Chapter 4
People Who are a Blessing to the Nations
Who was the greatest missionary in the Bible? Some might say Jesus, but most would probably answer, Paul. He certainly stands as the one who, as "apostle to the nations", envisaged and accomplished the great transition of the gospel across the divide between Jews and Gentiles and thus set in motion the movement that would see the gospel spread to every corner of the world.
How did Paul understand his own missionary life and work? What was he trying to accomplish? What kept him going through all the battering and bruising (literally) of his missionary career?
The Obedience of Faith among all Nations
Paul tells us in a phrase that comes at the beginning and end of his greatest letter. His calling as an apostle was, he says, "to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his [Christ's] name among all the nations" (Rom. 1:5; repeated at 16:26 ESV).
Now that is an ambition that resonates with strong echoes of Abraham. For Abraham is the Old Testament character par excellence who was the model of faith and of obedience—as Paul, James and the author of Hebrews all testify. And the horizon of "all the nations" goes back to God's promise to Abraham that through him all the nations on earth will be blessed.
So Paul is indicating, by this prominently placed phrase, that his lifetime's service of the gospel was all about producing communities of Abraham look-alikes in all the nations, not just in the nation physically descended from Abraham. An ambitious goal, for sure, but profoundly rooted in his reading of God's mission as expressed in his promise to Abraham.
But it goes deeper than that. Paul did not just mean that Abraham was a rather fine example that he could use to illustrate the doctrine of justification he was about to expound in the rest of the letter. God's promise to Abraham was not merely a random illustration of something else. It was the thing itself—God's own agenda for saving the world. God's promise to Abraham was, in short, the gospel. It is very good news indeed.
That is how Paul describes God's promise to Abraham in Galatians.
Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles [the nations] by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." (Gal. 3:8, italics added)
So the gospel, the good news, from God's own mouth, is that God intends to bless all nations, and to do so through Abraham and his descendants.
Who are we then? We are like the Galatians to whom Paul was writing. If we are among the Gentile nations and have come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and saviour of the world, we have entered into the blessing of Abraham. Indeed, we have become part of the people of Abraham. To be in Christ is to be in Abraham, according to Paul—no matter what ethnic, social, or gender identity you have.
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Gal. 3:28–29)
But what does this mean for our mission? If we are the people of God now in Christ and therefore also "in Abraham", how will that affect our understanding of who we are and what we are here for? We need first of all to see just how important God's choice of Abraham was for the implementing of God's own mission of redemptive blessing. Then we'll need to scan some of the echoes of Abraham through the Old and New Testaments, showing that it is in fact a major theme of biblical theology. Finally we can apply all this to our own practice of mission. In what ways are we to be people who model our mission practice on the faith and obedience of Abraham? What does it mean to say that we are people chosen to bless the nations?1
But first, we need to see the connection with the last chapter. There we explored the great biblical arch from creation to new creation. It was human rebellion that spoiled God's good creation and led to God's restoration project that now begins with Abraham. And the story that begins here is the first step on the road that leads to the new creation itself. We are standing at a very key moment in the Bible's story.
Abraham—In the Bleak Context of Genesis 1–11
The great promise of God to Abraham, often called the Abrahamic covenant, comes in Genesis 12:1–3. But Genesis 12 comes after Genesis 1–11. That may seem obvious, but it is crucially important. For the whole point of what God initiates with his promise to Abraham only becomes clear when we see it against the darkening background of those chapters.
After the grand opening chapters of creation, the biblical story goes awry in Genesis 3, when God's human creatures choose to rebel against their creator, distrusting his benevolence, disobeying his authority and disregarding the boundaries he had set for their freedom in his world. This produces radical brokenness in all the relationships established in creation. Human beings hide from God in guilty fear. Men and women can no longer face one another without shame and blame. The soil comes under the curse of God, and the earth no longer responds to human touch as it should.
The following chapters (chs. 4–11), then, combine an escalating crescendo of human sin alongside repeated marks of God's grace. The serpent's head will be crushed. Adam and Eve are clothed. Cain is protected. Noah and his family are saved. Life goes on, and creation is preserved under covenant. The great creation project is still moving forward, but it is limping under the crippling weight of human sin.
After the flood, God renews his promise to creation, and human beings are again sent forth under God's blessing to multiply and fill the earth (Gen. 9:1). However the story runs into trouble yet again in chapter 11. The human decision to settle and to build a city with a tower in the land of Shinar seems to combine arrogance (in wanting to make a name for themselves) and insecurity (in wanting not to be scattered over the whole earth as God intended). The Babel story presents us with people who seem intent on invading the heavens even while resisting God's will for them on earth.
