Chapter 4
The Mission of God: A Missional Reading of Scripture
A missional hermeneutic, then, is not content simply to call for obedience to the Great Commission (though it will assuredly include that as a matter of nonnegotiable importance), nor even to reflect on the missional implications of the Great Commandment. For behind both it will find the Great Communication—the revelation of the identity of God, of God’s action in the world and God’s saving purpose for all creation. And for the fullness of this communication we need the whole Bible in all its parts and genres, for God has given us no less. A missional hermeneutic takes the indicative and the imperative of the biblical revelation with equal seriousness, and interprets each in the light of the other.1
—Christopher Wright
A pastor search committee interviewed a recent seminary graduate. The candidate was young, and the committee wondered about his level of Bible knowledge. The chairman of the committee asked the student, “Do you know the Bible?”
“Of course,” he replied, “I just graduated from seminary!”
“Then tell us a story of the Bible—how about the ‘Good Samaritan’?” replied the chairman.
“No problem,” said the pastoral candidate.
“There was a man of the Samaritans named Nicodemus. He went down to Jerusalem by night, and he fell among the stony ground, and the thorns choked him half to death.
“So he said, ‘What shall I do? I will arise and go to my father’s house.’ So he arose and climbed up into a sycamore tree. The next day the three wise men came and got him and carried him to the ark for Moses to take care of him. But, as he was going into the eastern gate into the ark, he caught his hair in a limb, and he hung there for forty days and forty nights. Afterward he was hungry, and the ravens came and fed him.
“The next day he caught a boat and sailed down to Jerusalem. When he got there he saw Delilah sitting on a wall, and he said, ‘Chunk her down, boys!’ They said, ‘How many times shall we chunk her down, until 7 times 7?’ ‘No, not until 7, but 70 times 7.’
“So they threw her down 490 times, and she burst asunder in their midst, and they picked up 12 baskets of the fragments that were there. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?”
The committee sat stunned. They conferred briefly, then the chairman spoke to the seminary graduate. “Well, young man, we are going to recommend you as our next pastor. You may be young, but you sure know your Bible!”
The frightening thing is that I have told this story in churches, and they didn’t get it! Faithful understanding of the Bible is critical to evangelism.
One of the reasons evangelism has waned in its place in the contemporary church comes from the way we have compartmentalized it into a program or department in a local church, or an occasional activity in the life of the believer. This starts from the very way we see Scripture. If for you or me the commission to tell the good news to the world comes only from a few passages in the Gospels and the start of Acts (as vital as those are), we can easily push the witness of the church to the side. But what if the message of redemption, and the spreading of that message, was central to the whole of Scripture? Our approach to Scripture has much impact on the conclusions we draw. We must give much attention to understanding the whole counsel of God’s Word, not just an occasional story here or memory verse there.
The Bible gives us our authority for evangelism. Drummond notes the close relationship between redemption in the Bible and contemporary evangelism. “If redemption truly is the heartbeat of the Bible, the church’s responsibility of sharing the message of salvation rests right at the center of her ministry.”2 A direct correlation exists between one’s view of Scripture and one’s commitment to evangelism.3 A high view of Scripture leads to a deep commitment to reaching people! We must acknowledge and obey the Word of God. Some neglect the authority of Scripture with tragic results. Some who respect the Bible neglect its teaching. We must affirm both its authority and its sufficiency. Evangelism in the Pentateuch
Although Jesus declared the Great Commission in the New Testament, evangelism’s song rings throughout Scripture. The theme of redemption forms the melody sounding throughout the Word of God, from creation to consummation!
Oxford scholar Christopher Wright recalls his childhood when he attended great missionary conventions. There the walls were covered with banners declaring great missionary passages—Matt 28:19–20; Isaiah 6; Acts 1:8; and so on. Those verses burned in his heart and mind a passion for the gospel. Something different happened when he attended Cambridge to study theology. He found a serious disconnect between those passages from the missionary conventions and his theological studies, which ignored those texts. “Theology was all about God—what God was like, what God had said and done, and what mostly dead people had speculated on all three,” he observed. “Mission was about us, the living, and what we have been doing.”4 The two subjects never seemed to be linked.
