4 Mandate for the Nations

Studying this lesson will help you:

We rightly exalt Jesus as personal Savior. But in seeking to honor Christ for the great worth of His death and resurrection, we may have ignored much of the astounding accomplishment of His life. Jesus accomplished far more than just providing for the salvation of people. He launched a movement that will eventually bring that salvation to every part of the world. In this lesson we’ll examine Jesus’s life work and His enduring mandate. He chose His followers and ordered His actions with strategic intent. He said to His Father at the end of His life, “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do” (John 17:4).

Christ’s mandate entrusts to all God’s people an assignment to continue the work that He began during His life—until that work is finished in every people. Christ does not call us to keep ourselves busy doing good deeds. Instead, we are honored to co-labor alongside the risen Christ as He fulfills God’s global purpose. We can easily miss the joy of our mission if we fail to understand how Jesus was sent to co-labor with His Father. That is the same powerful and beautiful way that Jesus sends His followers today: “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21).

Mandate

To live under mandate is to be entrusted with a task of lasting significance. Mandates are not commands. By direct commands we assign small errands or daily chores. A mandate, on the other hand, releases authority and responsibility to pursue endeavors of historic importance. God has entrusted to Christ, and with Him to the church, a mandate to fulfill His purpose for all history.

I. Jesus Gives the Great Commission

We will begin at the end of Jesus’s time on the earth with what is often called the “Great Commission.” Each of the Gospels, as well as Acts, includes a direct expression of Christ commissioning His people to fulfill His mission in the world. Together, the expressions in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts show a clear mandate to complete world evangelization. The commissioning in the Gospel of John is different. It focuses on the way that Jesus now sends us in the same way that He was sent by the Father.

Steven C. Hawthorne’s description of Matthew 28 invites readers to place themselves alongside the eleven as they first heard the mandate. The word “all” is used four times in these few sentences.

A. All Authority. The commission is based on an endowment of authority from the Father to the Son. This authority remains upon Jesus. Some have stated that Jesus delegated this authority to His followers. But this comprehensive, all-inclusive authority over all of heaven and earth continues to be exerted until this day by only one person: Jesus, the Messiah.

What is this authority? The Father entrusted Jesus with a spiritual authority to put under His feet all the power of evil in order to place Him at the head of a people, consisting of people from every tribe and language. By virtue of this authority, the Son will dominate His defeated enemies and liberate people to become devoted servants of God.

The main verb in this commission is “to disciple.” The word emphasizes the enlisting of new followers instead of perfecting fully trained, fully taught, and fully tested super-followers who are living exactly like Jesus. To disciple someone means much more than understanding His message. Jesus expects personal obedience to Him as Lord.

The reference to His commands is certainly not any kind of legalism. Jesus points to Himself as the one to be obeyed. Calling for obedience to His commands is in stark contrast to the typical teaching of rabbis of His day. Rabbis would never say that their personal commands were to be obeyed. Instead, they would call for obedience to their interpretation of the Torah or to the commands of Scripture. Jesus is pointing to His unique place as Lord. His mandate is to train people to live under His lordship. He is calling for His kingship to become effective in the lives of people within every people group.

Read Hawthorne, “Mandate on the Mountain,” 87–88 (until “All the Peoples”)

B. All the Peoples. The mandate is to “disciple all the peoples.” This must be understood as a global goal that will take place once-for-all in history. To nurture, train, and encourage people in basic discipleship skills so that they are able to pass them on to others is a wonderful and necessary activity. But the mandate in Matthew 28 indicates that there will be a once-in-history achievement of establishing Christward movements of believers within every people group. With this clarity, we can speak of finishing the task of world evangelization.

Christ’s commission uses the Greek phrase panta ta ethne, which in most English translations is translated as “all nations.” The Greek phrase is more precisely understood in English as “all the peoples.” Based on the way the full phrase panta ta ethne is used in the New Testament, we can rule out two possible interpretations and affirm a third:

1. Countries? Are the ethne nation-states or countries? Because almost every translation uses the word “nations” to translate Jesus’s wording, this is a common misunderstanding of our day. Jesus did not have politically defined countries in mind. To those listening, the words that Jesus used in Matthew 28 would not have been understood as referring to nation-states, but instead, as peoples sharing a common culture and generational depth.