The result is chaotic dividedness. Genesis 3–11 show how every dimension of life is tragically adrift from the original goodness of God's purpose. The earth lies under the sentence of God's curse because of human sin. Human beings are adding to their catalogue of evil as the generations roll past—jealousy, anger, murder, vengeance, violence, corruption, drunkenness, sexual disorder, arrogance. Animals are being killed for food, with God's permission but hardly with their creator's best pleasure. Women enjoy the gift of childbirth along with suffering and pain. Men find fulfillment in subduing the earth, but with sweat and frustration. Both enjoy sexual complementarity and intimacy, but along with lust and domination. Every inclination of human hearts is shot through with evil. Technology and culture are advancing, but the skill that can craft instruments for music and agriculture can also forge weapons of violent death. Nations experience the richness of their ethnic, linguistic and geographical diversity along with confusion, scattering and strife.
Where can the mission of God go from here? What can God do next? Whatever it may be, it will have to tackle a broad redemptive agenda. Genesis 1–11 poses a cosmic question to which God must provide a cosmic answer. The problems so graphically spread before the reader in Genesis 1–11 will not be solved just by finding a way to get human beings to heaven when they die. Death itself must be destroyed if the curse is to be removed and the way opened to the tree of life. The love and power of God must address not only the sin of individuals, but the strife and strivings of nations; not only the need of human beings but also the suffering of animals and the curse on the ground.
It will take the whole of the rest of the Bible's story, from Genesis 12 to Revelation 21–22, to accomplish all this. Biblical theology encompasses this comprehensive span of problem and solution. So our biblical theology of mission must stretch alongside the same span.
What can God do next? Something that only God could have thought of. God sees an elderly, childless couple in the land of Babel itself and decides to make them the launch pad of his whole mission of cosmic redemption. One can almost hear the sharp intake of breath among the angels when the astonishing plan was revealed. They knew, as the reader of Genesis 1–11 now knows, the sheer scale of devastation that serpentine evil and human recalcitrance have wrought in God's creation. What sort of an answer can be provided through Abram and Sarai? Yet that is precisely the scale of what now follows.
The call of Abram is the beginning of God's answer to the evil of human hearts, the strife of nations, and the groaning brokenness of his whole creation. It is the beginning of the mission of God and the mission of God's people.
Abraham and God's Surprise—Blessing to the Nations
The Lord had said to Abram, "Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you.
"I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you." (Gen. 12:1–3)
It is not hard to see what the central theme of these verses is. The words bless and blessing shine through it like a golden thread. The root word (barak) actually occurs five times in the three verses. And it is sudden and surprising good news!
Apart from the words of God to Noah immediately after the flood, we have not heard much about blessing since the opening chapters of Genesis, when God's blessings bathed the whole creation. The story has lurched through sin and rebellion to judgment and curse. But now, God speaks again, as he spoke at creation, with words of blessing, first for Abraham, but then through him for all nations on earth.
No wonder Paul read this text as "the gospel in advance" (Gal. 3:8). It is God's glorious surprise. In spite of all that has occurred in the previous chapters, God still intends blessing for the nations. And he will launch that great mission of blessing through Abraham.
But what is meant by "blessing"? All too easily our minds as Christians slip quickly into spiritual mode, and verses like Ephesians 1:3 pop up: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ." We may be tempted, then, to think that only spiritual blessings are contained in God's promise to Abraham. But of course we must take the words in their wider and fuller biblical context. When we do so, we find that there are several rich and complementary ingredients in the biblical concept of "blessing".
Blessing and the Goodness of Creation
In the majestic account of creation in Genesis 1, God's blessing is pronounced three times: on day five he blessed the fish and the birds; then on day six he blessed human beings; and finally on day seven he blessed the Sabbath. The first two blessings are immediately followed by the instruction to multiply and fill the seas and the earth. The third blessing is followed by the words of sanctification and rest that define the Sabbath.
Blessing, then, at the very beginning of our Bible, is constituted by fruitfulness, abundance and fullness on the one hand, and by enjoying rest within creation in holy and harmonious relationship with our Creator God on the other. Blessing is off to a good start. We find the same themes in God's words of blessing to Noah in Genesis 9 (vv. 1–3, 9–17).
So when we come to 12:1–3, the word of blessing must, from the context so far, include at least the concept of fruitfulness, multiplication, spreading, filling and abundance. It is a richly life-affirming word. This is what God wants for the nations of humanity.
However, there is nothing mechanical about being blessed in this way. Blessing is set within relationships that are both vertical and horizontal. That is, blessing is dependent on relationship with God, and blessing is something to be shared in relationship with other human beings.