Wright stated that the chief reason why this spiritual schizophrenia that splits theology and mission even exists is because we do not read the Bible as a missiological text. He argued that we should speak less of a “biblical basis of missions” (as if the missional endeavor of the church was just one of many possible things the church can be involved in) and more of the “missional basis of the Bible.” This is a point worth pondering. Is mission one of a cafeteria of disciplines vying for the interest of ministers, scholars, and believers? Would we be right to, as some have done, make the telling of the news of redemption simply one compartmentalized part of the church, based on essentially one passage (Matt 28:19–20), or is there more?
An Old Testament theologian, Wright stated, “I wanted [my students] to see not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavor but that the whole Bible is itself a ‘missional’ phenomenon.”5
Wright argued that the very hermeneutic by which we interpret the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to consummation, is mission. I think he is correct. So as we journey all too briefly through the Scriptures to see the place of evangelism in its pages, I believe the theme of redemption and the sharing of that theme is a hallmark of the Bible, not a few verses at the end of the Gospels.
Could it be that the very way we have approached the Scriptures is part of our problem? Could it be that the separation of our witness from all of life stems more from an institutional reading of the Word, rather than reading it as our guide for advancing the movement of God? As my friend Mark Liederbach and I put it in The Convergent Church, when the church fails to emphasize the missional thrust of its purpose, or does not connect it to the final end of glorifying God, “the result inevitably will be a loss of moral vigor, a decline in motivation for outreach, a gradual waning of passion through time, and often an increase of squabbling over nonessentials and divisions related to the trivial.”6
The book of Genesis demonstrates our need for a Savior. The first question in the Bible demonstrates the evangelistic heart of God: “Adam, where are you?” From creation onward we see the missionary heart of God. These words from Mark Liederbach illustrate succinctly the importance of the whole Bible in understanding the Great Commission:
The Great Commission of Genesis 1:26–28 overlaps perfectly with the Great Commission of Christ in Matthew 28:18–20. The relationship with God through Christ is not only the reestablishing of the proper foundation of our personal lives but it also becomes the missional purpose of our life together and existence as the body of Christ. Every moment of our personal lives is meant to be a convergence of personal worship of the King and personal effort to expand his kingdom. Every moment of our life together as the body is meant to be a convergence of corporate worship of the King and a communal effort to enjoy and expand his kingdom here and blossom in it in an ever-increasing eternity of joy.7
I taught Old Testament at Houston Baptist University in the 1990s. I recall how some students who had never read the Bible responded to the creation account in Genesis. They tended to comment on its brevity and its beauty. We see in Genesis 1 a panoramic overview of the world God made—perfect, designed, interrelated, and wonderful. Genesis 1:26–28 shows man to be the pinnacle of creation, being made in the image of God. Further, God gave man a task, unlike the rest of Creation, to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (Gen 1:28).8 We see a more specific focus on man in the narrative of Genesis 2. God gave Adam a “helper” in Eve and placed them in the garden of Eden “to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen 2:15 NASB). What does this last phrase mean? John Sailhamer argued that this means more than simply the physical labor of tending the ground: “Man is put in the garden to worship God and to obey him,” Sailhamer observed. “Man’s life in the garden was to be characterized by worship and obedience.”9
We find Adam and Eve in the garden, the pinnacle of creation, ready to worship and serve God like nothing else in all creation. I have a friend who uses animals to demonstrate the wonder of creation. As he explains the unique features of an alligator or an owl that allows them to function uniquely in this world, my friend repeats the mantra, “Animals do what they were created to do, and they do it well.” He then notes the impact of the fall as recorded in Genesis 3 by noting that the only thing in creation that does not do what it was created to do is man. Why? Man, who was created in the image of God with the capacity to worship Him chose instead to sin and rebel. Thus, the creation account in Genesis gives us much more than an introduction to God’s Word; it actually relates to the gospel and this to our effective proclamation. When Paul began to explain the wonder of salvation in Romans he begins with creation (read Romans 1: our versions of the “Roman Road” in witnessing tend to leave this out). We must increasingly proclaim the good news in the larger sense of the story of redemption—creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Such a broader look at the gospel will give us a greater appreciation for its majesty and help us to communicate better in an increasingly biblically illiterate world.