2. Gentiles in General? Was Jesus referring to gentiles in general? Another misimpression is that Jesus was simply sending the disciples beyond the bounds of Israel to non-Jewish persons. But the way that the phrase panta ta ethne is used in other biblical passages does not sustain this view. The Greek word ethnos in singular form is never used of a gentile, or a non-Jewish person. The word in singular form always refers to a people group. The plural use of the word can sometimes mean gentiles, but the full phrase panta ta ethne is always used to describe ethnicities with generational depth, interconnected by race, language, or culture.

3. People Groups. The interpretation of panta ta ethne, with the best support from New Testament usage, is that Jesus has in view the people groups of the world as they tend to understand and define themselves: by language, lineage, or sociocultural factors.

Read Hawthorne, “Mandate on the Mountain,” 88–90 (from “All the Peoples” to “All That I Commanded”)

C. All That I Commanded. Two activities, baptizing and teaching, define what it means to “disciple all the peoples.” With John the Baptist’s ministry as a backdrop to Jesus’s command, baptism marked a loyalty change to serve the coming Messiah. Baptism formed a community of shared allegiance to God as He has fully revealed Himself—as the Father who sent His Son and gives His Spirit. In this context, “teaching” goes beyond merely educating people to know about Jesus’s commands. It refers to the work of training people to live in daily, vital obedience to Jesus. These two facets—proclaimed allegiance to the God of the Bible, and growing obedience to Christ as Lord—are the core of what it means to establish communities of Jesus followers that we have come to call “churches.”

D. All the Days. This phrase should not be translated as “always,” suggesting a constancy of Jesus being present. Jesus states that He will be co-working with His followers throughout the days of the age. He was issuing a mandate for the entire age and for every believer. It is a global project that any single person cannot accomplish. It can only be fulfilled collectively, over many generations. Christ’s reference to the culmination of the age gives extra force to the idea that He intends the task of evangelizing the world to be understood as a task that must, and will, be accomplished in the days of this age.

Read Hawthorne, “Mandate on the Mountain,” 90–91 (from “All That I Commanded” to end)

II. Focus on Finishing the Task

A. The Priority of Peoples. The Great Commission defines the global task in terms of people groups. In our day, many have recognized that focusing on people groups is important. But we need to be sure that we focus on reaching people groups for the best reason.

The goal is that within every single people group, at some point in history, there will be a movement of baptized and obedient disciples who lovingly serve God and are also willing to begin or continue evangelizing their entire people. As these movements mature, new believers watch and come to understand how their own people can follow Christ in ways that honor their family and bring forth the best of their culture.

The strategic priority of “unreached” peoples is not that they are the neediest peoples. Although they are often needy in many ways, the strategic priority of unreached peoples is that they lack a discipling movement of any kind. They are not the neediest peoples; they are the remaining peoples in the task Christ has given us.

B. His Commission as Historic Accomplishment. His Great Commandment as Constant Imperative. These two imperatives must not be held as equivalent or as being in competition.

Read Hawthorne, “The Great Commission and the Great Commandment,” 89 (sidebar)

III. The Strategic Approach of Jesus

Recognizing the commission that Jesus gave to His disciples helps us understand His goal in choosing and training His followers. He not only modeled God’s concern for world evangelization; Jesus also was preparing a dynamic, multiplying movement that, with God’s help, would be capable of evangelizing all the earth. H. Cornell Goerner describes the background of Jesus’s work and helps us see His strategic intent.

A. His Concentration on the Jewish People. Since Abraham, God had been preparing the Jewish people to receive and understand the gospel. Even so, when Jesus came, He faced vicious hostility from His own people. Many Jews rejected Him, but a substantial number of the Jewish people came to receive Him as the Messiah, the long-promised king. God’s desire to make the Hebrew people a light to the nations was eventually fulfilled. From the beginning, we can see that Jesus was forming His Jewish following into a mission movement.