On the one hand, vertically, those who are blessed know the God who is blessing them, and they seek to live in faithful relationship with their God. The patriarchs knew that the blessings that accompanied them all their lives were all wrapped up with their relationship with God. When blind and aged Jacob blesses the two sons of Joseph, he acknowledges this. Jacob knew from whom his blessing had come:
May the God before whom my fathers
Abraham and Isaac walked faithfully,
the God who has been my shepherd
all my life to this day,
the Angel who has delivered me from all harm—
may he bless these boys. (Gen. 48:15–16)
On the other hand, horizontally, the relational element of blessing reaches out to those around. Genesis has several instances of other people being blessed through contact with those whom God has blessed. Those who inherit the Abrahamic family blessing are then found to fulfill God's purpose that they should be a blessing to others.
• Laban is enriched by God's blessing on Jacob (30:27–30).
• Potiphar is blessed through the presence of Joseph (39:5).
• Pharaoh is blessed by Jacob (47:7, 10).
Thus, the blessing of Abraham becomes self-replicating. Those who are blessed are called to be a blessing beyond themselves—and this is one feature that makes it so profoundly missional. For if we see ourselves (as we should, according to Paul in Galatians) as those who have entered into the blessing of Abraham through faith in Christ, then the Abrahamic commission becomes ours also—"be a blessing".
Blessing and Hope within History
When we combine the dark picture of Genesis 3–11 with the promise of blessing in chapter 12, we can anticipate that the story to follow will involve both realities. We know that we will be watching two scenarios unfolding together—just as Jesus said in his parable of the wheat and the weeds growing in the same field. On the one hand, we know that history will be the arena of human sin getting even worse. But on the other hand, we will now be watching for the footprints of God's blessing and looking forward to how he will keep his vast promise to bring about blessing for all nations through the nation to emerge from the loins of Abraham. Blessing will take on a historical dimension, injecting hope and faith into an otherwise dark and depressing narrative.
And that means also, then, that blessing will be missional. For it is precisely this promise that all the nations on earth will find blessing through God's election of Abraham that drives forward the mission of God, and the mission of God's people that flows from it.
At the most fundamental level, who were these people called Israel in the Old Testament, and what were they there for? To be the vehicle of God's mission of extending his blessing to the nations.
So who are we and what are we here for? The same answer has to be given—and is indeed given in the New Testament as we will eventually see. We also are to be a people through whom the nations are blessed. The history of mission is the history of the spread of God's blessing, the history of God keeping his promise to Abraham.
Blessing, Salvation and Obedience
God promised to bless Abraham within a covenant relationship in which Abraham responded in faith and obedience. That remained the pattern for Israel too. Blessing was not automatic or mechanical. Blessing flowed from all that God had already done for Israel in the grace of redemption, provision and protection. And blessing flowed only as Israel responded to God's grace in covenant obedience. The blessing of salvation called for the response of covenantal obedience in order for the blessing to go on being enjoyed.
Blessing is the way God enables his creation to be fertile and fruitful, to grow and to flourish. It is in the most comprehensive sense God's purpose for his creation. Wherever human life enjoys the good things of creation and produces the good fruits of human activity, God is pouring out his blessing. Wherever people bless God for his blessings, to that extent God is known as the good Creator who provides for human flourishing. God's blessing is universal. But it is not the case that blessing is God's goodness in creation as distinct from his goodness in salvation, as has sometimes been proposed.…
Salvation too is God's blessing, since salvation is the fulfillment of God's good purposes for creation, purposes already expressed in creation. But salvation is the fulfillment of God's purposes in spite of the damage evil does to God's creation. The Abrahamic blessing is more than the blessing of creation because it is designed to contend with and to overcome its opposite: God's curse.…
The ultimate goal of God's promise to Abraham is that blessing will prevail over curse. It does so when the seed of Abraham, the singled-out descendant of Abraham, the Messiah, becomes "a curse for us … so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles" (Galatians 3:13–14). It is in this light that Paul can call the promise to Abraham that the nations will be blessed the gospel.…
The gospel is that in Christ Jesus the curse has been set aside and God's creative purpose for the blessing of his creation is established beyond any possibility of reversal.
Richard Bauckham2
Deuteronomy comes to its climax with a powerful appeal to Israel to "choose life", that is, to sustain their enjoyment of God's blessing (in which they already stood by God's redeeming grace). They could do this only by living in loving, trusting and obedient relationship with their God (Deut. 30). This did not mean, of course, that Israel ever did or ever could deserve the blessing of God or any of his great saving acts. It is a fundamental mistake to think that in the Old Testament blessing or salvation came as something earned through obedience (this is a mistaken way of reading Deut. 28:1–14). On the contrary, blessing is intrinsic to the covenant relationship established by God's saving grace. The pattern is clear in Deuteronomy 26: the initial redemptive blessing of God has been experienced as a matter of grateful rejoicing (vv. 1–11). This leads on to responsive obedience (vv. 1–14). And that in turn is the context in which further blessing can be anticipated (v. 15), within the framework of mutual covenant commitment (vv. 16–19).
