least in that respect I’m different. I used to often comment on this to my students at All Nations, that in this lecture course on the biblical basis for mission, they would find that probably about 7/8ths of it would be Old Testament and we would eventually get to the great commission, but not until we had seen a long journey which led up to it. And in the context of which it makes sense. And so we find exactly this, that the church now in the end of Luke’s gospel and the beginning of Acts and so on is entrusted with this missional identity and rule from Jesus. 

And I’ve only really highlighted just two or three examples of this here in these three points. One could I’m sure draw many more. But first of all, Jesus says to his disciples both there in Luke 24 and in Acts 1, “You are witnesses,” or, “You are my witnesses,” or, “You are witnesses of these things.” It varies according to the different passage. 

Not many people comment on the fact that almost certainly Jesus here is consciously quoting from Isaiah 43:10-12. A witnessing identity which God/Yahweh had given to Israel. Witnessing to his/Yahweh’s deity. These are the words of God to Isaiah and this of course is in the context of the great conflict between Yahweh and the gods. Remember Israel here, the words are addressed to Israel in exile. Faced with the reality of competing gods and competing nations. And who is to know who god is? How is the world to know who is the living god? How are the Babylonians to find out, or anybody else?

And God says to Israel, “Look, you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, and my servant whom I have chosen so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed. Nor will there be one after me. I, even I am the Lord, Yahweh, and apart from me there is no savior.” Do you hear echoes of Peter’s speech at the San Hedran? “No other savior. No other name. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed. I am not some foreign god among you. And you are my witnesses, declares the Lord, that I am God.” That’s how the nations will know who God is. You will witness to them. You will testify to the reality of God. And so Jesus stands again on the mount of ascension and calmly says to his disciples, “Look, you know who I am now. All authority has been given to me. You know the truth now by me through the resurrection. Therefore you are my witnesses. Go and tell the nations.” 

And that theme of witness then flows through the Book of Acts as Luke develops it. So, the witnessing theme. Also the servant theme. Where did Paul get his theology of mission from? Well, exactly from the same chapters that Jesus did. Mainly Isaiah although also to a large extent Deuteronomy. I have to say, probably Deuteronomy 32, which one scholar has said is Romans in a nutshell. You may not believe it when you first read it. 

But when Paul went out in mission, you remember his strategy. His strategy was self consciously and quite deliberately to the Jew first, and then to the Gentiles. To the Jews and then to the nations. Not to one or the other, but to both. And so he would go as he did in Acts 13 to a synagogue. On this occasion it was the synagogue in [inaudible 00:42:31] Antioch. And he would open the scriptures as he was entitled to do and he would then seek to persuade his listeners, his Jewish listeners, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah they expected but God had indeed fulfilled his promise, the Lord had come to Zion, the scriptures were fulfilled, and it was now the day of salvation and they should believe in Jesus. 

And as regularly happened, some did, some believed and were saved and others did not. And the ones who did not came back the following Sabbath and caused trouble and disturbed everything. And then Paul says these are his words, Acts 13:46, “Then Paul and Barnabas answered them both and said we had to speak the word of God to you first. Because you needed to know that the Messiah has come. However, since you rejected it and do not consider yourself worthy of eternal life,” ironic statement, “we now turn to the nations, the Gentiles.” And then, listen to this piece of hermeneutical leap frog, “For this is what the Lord has commanded us. I have made you a light for the gentiles that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6

But excuse me, Paul, actually Isaiah commanded that to the servant figure that he was speaking to. And Isaiah 49:6, the servant was speaking in his own person and he says to the nations this is what God commanded. He said to me I will make you a light to the nations that you may take my salvation to the ends of the earth. And actually, Paul, I suppose we could maybe extend this and say, yes, this could refer to Jesus. Because Jesus is the servant and Jesus is the light of the world. And Jesus is the one who brings salvation to the ends of the earth. 

And Paul would agree with both statements. Yes, it spoke of the servant in Isaiah and yes, it applies to Jesus, but I’m afraid he insists my missiology, my theology of mission is that this is what the Lord has commanded us, ie, me and my band of missionary friends here – who is it on this occasion? Paul and Barnabas and well, I don’t know if Luke was there or not, but Paul says, “Here we are, ambassadors of Jesus the Messiah, and this scripture is what God commands us.” So, he takes an Old Testament scripture relating to the servant, he links it through Christ, and he applies it to the mission of the church. It’s a missiological theology based on a passage of Isaiah. Acts 13:47, quoting from Isaiah 49:6. 