Jesus began to reveal God’s mission heart to His followers by first sending the twelve to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” adding that they were explicitly not to “go in the way of the Gentiles” (Matt 10:5–6). The fact that there were twelve apostles sent only to Israel suggests that they represented the twelve tribes of Israel. After this, Jesus sent a larger group of seventy disciples to “every city and place where He Himself was going to come” (Luke 10:1). Because the number of nations, or peoples, in the mindset of Israel at that time was seventy, it’s likely that Jesus was foreshadowing the eventual commission to evangelize every city and place and people throughout the earth.

B. His Concern for Gentiles. The Gospels show that Jesus was profoundly concerned for non-Jewish people. Many times He modeled God’s heart for all peoples by deliberate outreach to gentiles, whom most Jewish people despised. Goerner recounts stories that are sometimes overlooked about Jesus demonstrating God’s concern for the nations. Because His teaching throughout His ministry emphasized the global scale of God’s heart, the Great Commission was not a last-minute add-on to His teaching.

Read Goerner, “Jesus and the Gentiles,” 81–82 (from “Contacts with Gentiles” until end)

C. Jesus Enlists Followers by Sending Them. Steve Hawthorne tells the story of Jesus choosing some of His followers. The people Jesus chose were trusted and known by others in their family or neighborhoods. Several of His first followers were uneducated, working-class fishermen. They responded to the summons “Follow Me,” even if it was not clear where they would be going. But they ended up following Jesus to their own households. They were the kind of people who could easily invite friends, neighbors, and relatives to gather in their homes.

The same thing happened with Levi, a tax collector, who eventually used the name Matthew. Summoned to follow Jesus, he invited his friends and family to his home to meet with and listen to Jesus. It was in their own homes that these followers learned how to help people meet with Jesus and become followers. Not only did they learn how the gospel message could be conveyed in ordinary homes, but they also learned basic principles of meeting and multiplying gatherings of Christ followers. These were essentially churches.

1. Following Jesus: Making It Possible to Do the Impossible.

It wasn’t clear at first what Jesus meant by saying, “I will make you . . . “ But eventually they realized it was a promise. Jesus was going to train them, correct them, and empower them so that they knew how to start and sustain neighborhood movements. When fishing with Jesus in the boat with the normal crew, they caught an extremely large number of fish. Peter figured out that this was a miraculous number of fish. At that moment, Peter realized that this miracle meant that whatever Jesus told Peter to do would be done. Peter was terrified as he recognized what Jesus meant when He said that He would “make him to become a fisher of people.” Whatever Jesus sent Peter to do would be accomplished.

2. Training by Sending. Jesus did train them, asking them to observe and help Him. Eventually, He selected twelve of them to go to the people of Israel. The twelve were sent to specific villages or towns in which there were mostly Israelites. A while after the twelve returned from these ventures, Jesus then sent another larger group of seventy disciples. The twelve represented Israel, but the seventy represented, in the minds of people at that time, the number of tribes, languages, or peoples there were in the world.

In their training, Jesus taught them to stay in the home of a “person of peace” who would welcome them into their home. These were the kind of trusted people who would tell others and eventually become dynamic, multiplying movements of home gatherings.

Read Hawthorne, “Follow Me,” 75–77 (all)

3. To Non-Jewish People. Hawthorne recounts a familiar story, often called “the woman at the well.” Jesus knew that the Samaritan people had a hope that a Messiah was coming. Jesus surprised the woman by speaking of Himself as the long-awaited Messiah. As He discussed the gift of God with her, He used an analogy of “living water,” saying that a time was coming when people would “worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). Right away, she went to her city, approaching the leading “men of the city” to persuade them to invite Jesus and His followers into their homes. So Jesus and His followers stayed for days in homes that usually would have nothing to do with them. After staying two days, the Samaritans of the city were saying, “This One is indeed the Savior of the world” (4:42).

Jesus used this event to teach His followers that God wanted to satisfy a yearning within them that was something like hunger. Jesus knew that they longed, like Him, for a different kind of food: “. . . to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work” (4:34). Jesus was preparing them to take on the work of God in such a way that it would be accomplished. And that would include overlooked peoples, such as the Samaritan people.

Read Hawthorne, “Not Thirsty, Still Hungry,” 85–86 (all)

I am the good shepherd;

the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. . . .

And I lay down My life for the sheep.