We affirm that there is a biblical vision of human prospering, and that the Bible includes material welfare (both health and wealth) within its teaching about the blessing of God. This needs further study and explanation across the whole Bible in both Testaments. We must not dichotomize the material and the spiritual in unbiblical dualism.
However, we reject the unbiblical notion that spiritual welfare can be measured in terms of material welfare, or that wealth is always a sign of God's blessing (since it can be obtained by oppression, deceit or corruption), or that poverty or illness or early death, is always a sign of God's curse, or lack of faith, or human curses (since the Bible explicitly denies that it is always so).
Lausanne Theology Working Group3
Obedience, then, is the means of living within the sphere of blessing and enjoying it; obedience is never the means of earning or deserving the blessing. Israel had already been redeemed by God (in the exodus), so their obedience could never earn that. It was already accomplished. However, their obedience was necessary in order to go on enjoying the benefit of their salvation. Otherwise, through disobedience they would find themselves thrown out of the land, out of the place of God's blessing.
This ethical dimension of blessing within the covenant relationship is another feature that protects biblical blessing from degenerating into the parody that is paraded in Prosperity Theology. Blessing is not just an automatic reflex, routinely doled out in response to certain prescribed inputs—prayers or faith or money. Blessing is not like a great heavenly cashbox of miracles stored up for you and just waiting to be claimed. We will have some more to say on the Prosperity Gospel in chapter 15.
Abraham—God's Mission and Ours
God's Universal Mission—All Nations
Genesis 10 and the first part of chapter 11 focus on the nations of humanity. In Genesis 10 they are scattering across the earth in order to fill it, as they were told to. In Genesis 11 they are scattering, but in a state of confusion and division that thwarts their arrogant attempt at self-built unification. So it is natural and fitting that God's great promise and plan announced in chapter 12, though it involves one man initially, has all the nations in view. God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 is God's answer to the problem of the nations in Genesis 10 and 11.
The bottom line (literally and metaphorically) of the Abrahamic covenant is that "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (Gen. 12:3). There is some dispute over the precise exegesis of the verb,4 but there can be no doubt about the extent of God's intention—"all peoples". The word varies between "all kinship-groups" (mišpehọt) and "all nations" (goyim), but the intention is clear and emphatic.
In fact, it is so emphatic that this promise is repeated five times in Genesis (12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14). There is a universal end in view. If humanity as a whole is subject to God's curse, then humanity as a whole must be reached by God's blessing. And therein lies the great thrust of God's mission and the mission of God's people.
From the perspective of biblical theology we can draw a great trajectory—from the "tribes, languages and nations" of Genesis 10, who stood in need of redemptive blessing, to that "great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language", who will constitute the redeemed humanity in the new creation (Rev. 7:9).
The Abrahamic covenant is therefore one of the key unifying threads in the whole Bible. As I've said before, no wonder Paul could simply call it "the gospel in advance". What could be more "gospel"—more good news—in the light of Genesis 3–11 than that God has committed himself to bless all the people of the earth?
God's Particular Means—One Nation
But this same text that ends with such universality begins in singular particularity. God addresses one man, Abraham, and promises to bring his blessing to humanity through one nation—his descendants. At Genesis 12:1–3 we stand at the fountainhead of Old Testament Israel's self-consciousness of being God's elect people. That is, they believed they were a people uniquely chosen by God for a relationship with himself that would later be consolidated in the form of the Sinai covenant. But it is utterly crucial to see that this divine election of one man and one people takes place in the context of, and on the global stage of, God's dealings with all the nations, who have been the main focus of the narrative in chapters 10 and 11.
One nation is chosen, but all nations are to be the beneficiaries of that choice. In our biblical theology, we know, of course, that in the end that one nation would be represented by one man, the Messiah Jesus, through whom God's redemptive blessing would become available to all nations. That was the way Paul understood God's mission through Christ and the spread of the gospel as the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham in Galatians 3.
Election for Mission
This affects the way we understand the whole biblical doctrine of election. There is a tendency to speak of it solely as a doctrine of salvation—that is to say, the elect are those who get saved. That then leads to all kinds of controversy through the centuries as to whether God is fair in choosing some to be saved and not others. I don't want to get bogged down in that ancient but still potent debate. All I want to point out here is that the first time we really see God choosing and calling someone—i.e., putting election into action—it is precisely not so that Abraham and his family alone get saved, but rather that by being blessed he should become the agent of blessing to others.