And my final example of the church with a mission is the way in which the New Testament handles the concept of priesthood. Now, I want to take this a little bit further tomorrow when we actually look at Exodus 19:4-6 where God said to Israel, “You will be for me a royal priesthood, priesthood among the nations, because all the earth is mine and all the nations are mine, but you will be for me a royal priesthood.” And it’s very interesting that Peter takes that verse and applies it to Christians who are mixed Jews and Gentiles, no doubt he describes them as scattered abroad throughout various provinces of what we would now call Turkey, so they’re almost certainly a mixture of Jewish and Gentile Christians. And yet he says, “You are that chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.” All of that straight out of the Old Testament. Some of it Exodus, some of it Hosea. “So that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” You’ve had your exodus experience. For what? So that you may declare the praises of God, but also (verse 11) so that you may live such (verse 12) live such good lives among the pagans, ie the nations ... I wish it wasn’t translated “pagans” because it’s actually [foreign language 00:46:45] it means among the nations. That though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day he visits us. 

In other words, your role as God’s priesthood is to live in the midst of the nations to bring praise to God and ultimately to bring the nations to bring glory to God. So, the priestly life and ministry and worship of God’s people is a visible one. It’s to be in the world, seen by the nations, for that reason. And the other passage where the apostle Paul picks up this priestly idea and applies it to his mission is Romans 15:16. Paul is talking about his ministry and he says, “The grace that God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus, the Messiah Jesus, to the nations with the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel so that the gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God and sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”

Now this is the only place in the New Testament where anybody speaks individually of their own ministry as a priestly ministry. We know of course do we not that priesthood, Old Testament priesthood, is handled in the New Testament predominantly in only two ways. On the one hand there is Jesus, our great high priest in Hebrews who in his own person has taken the blood of his own sacrifice into the presence of God and there has sat down at the right hand of God to intercede for us. So, there is the priestly work of Jesus, which has therefore made no longer necessary that sacrificial role of the priest in the Old Testament. 

And, secondly, there is the priesthood of all believers. I think collectively. Which is what Peter is talking about in 1 Peter 2. You (plural) the people of God are the priesthood of God in the midst of the nations. But here Paul uniquely speaks about his own ministry in priestly analogy and what is he talking about? His priestly duty is not something that he did inside the church. It’s not pastoral work. It’s not leading the service of holy communion or hearing confessions. His priestly ministry is evangelism. 

He says, “My role as a priest of God,” which of course he couldn’t have been, he wasn’t of the right tribe anyway, but he says, “My priestly duty was to bring the gospel of God to the nations and to bring the nations to God.” And that’s the twofold movement of priesthood, bringing God to the people and bringing the people to God. 

So, Paul also has accepted this missional identity, this missionary task to the nations again on the basis of his deep fundamental understanding of the role and identity of what it was to be Israel the priesthood of God for the nations. 

Now those are just three examples of the way in which the New Testament takes Old Testament concepts: witness, servant hood, priesthood – and interprets them in the light of the mission that God has given to this church and to his people. 

So, God with a mission. Humanity with a mission. Israel with a mission. Jesus with a mission. The church with a mission. What this then means to me it seems is that when we come to read the bible missiologically, that we do it in the light of all these realities, that is to say that we read it first of all in the light of God’s own missional character. That God is a God of purpose, purpose for his whole creation. Secondly, that we read it in the light of humanity having a purpose. God has a role for human life in general. What does that say to our understanding of culture, of all that human beings do under the providence of God? And how we relate to people in the world around us. What is God’s purpose for human life on this planet?

Thirdly, that we read the scriptures in the light of God’s election of Israel and their role in relation to the nations. So that when we read the Old Testament we also have our wide angle lens on our camera, as it were, to see what God is doing for the nations and don’t simply get narrowed down to a more chauvinistic or nationalistic view of Israel as they were sometimes tempted to do themselves. 

Fourthly, that we read the whole of the scripture in the light of the messianic identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the missional implications of that messianic identity. If Jesus is Messiah of Israel, then he is also the savior of the world. He cannot be one without being the other. 

And finally, it means reading the whole of the bible in relation to the mission of God’s church to the nations. Someone has said, and I think it’s a very good quote, I wish I could ... I should have written it down and gotten its source, some of you may be able to tell me who it was ... but someone has said we should not think in terms that God has a mission for his church in the world – but rather that God has a church for his mission in the world. 

God is about his purposes of salvation, blessing the nations and bringing the whole of creation under the lordship of Christ. That’s God’s mission. And God in his grace and his mercy and his infinite patience calls us his people to share in his mission that he is about in this world. That seems to me to be what the scriptures are saying. And that I hope will be the way we may read the scriptures in the future. Thank you. 


>>Rob Willis:

You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our engineer is Rob Willis. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes and Spotify.