I have other sheep, which are not of this fold;

I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice;

and they will become one flock with one shepherd. (John 10:11, 15–16)

Read John 10:11–16. Reflect on the purpose of Jesus’s words about “other sheep.” How will they hear His voice? What is the significance of these sheep being formed into “one flock” instead of multiple flocks? Why is it significant that there is a single shepherd figure?

IV. On Mission with Jesus

It may be more important to understand the way that Jesus sent His followers than to grasp what He sent them to do.

A. As the Father Sent Me. Consider one of the most powerful statements in all of Scripture: “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21).

1. The Ways of God. We can understand this verse to read: “As the Father sent Me, so also in the same way I am sending you.” How did the Father send the Son? The Father loved and listened to the Son. The Son loved and watched for what the Father initiated. Jesus, in dynamic nearness to the Father, continued what God had been doing throughout history. Jesus sends us in this same way.

2. The Purpose of God. The verse also means: “As the Father sent Me, so also you are sent to accomplish the same historic purpose for which I was sent.” This is more than mind-boggling. Jesus entrusted ordinary people with the same enormous matters that the Father entrusted to Him. Some have suggested that this articulation of the mandate should be understood as a calling for us to follow the example of Jesus’s deeds. But in fact, a clear reading of the text and other texts like it in John will show that Jesus is emphasizing the commingling of His life with our life to empower us. He is not calling for us to merely imitate His example.

B. On Mission with God. Henry T. Blackaby and Avery T. Willis Jr. describe how God enlists people to be on mission with Him. Behind their statements are radical ideas! What Blackaby and Willis present is contrary to some high-pressure styles of mobilizing mission involvement. Such guilt-inducing tactics often backfire, causing many people to resent what seems to them to be an unbearable burden of saving billions of lost people. Notice how they give more detail to what Jesus meant by “as the Father sent Me” in John 20:21. Consider each of the seven points concerning God’s ways. One of the last sentences of the article sums up much of God’s ways of involving us in His will: “He calls every one of His followers to join Him in that relationship of love, power, and purpose” (p. 54, emphasis added).

1. Love. God’s way of sending is relational rather than utilitarian. When God calls us to be on mission with Him, He always invites us to experience a more intimate love relationship with Him. He is much more focused on that love relationship than on getting certain jobs done. The tasks are indeed accomplished in God’s ways, but in the power of a growing experience of close relationship.

2. Power. God’s way of sending is empowering rather than acting in a coercive way. He extends invitations rather than obligating demands. He reveals first what He is doing rather than pointing out what needs to be done. He speaks to us about His will as we listen. He enables us to respond in trust. He patiently works and waits for us to make adjustments to Him so that we can do His will for our own good and His greater glory.

3. Purpose. God’s way of sending is purposeful rather than being oriented around us. As much as He loves us, He refuses to allow our lives to be oriented around ourselves. God is focused on a historic fulfillment of His global mission. He is determined to honor us with the dignity of being on mission with Him, fulfilling part of His historic purpose.

Read Blackaby and Willis, “On Mission with God,” 53–54 (from “Knowing and Working in God’s Ways” until end)

V. To Seek and to Save the Lost: Dealing with Universalism We’ve considered the primary focus of world evangelization to be God gaining worshipers for His greater glory. It seems that glorifying God is a greater matter in Scripture than saving people from eternal loss. But people do matter! Jesus said that He came “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). What does it mean to be lost? Who are the lost? How shall we understand the plight of the people who have never heard of Jesus or who have rejected Him? How can we carry this burden in the way God wants?

A. Different Ideas about the Lost. Universalism is a commonly held idea that God’s salvation in Christ will be universally accepted or applied to all persons. Some models deriving from universalism—the so-called “wider hope” theories—assume that people are saved in a general way and damned only by rejecting the gospel. If this is true, then it might be better to keep the world ignorant of salvation in Jesus. But the Bible teaches clearly that people are not lost because they reject the truth, but rather because of sin that has warped them in their own evil.

Robertson McQuilkin affirms the biblical truth that there are two kinds of people: the saved and the lost. It may appear that universalism presents a more compassionate God. But only the biblical God is both loving and good. God does not mock His own goodness by declaring people to be good who have chosen evil. Instead, God honors an individual’s choice of good or evil, always giving them enough spiritual light that they can choose God’s way. God has appointed that people be saved in the light of Christ’s name. Jesus Christ is the only agency of salvation.