Election of one is not the rejection of the rest, but ultimately for their benefit. It is as if a group of trapped cave explorers choose one of their number to squeeze through a narrow flooded passage to get out to the surface and call for help. The point of the choice is not so that she alone gets saved, but that she is able to bring help and equipment to ensure the rest get rescued. "Election" in such a case is an instrumental choice of one for the sake of many.
In the same way, God's election of Israel is instrumental in God's mission for all nations. Election needs to be seen as a doctrine of mission, not a calculus for the arithmetic of salvation. If we are to speak of being chosen, of being among God's elect, it is to say that, like Abraham, we are chosen for the sake of God's plan that the nations of the world come to enjoy the blessing of Abraham (which is exactly how Paul describes the effect of God's redemption of Israel through Christ in Gal. 3:14).
Missional Church
It all started with one man, Abraham. But the promise was to him and his seed, or his descendants. Who are the descendants of Abraham now? Paul is totally explicit on this point: people of any and every nation who believe in Jesus as Messiah and saviour are included in the seed of Abraham and are inheritors of the promise made to Abraham. Abraham, as God promised, has become the father of many nations—in and through Jesus Christ. Abraham is, in short, "the father of us all"—all of us who share his faith (Rom. 4:16–17). The church, then—that multinational community that includes believing Jews and Gentiles—is the people chosen and called in Abraham to be God's people.
But if that is so, and I cannot read the New Testament in any other way than to affirm that it is so, an important conclusion follows. If we are in Christ, we not only share in the blessing of Abraham, we are commissioned to spread the blessing of Abraham. The last phrase of Gen. 12:2 is actually an imperative in Hebrew—"Be a blessing!", though it is most often translated simply as a consequential statement from the preceding phrases, "so that you will be a blessing". My own exegetical understanding of the structure of Gen. 12:1–3 sees it as two fundamental commands, each followed by three subordinate or explanatory clauses, climaxing in the last line of verse 3.
The skeleton message of Genesis 12:1–3 is this:
"Go …
and be a blessing …
and all nations will be blessed through you."
Is that not a "great commission"? Is it not, in fact, the foundation on which the whole thrust of God's mission, including what is usually referred to as "The Great Commission" in Matthew 28, is based? And if so, this has serious consequences for our understanding of the church as well as of mission.
When God set about his great project of world redemption in the wake of Genesis 12, he chose to do so not by whisking individuals off up to heaven, but by calling into existence a community of blessing. Starting with one man and his barren wife, then miraculously transforming them into a large family within several generations, then into a nation called Israel, and then, through Christ, into a multinational community of believers from every nation—all through the story God has been moulding a people for himself. But also a people for others. "Through you … all nations."
In other words, the missional thrust of Genesis 12:1–3 is also ecclesiological. The origins of the church go back, not just to Pentecost, but to Abraham. And the missionary impulse that we find in Acts was no sudden change, but the outworking of the logic of biblical faith and history. The command of Jesus and the leading of the Holy Spirit combined to send the church out in mission to the ends of the earth, as those who, having received the blessing of Abraham, must now be the means of passing it on. That was how the story worked, and that was the story they knew they were in.
So the idea of "missional church" is far from a new idea. It may have taken on a particular cultural form in recent years in reaction to an institutionalized church that has lost touch with its own raison d'être. But really, if we understand the church from our biblical theology as that community of people chosen and called since Abraham to be the vehicle of God's blessing to the nations, what else can the church be but missional? This is who we are and what we are here for.
Indeed, as a friend of mine said recently, "All this talk of 'missional church' sounds to me like talking about a 'female woman'. If it's not missional, it's not church."
Echoes of Abraham in Biblical Theology
We are attempting to do biblical theology in this book and series, so we need to show that a theme we are putting so much weight on actually does find support through a variety of biblical texts in both the Old and New Testaments. Once again, a fuller exposition of all the following texts and many more can be found in The Mission of God (read especially chs. 6, 7 and 14), but a selection of some of the most revealing ones should make our point clear. Do take time to read these texts. Their cumulative effect will greatly strengthen our biblical theology of mission at this point.
The Nations Drawn to Israel's Worship and Israel's Salvation
The Psalms are the songs of Israel's faith imagination in worship. They not only soar into the presence of God in adoration, confession, thanksgiving, praise and protest, they also take wings and fly to the ends of the earth and bring the nations of the world into the scope of their vision. Whatever God is doing in and through Israel itself must ultimately impact the nations, for that is the reason for Israel's existence in the first place.