This reality causes us to face an important fact. If worship of the Creator stands as the created purpose behind life, if it is to be the drive behind each and every act of our lives, if it is the future and final glorious fulfillment of all creation, then it is imperative that no one be without opportunity to join us in this journey. Witness and worship go together! Likewise it matters that no corner of creation be exempt from exposure to the glory of God. Thus, the mission of our life must be continually shaped and reshaped by the mission of God, the very thing God created Adam and Eve for: worshipping God and spreading that worship to the uttermost reaches of creation. Our desire should be to see the nations worship, as we read at the end of Scripture:
After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were robed in white with palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
Salvation belongs to our God,
who is seated on the throne,
and to the Lamb! (Rev 7:9–10)
Thus, a close connection lies between God’s purpose in creating the universe and this commission Jesus commanded His church to pursue. All nations are to have the opportunity to worship the King of kings. God’s people must spread this news, and it is indeed good news! From the beginning, God desired that His people would fill the earth with the worship of His great name. We now have the possibility not only of personally experiencing a right relationship with God and proper orientation toward the purpose of our existence, but we also see the purpose for how to live both individually and corporately.
In the words of Piper, “Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal of missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white-hot enjoyment of God’s glory. Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is.”10 I would only add that we cannot have one without the other. Both matter throughout the pages of the Word and in our lives today.
Genesis 3:9 shows a redeeming God seeking His estranged creation. The first 11 chapters of Genesis reveal why man is so important to God and why the salvation of humanity becomes the dominant theme of Scripture. Even when God judged Adam and Eve for their sin, we see His grace. The protoevangelium, Gen 3:15, shows the early sign of the gospel: “I will put hostility between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed.
He will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.” This singular verse is pregnant with New Testament truth. The passage relates to evangelism in at least five ways:
1. The expression “he will strike your head” shows the grace of God in that the Father gave a promise to Eve that her seed would triumph.
2. The same phrase initiates the promise of the ultimate defeat of Satan, remembering that one of the reasons for Jesus’ incarnation was to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8 NKJV).
3. Salvation comes through a mediator. This mediator will be directly related to humanity, being the “seed of woman.”
4. This salvation comes through the suffering of the seed of woman, whose heel will be bruised.
5. Salvation is available to the whole race, for Eve is the mother of all living. All racial prejudices and bigotry should end with this passage, for if Eve is the mother of all living, then we are all kin. In the earliest pages of the Bible, we find ample evidence for the necessity of cross-cultural evangelism.
The fall changed things:
Prior to human sin and the fall, the task of spreading God’s glory to all the earth was simply and inherently bound up with the life and experience of Adam and Eve. Because of sin, however, the human heart is no longer naturally inclined toward the heart of God or the fulfillment of his agenda. Even in the lives of God’s people, the task of spreading God’s glory to all the earth is constantly in danger of being pushed aside in favor of personal desires, comforting traditions, selfish longings and ambitions, and theological systems that fail to integrate the pursuit of God’s glory with the aggressive proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ.11
The flood gives us another picture of evangelism. In the midst of a godless people, Noah lived righteously. The ark is a picture of God’s desire to save the world, for the righteous were not taken in the deluge. Further, the grace of God shines in the brightness of the rainbow. God delivered the righteous, even as He will deliver any person made righteous through the atoning work of Christ. What a glorious gospel we share!
By the end of Genesis 11, the reader can see the devastation of sin: murder, intrigue, idolatry, rampant ungodliness, and the judgment of God. Beginning with Genesis 12, we read of God’s unfolding plan to redeem humanity. Abraham is told all humanity will be blessed through his seed. One Gospel writer tells us succinctly that Jesus is “the Son of Abraham” (Matt 1:1). Certain themes resound with the redemptive intent of God.
In Exodus we see further gospel truth. The Exodus event became the great salvific moment in the Old Testament. It is recalled over and over again throughout the books of the Old Testament, reminding the people of God’s power to save. It was not by accident that Jesus also traveled to Egypt as a child and came out as well. Nor did Luke accidently use the word “exodus” in his account of the transfiguration of Jesus. Luke tells us Jesus discussed with Moses and Elijah His exodus (Luke 9:31 NLT), referring to His death and resurrection that would allow us to pass, not through a sea, but from death to life.