What about those who have never heard? Based on a story from Acts, McQuilkin says that God can bring greater light to any who respond positively to the light He has already given them.

Read McQuilkin, “Lost,” 123–26 (all)

B. Loving God or Loving Darkness. Michael McClymond approaches the different concepts of universalism by clarifying that God’s judgment respects and follows the choice of men and women. People either choose to love darkness or they choose to love God. Because many from every tribe, tongue, and people on earth will choose, by the power of the gospel, to honor and worship the living God, our motive can be the joy of heaven rather than avoiding the anguish of hell.

Read McClymond, “The Choice,” 127–28 (all)

C. The Uniqueness of Christ. The Lausanne Covenant contains clear, simple statements of profound truths about the universality of God’s love for all, and yet He allows people to reject Christ.

Read the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, “The Lausanne Covenant,” 517–18 (section 3)

Image Conclusion of Certificate Readings for this lesson. Image

After studying this section you should be able to:

VI. The Uniqueness of Christ: Dealing with Pluralism Mission sounds to many as if it were a campaign of self-authorized religious supremacists. This is understandable if one’s operative belief system is framed with the assumptions of pluralism. Pluralism is a philosophical assumption that it is not possible to recognize any one system of thought as absolute truth. Forms of pluralism are prevalent in many parts of the world. Many Christians find aspects of pluralism as attractive as they are confusing.

Advocates of pluralism argue against the missionary enterprise in two ways. First, there are some who declare that Christian missions are acts of intolerant bigotry. Second, there are those who dismiss the message of Christ because, in their view, it is virtually identical to other religions.

Ajith Fernando helps us respond to the different notions of pluralism that we find in different parts of the world, as well as the skepticism that may have already affected our own vision. He calls us to look to the uniqueness of Jesus and therefore embrace a shameless, even joyous conviction that because Jesus Christ is unique, He is supreme. Fernando expands Jesus’s own statement that He is the way, the truth, and the life.

A. Jesus as the Truth. Arguments for absolute truth must be grounded on the fact of the incarnation. Absolute truth can be known because the Absolute has become concrete in history in the person of Jesus. Jesus’s words and works open people to an encounter that is not just a mental grasp of truths but a personal encounter with the person who is Truth. What separates the gospel from all other religions is the joy of relationship with the person of Jesus and the completeness of His message.

B. Jesus as the Way. By His statement in John 14:6, Jesus meant that He would become the way through His death.

1. The Accomplishment of the Cross. It is essential to understand what Jesus accomplished on the cross. We have already seen in the previous lesson how God used Christ’s death to overcome evil. Fernando lists five more biblical ways of recognizing the uniqueness of Jesus’s death. It’s breathtaking to consider the global importance of each one.

2. The Challenge of the Cross. People invariably attempt self-salvation. The cross shouts that this is impossible. This offense of the cross may explain some of the hostility of pluralists to the missionary movement.

Read Fernando, “The Supremacy of Christ,” 134–37 (until “Jesus as the Life”); and Fernando, “Ten Qualities of Jesus’s Words,” 136–37 (sidebar)

C. Jesus as the Life. Jesus summons a people from every people. John 10:10 is commonly quoted to affirm Christ’s intention to bring fullness of life. Fernando directs our attention further in this same passage (through v. 16), where Jesus is described as the singular life-giving Shepherd. Jesus is drawing together people from every people by His life-giving power so that there will be “one flock,” in Fernando’s words, a “new humanity.” This “Good Shepherd” passage is not about personal comfort through trying times—it is a declaration of Christ’s global mission. Because the shepherd figure lays down His life to defeat the marauding thief and to gather sheep from all over the world, there can be only one shepherd. The shepherd figure is necessarily unique. The resurrection makes it starkly clear that Jesus Christ is unique, and therefore, utterly supreme.