It would be worthwhile to read the following passages carefully and note the echoes of the Abrahamic promise in their reference to all nations of the world ultimately coming to worship YHWH the God of Israel, or being the venues where the praises of God are sung. These are some of the places in the book of Psalms where we see the universality of Israel's faith in relation to the nations. Some of them seem clearly to be echoes of the Abrahamic covenant, but even where they are not directly alluding to it, they draw from its deep source a powerful message of God's overarching mission of blessing that extends way beyond the borders of Israel itself.
• Psalm 22:27–28
• Psalm 47:9
• Psalm 67
• Psalm 72:17
• Psalm 86:9
• Psalm 87
• Psalm 96
• Psalm 102:15, 21–22
• Psalm 117
The prophets, like the historians and psalmists, focus most of the time on Israel in relationship with God, but when their vision widens to the nations and the earth, the results are sometimes stunning, and the echoes of Abraham are unmistakable. Again, take some time and read these passages, savouring the universality of their vision. These are the kind of texts that feed the New Testament theology of mission to the nations.
• Isaiah 19:19–25 (esp. vv. 24–25)
• Isaiah 45:22–23
• Isaiah 56:3–8
• Isaiah 60
• Jeremiah 4:1–2
• Amos 9:11–12
• Zechariah 2:10–11
Abraham in the Gospels
Matthew is often portrayed as the gospel for the Jews. But Matthew sees clearly that the very existence of the Jews, as the people of Abraham, is for the sake of all nations. Matthew shows this in the way he begins with Abraham and ends with all nations.
Luke also puts an Abrahamic envelope around his gospel by seeing the coming of Jesus as the fulfillment of that promise, with its relevance to Israel and to all nations. He begins and ends on that note of Scripture fulfillment (Luke 1:55, 73; 2:29–32; 24:46–47).
Matthew frames the whole story of Jesus between the identification of him as a descendant of Abraham in the opening verse of the Gospel and, in the closing words of Jesus at the end of the Gospel, the commission to the disciples of Jesus to make disciples of all nations. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus begins with Abraham (1:1–2), not with Adam, as Luke's does (3:38), nor with David, which would have been sufficient to portray Jesus the Messiah the son of David, which certainly is an important theme in Matthew's Gospel. However, for Matthew, Jesus is the Messiah not only for Jews but also for Gentiles. He is the descendant of Abraham through whom God's blessing will at last reach the nations.
Richard Bauckham5
But Luke also mentions Abraham by name in four short but significant incidents in his narrative—three in the gospel and one in Acts.
• Luke 13:10–16—the crippled woman
• Luke 16:19–31—the poor beggar Lazarus
• Luke 19:1–10—the tax collector Zacchaeus
• Acts 3:1–26—the lame man at the temple
What these stories have in common is that in each of them somebody who was excluded—by demonic bondage, or poverty and injustice, or deserved social contempt, or crippling illness—is brought into saving blessing. None of the characters is a Gentile (though Luke has plenty to say about them too). But they illustrate the healing, transforming, restoring power of God that is entailed by receiving the blessing of Abraham.
Abraham in Paul's Gospel
It would not be exaggerating to say that Abraham is the most important figure in Paul's understanding of the gospel—second only to Jesus Christ. For what God had accomplished in Christ was nothing less than what God had promised to Abraham, to bring about the blessing of all nations on earth. That universal hope had been a mystery (as Paul puts it) for centuries—not a mystery in terms of what was expected, for that was clear in the text itself, but a mystery in terms of how it could ever be accomplished. That, says Paul, has now been revealed through the gospel of Christ, by what he accomplished in his cross and resurrection (Eph. 3:4–6).
So, as we saw at the start of this chapter, Paul's personal mission was to replicate Abrahamic faith and obedience among all nations, to bring about what God had originally promised Abraham. Paul's theology of the gospel and his theology of mission are both Abrahamic. In Christ, the promise to Abraham is accomplished in principle, for salvation is now open to people of all nations. In mission, the promise to Abraham is worked out in the ongoing history of the church in its proclamation of the good news.
Thus, though we cannot now study the passages in detail, Paul's argument from Romans 3:29 to the end of Romans 4, and even more so in Galatians 3, is not (as sometimes suggested) merely using Abraham as an illustration of his doctrine of justification by faith, but constitutes precisely his exposition of what that doctrine means. God has demonstrated his righteousness and his trustworthiness by keeping his promise to Abraham through providing, in Christ, the means by which people of all nations, not just Jews, can enter into the blessing of a right relationship with God by God's grace through faith.6
Paul's doctrine of justification is essentially missional for it extends the blessing of the gospel, with no ethnic privileges or barriers, to all nations in principle, and therefore demands that it be extended to them in practice—that is, in the practice of evangelism, church-planting and discipling communities who walk in "the obedience of faith" among all nations.