The covenant at Sinai was where God told His people they were to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:6). A priest was to point others to God, intercede on behalf of others, and teach the redemption of God to all people. The fact that Israel did not always fulfill this command did not take away their obligation to tell the nations about the only true God.
The Commandments (the Law) gave the standard of a holy God. Galatians tells us the law shows us how we need the gospel. Even as a person cannot be saved apart from recognizing his lost state, we cannot comprehend grace apart from the standard of the law of God. However, merely keeping the Ten Commandments cannot save. Even in the Old Testament, they were given to God’s covenant people.
In Leviticus, the sacrificial system modeled the means of redemption. Hebrews 9:22 tells us that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. The sacrificial system paved the way for the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus, the Son of God. The Day of Atonement, held once annually for forgiveness of sins, was replaced by the atoning work of Christ.
In Numbers, we see a picture of God’s work of redemption in the bronze serpent (Numbers 21). What a beautiful shadow of the work of Christ on the cross. The proud, stubborn people of Israel were bitten by poisonous snakes. The cure was simple: look upon the bronze serpent. Most did, but a few were too proud—and they died. In the same way, Jesus compared the bronze serpent to His work on Calvary, for as the people of Israel had only to look and live, today we need to believe on Jesus to live (John 3:16).
The Historical Books
As we move from the Pentateuch to the time of conquest, the promise-fulfillment motif becomes more apparent. Central to the Old Testament message was this idea of promise and fulfillment. God promised Abraham a special land; it was ultimately fulfilled in Joshua’s time. Joshua, the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek “Jesus,” was the man who delivered the people into the land of promise; Jesus delivers us out of the kingdom of darkness.
The Prophets
The Book of Jonah demonstrates God’s mercy to any nation that repents. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant, the covenant provided by the death of Jesus (see Jeremiah 31). Ezekiel gives us a stern warning: “Nevertheless if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered your soul” (Ezek 33:9 NKJV).
The prophetic records give ample witness to the importance of passion in proclaiming the word of the Lord in any generation. Messianic passages abound with prophetic glimpses into the redemptive heart of God. Scores of passages give light, but only a few select passages can be offered here.
• Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (NKJV).
• Isaiah 9:6 speaks of the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
• Isaiah 53 describes the Suffering Servant, giving a picture of a vicarious sacrifice.
The prophets spoke God’s word in the face of tremendous opposition at times. Our zeal for God should move us to speak out for Him. Imagine for a moment that you have a small child, a little girl. She is playing in the road, unnoticed by you. Your neighbor Bill looks up from his yard work, only to see a tractor trailer bearing down on your daughter. Bill runs to the scene, pushing your child to safety just in time. She is scratched and scared but unhurt. But Bill was not so lucky. He awoke the next day in a hospital bed to the diagnosis that he would never walk again.
How would you feel about Bill? Would you not rush to the hospital to thank him, to ask him if there were anything you could do for him? Suppose you did visit him, and he said, “No, thanks, but I’m OK. My family is here. I will make out all right.”
But then suppose he looked at you and said, “There is one thing you can do for me. Would you mind telling just five people over the next several years about my actions to save your daughter? It would mean a lot to my family.”
You would probably respond to Bill, “I have already told everyone I have met about what you have done! I will speak of you for the rest of my life!” The Old Testament showed us our need for a Savior, and it pointed the way for Him. Now that we know Him and thinking of all He endured for us, can we truly be silent?
A “Whole Bible” Approach to the Great Commission
My colleague Mark Liederbach gets this. He teaches ethics, not normally a subject associated directly with evangelism in our compartmentalized world. But he is very much a Great Commission Christian. He summarizes well the teaching of Scripture as it relates to redemption and our telling of that great story.12
One simply cannot understand the Great Commission apart from a reading of all Scripture. An understanding of the mission of God from all of Scripture can be summarized with the following:
1. Everything begins in God and is to return to God.13 Understanding this undergirds any theological system, any system of ethics, any evangelistic strategy, or any evaluation of culture. God created, God sustains, God redeems, and God will consummate history as we know it.