Read Fernando, “The Supremacy of Christ,” 137–38 (from “Jesus as the Life” until end)

VII. An Approach to Encounter Pluralism

Charles Van Engen describes the common pluralistic worldviews of our day. Pluralistic ideas are built around the idea that there are many ways to know God. To speak clearly and biblically about other religions, we need to do something beyond proclaiming our opinion that Jesus is the one and only way. New categories may help us proclaim the astounding claims of Scripture in a relevant way. Without clarity on these issues, we can easily be made to feel that we are religious bigots, foisting our views on people in ways that seem to be religiously criminal to many.

The standard categories force many, including some in the church, to conclude that if someone believes that Jesus is unique (i.e., the only way to salvation), then they are automatically considered to be offensively intolerant and should be asked to stop pushing their religion on others. In reality, if someone affirms Christ’s uniqueness, this does not mean that such a person is a mean-spirited exclusivist. Van Engen’s article is helpful for marking out an approach that is faithful to Christ and relevant to culture.

A. Three Broad Categories. There are three standard positions on the issue of the uniqueness of Christ and the adequacy of other religions: Pluralist, Inclusivist, and Exclusivist. Evangelizing Christians are usually placed in the exclusivist category. Christians often drift toward a vague, unstated inclusivist position.

B. An Important Distinction: Faith Does Not Equal Culture. If faith were just another aspect of one’s culture, then faith might not be regarded as being based in truth but as an expression of one’s culture. However, Christian faith is based on the fact of the historic Jesus. The truth that is the basis of faith is not relative to different cultural environments.

C. A Fourth Position: Evangelist. To the three common positions, Van Engen adds another—the evangelist. It is based on the historic Jesus as reported in the Bible and is summed up in the core confession of the church: Jesus Christ is Lord. The evangelist position is:

1. Faith-Particularist. This is not a question of whether you are inside or outside any particular church boundaries. The particularist (having to do with that which is unique and distinctive) affirmation is the question of discipleship, “of one’s proximity to, or distance from, Jesus the Lord.”

2. Culturally Pluralist. If faith does not equal culture, then Christians can be eager pluralists regarding culture. This means that they can affirm the value and beauty of any culture. “Everything that does not contradict the biblical revelation concerning the historical Jesus Christ our Lord is open for consideration.”

3. Ecclesiologically Inclusivist. “Ecclesiological” has to do with churches. The evangelist position is so focused on Jesus as the head of the church that church membership is not seen as the dividing line between the saved and the unsaved. That distinction is left to Jesus Himself. The mission task is to gather people together under His lordship. His lordship over all requires a vision of His headship over the church. This means that there is a diversity of churches that thrive under Christ’s headship. The evangelist eagerly welcomes people into the church because that is where Christ’s lordship is to be enjoyed.

Read Van Engen, “The Uniqueness of Christ,” 129–33 (all)

VIII. Discipling All Peoples

We’ve seen that the Greek word translated as “make disciples” requires a direct object to make sense. In Matthew 28:19, the direct object of the sentence is the phrase translated “all nations.” John Piper examines the Greek meaning behind these words. He does this with such methodical simplicity that you don’t have to be a Greek scholar to grasp the incredible significance of the phrase panta ta ethne.

A. Comparing Singular with Plural Usages. The singular form of the Greek word ethnos always means a people group defined by language or lineage. The plural usage rarely refers to gentiles in general. The majority of the usages by far refer to people groups.

B. Old Testament Cross-Reference. Of the five repetitions of the Abrahamic covenant, two of them (Gen 12:3; 28:14) use the Hebrew phrase kol mishpahot. This phrase refers to even smaller groupings than the Greek word ethnos, such as clans or small tribes. The other three (Gen 18:18; 22:18; 26:4) are translated in the Greek translation of the Old Testament with the phrase panta ta ethne. Peter refers to these passages in Acts 3:25.

Piper concludes that the Great Commission defines the task as discipling people groups defined by language, lineage, or tribal boundaries. The weight of evidence excludes the idea that Jesus was mandating an outreach to non-Jewish people in general or an outreach to politically defined countries. This is an important distinction since the mandate is given to us as a task to be completed. To complete our mandate, we must understand what we are aiming to accomplish.

Read Piper, “Discipling All the Peoples,” 94–97 (all)

⬅️ 上一章 🏠 回到總目錄 下一章 ➡️