Mission Accomplished in Revelation
How else could we finish a biblical survey of such an important theme other than in the Bible's climactic final book, Revelation? And there indeed the echoes of Abraham resound loud and clear.
Revelation 5:9–10
Why is Jesus worthy to unlock the seals on the scroll in the right hand of God? Because he is "the Lamb who was slain". It is the crucified Christ who holds the key to the unfolding purpose of history and its final destination. So when the elders sing out their answer to the question as to who is worthy to open the seven-sealed scroll, they celebrate the cross as redemptive, universal and victorious. And that universal phrase, "with your blood you purchased for God members of every tribe and language and people and nation", is an instantly recognizable allusion to the context of Genesis 10, the world of nations, for whose blessing and salvation God had called Abraham.
Revelation 7:9–10
The same language surfaces again here, as the great song of God's salvation is sung by "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language."
Revelation 22:2
Who benefits from the healing power of the tree of life by the river of life in the new creation? The nations. They have already been pictured as bringing their splendour, glory and honour into the city of God—redeemed and purified of all sin and evil (Rev. 21:24–27). But the final picture of the nations that we have in the Bible is healing: "The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." Nations that have been fundamentally sick since Genesis 3–11 will at last experience that international healing that the world longs for. The blessing of Abraham will bring all nations into the shalom of Christ, the redeemer, saviour and healer of all.
And as redeemed humanity, together with all angels and all creatures in creation, joins to celebrate that great achievement, I picture God turning to Abraham and saying, "There you are. I kept my promise. 'All nations,' I said, and all nations it is. Mission accomplished."
Abraham as a Model for our Mission
I hope it has been inspiring to see the wonderful biblical panorama of God's promise to Abraham and how it generates the biblical theology of God's mission to all nations. But we are thinking in this book not only of the mission of God but the mission of God's people. And so we need to ask also what relevance Abraham has to our own concept and practice of mission.
If we are those who inherit not only the privilege of Abrahamic blessing, but also the responsibility of being a blessing to the nations, then what is required of us? Surely, that we respond as Abraham did to the promise and command of God. For Abraham, that meant leaving and going, believing and obeying.
Leaving and Going
God's opening word to Abraham was, in essence: "Get up and go, away from your land.…" It is a clear command to leave a particular place and go elsewhere. He had to leave his land and people, in order that God would bless all lands and peoples. Only Abraham's leaving released the nations' blessing.
The story of Babel had brought an end to the hope and attempts of humankind to find their own means of blessing. Blessing will not come from within that world itself. Abraham must relinquish all that ties him to the land of Babylon before he can be the vehicle of blessing to the whole earth. Babel, the climax of the problem portrayed in Genesis 3–11, cannot be the source of the solution to the problem.
In this way, even the great Mesopotamian empires are relativized and negated. The greatest human civilizations cannot solve the deepest human problems. God's mission of blessing the nations has to be a radical new start. It requires a break, a radical departure from the story so far, not merely an evolutionary development from it. So Abraham is commanded to get up and leave.
God's mission required leaving and going. And of course, it still does.
Now at one level, we can see this as an obvious parallel to the opening of the so-called Great Commission, "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19)—though it needs to be pointed out that the first word is not a command in itself, but a participle—"As you go.…" Nevertheless, it is clear that if the nations were to be discipled, the disciples had to go to them. So we can certainly detect in God's first command to Abraham an anticipation of the dynamic that would eventually explode in centrifugal missional "going" to the ends of the earth. And that would be an appropriate connection to make.
But at another level, such "leaving and going" need not necessarily mean actual travel from one geographical place to another. Christians who commit themselves to the mission of God in the world have to start with a certain going out from the world. For we still live in the land of Babel and Sodom. We need to recognize the idolatrous nature of the world and all its claims and ideologies. This is not so that we become "other-worldly", for as we will see in chapter 13, our mission must also take place in the public arena of the place where God has put us. Nevertheless, there is a form of leaving and going that is spiritual, mental and attitudinal—even when it is not physical. For it involves the abandonment of the worldview through which the world tells its own usurped story, and adopting, in faith and hope, the worldview of the story we are in—the biblical story of God's mission. That brings us to our next point.
Believing and Obeying
We began this chapter with Paul's ambition to bring about "the obedience of faith … among all the nations", and that indeed is what the Bible emphasizes most of all about Abraham, in both the Old and New Testaments—his "faith-obedience".
There is an old dispute among biblical theologians as to whether the covenant with Abraham was unconditional or conditional. But really, that is far too simplistic because, in different respects, it was both. On the one hand, it was unconditional, in the sense that it did not depend upon any prior condition that Abraham had fulfilled. God simply announces his choice of Abraham and his amazing intention to bless the nations through him. Abraham had done nothing to deserve or trigger that action on God's part.