2. Human existence must be understood as theocentric, not anthropocentric. “In Christian theology, particularly that of Augustine and Aquinas,” Liederbach writes, “this idea of exitus et reditus asserts that proper theology must begin with discussion on the existence of God, then the creation and fall of human beings, their salvation through Christ, and finally their return back to God in death and resurrection. It is foundational to understanding that the universe is theocentric, not anthropocentric.”14 Our perspective on the world and the church begins with the assumption that the focal point is God, not us as individuals, our family, our church, or our denomination.
3. Individual life stories must conform to God’s story. Because the whole of Scripture from Pentateuch to the Apocalypse holds God alone in the central place in the universe, all of our personal life stories must yield to the higher, grander, more wonderful story that God tells throughout the Scripture, and in which alone our life finds any meaning (the metanarrative). Christianity is not just one story as a part of many stories, from Genesis, through the wilderness wanderings, into the time of the kings and the exile, until the time of Christ and the birth of the Church; it is The Story. Most of us live our lives, and approach the Bible, to find how to make God’s agenda fit into ours. This idolatrous thinking must be reversed and must affect the way we think about and do church. My son read the great books of the Western world as part of his college studies, from Augustine’s City of God to Plato’s Republic, from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to Dante’s Divine Comedy. He enjoyed the readings more than he had anticipated. Why? Because these books have great ideas, which is why they continue to be studied in fine schools. Great ideas endure. There is no greater idea, no more compelling message, than the gospel! “Our agendas and our stories will not enflame the hearts of men and women to follow hard and live greatly. Similarly, any compromise or capitulation on the uniqueness of the gospel story as the sole means of salvation serves only to dilute the passionate existence we were meant to live,” Liederbach and I argued. “The gospel of Jesus Christ is the grand story of the universe. It alone rightly captures the imagination and fires the soul for greater things. This is the story we must learn, live in, and seek to tell often and well.”15
4. A higher affection must motivate a life lived for God’s glory. When we truly see God’s beauty and majesty from the creation through the Old Testament story and throughout the New Testament, when we grasp His greatness and our place in His plan, we can see the relative insignificance of other things that would vie for our attention and affection. “It is through a Spirit-filled meditation on the Word of God here and now that we can find our affections transformed and purified. The more one tastes of this kind of beauty, the deeper our hearts will long for more.”16
5. A life of worship should compel us to invite the lost to join us. As we see all of Scripture in its grand message of redemption and the invitation to be worshippers of God, evangelism becomes less a burden and more the joyful proclamation of the good news that others, too, can worship this great God! Evangelism becomes nothing more than inviting people to join us in being and doing that for which we have all been created! Thus, worship from God’s intention in the beginning serves as the impetus for evangelism and the purpose of our mission.
6. The corporate worship of the church ought to change the culture. When believers as individuals, families, and churches together live a life of worship, even as we were intended to do before the fall and are able to do now because of the cross, individuals and the culture are changed as a result.
We have the most amazing story to tell in history. But it is a story that begins in Genesis, not the Gospels. And it is still worth telling today.
Questions for Consideration
1. Have you ever thought of evangelism as being linked to the Old Testament, or have you only seen it as a few verses in the New Testament?
2. How do worship and witness go together?
3. Which if any Old Testament passage helps you better to understand the Great Commission?
NOTES
1. C. J. H. Wright, The Mission of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 61–62.
2. L. Drummond, The Word of the Cross (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1992), 67.
3. See J. Avant, “The Relationship of the Changing Views of the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture to Evangelism and Church Growth: A Study of the United Methodist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States Since World War II” (PhD. Dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1990).
4.Wright, The Mission of God, 21–22.
6. M. Liederbach and A. L. Reid, The Convergent Church: Missional Worship in an Emerging Culture (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 144.
8. Read about this in greater detail in Liederbach and Reid, Convergent Church, 120–36. I am indebted to Mark Liederbach for his analysis of this passage.
9. J. H. Sailhamer, “Genesis,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 2, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, ed. W. C. Kaiser and B. K. Waltke (Grand Rapids: Regency, 1990), 45.
10. See Liederbach and Reid, Convergent Church, 132.