Yet on the other hand, God's first words imply a condition. Everything hinges on the opening command (lit.), "Get yourself up and go from here to the land I will show you." All that God goes on to promise depends on that. No leaving, no blessing. Bluntly put, if Abraham had not got up and left for Canaan, if he had not trusted God enough to obey him, the story would have ended right there. The Bible would be a thin book indeed.
It is not that the divine promise has become contingent upon Abraham's obedience, but that Abraham's obedience has been incorporated into the divine promise. Henceforth Israel owes its existence not just to YHWH but also to Abraham. Theologically this constitutes a profound understanding of the value of human obedience—it can be taken up by God and become a motivating factor in his purposes towards humanity.
Walter Moberly7
But Abraham's faith and obedience were repeatedly tested in the chapters that follow. The severest test came in Genesis 22, which is really the climax of the whole story of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him. Abraham's willingness to obey even up to that point and to trust God for the aftermath, was then built into God's most solemn confirmation of his promise, reinforced by an oath on his own existence.
By myself I have sworn, oracle of YHWH,
it is because of the fact that you have done this thing
and have not kept back your son, your only one,
that I will most surely bless you,
and I will most surely multiply your offspring [seed],
like the stars in the heavens and like the sand on the seashore,
and your offspring will possess the gate of your enemies.
And in your offspring all the nations of the world will find blessing,
on account of the fact that you obeyed me.
(Gen. 22:16–18; my translation and italics)
This remarkable text explicitly binds together God's promised intentions for the nations, on the one hand, and Abraham's faith and obedience on the other. The two are integrally bound together. God's speech emphatically begins and ends by making Abraham's obedience the reason why God now binds himself irrevocably on oath to keep his promise to bless the nations.
Now of course this does not in any way mean that Abraham has merited God's covenant promises. We are not slipping into "works righteousness" here. As we just said, Abraham had done nothing to deserve God's promise, which came "out of the blue", as it were. But Abraham's sustained response of faith and obedience not only moves God to count him as righteous (Gen. 15:6), but also enables God's promise to move forward towards its universal horizon.
When we come to the New Testament, we find that Paul, James and the writer to the Hebrews between them capture both poles of Abraham's response to God.
• Paul focuses on the faith that led Abraham to believe in the promises of God, however impossible they seemed, and that was thereby counted as righteousness (Rom. 4; Gal. 3:6–29).
• James focuses on the faith that led Abraham to obey the command of God, thus demonstrating in practice the genuineness of his faith (James 2:20–24).
• Hebrews actually captures both dimensions (as, of course, Paul and James would have both agreed), by repeatedly emphasizing Abraham's faith while going on to show that he proved his faith through his obedience, from his initial departure from his homeland to the classic account of his obedience in Genesis 22 (Heb. 11:8–19).
For ourselves, with our concern for a missiological reading of these texts, the important point to notice is the way God's intention to bless the nations is combined with human commitment to obedience, which enables us to be the agent of that blessing.
The glorious gospel of the Abrahamic covenant is that God's mission is ultimately to bless all the nations. The enduring challenge of the Abrahamic covenant is that God planned to do that "through you and your descendants". The faith and obedience of Abraham, therefore, are not merely models for personal piety and ethics. They are also the essential credentials for effective participation in all that is meant by the command, "Be a blessing".
There is no blessing, for ourselves or for others, without faith and obedience. Those whom God calls to participate in his redemptive mission for the nations are those who exercise saving faith like Abraham and demonstrate costly obedience like Abraham.
So then, what God promised Abraham becomes the ultimate agenda for God's own mission (blessing the nations), and what Abraham did in response to God's promise becomes the historical model for our mission (faith and obedience).
Summary
In "Queuing the Questions" (the title to part 1 of this book), we asked the fundamental question about the church: "Who are we and what are we here for?" Getting a correct answer to that question is essential if we are to build a sound biblical theology of the church's mission. Rather than begin with the book of Acts, we have gone back to Abraham, because that is where we find God launching his great redemptive, restorative project—God's answer to the bleak situation presented in Genesis 3–11.
In a world where God's curse is operating in response to human sin and rebellion, God launches a program to bring blessing, and we have explored what a rich and comprehensive content there is in the biblical word "blessing". But God's blessing was not for Abraham and his family only. He would be the father of a particular nation through whom blessing would come universally to all nations. "We", then, if we are in Christ, are part of that family of Abraham, no matter what nation we come from.
But if, in Christ, we inherit Abraham's blessing, we also inherit Abraham's mission—that is, to go and be a blessing, to be the means by which God's blessing comes to others. At a fundamental level, starting right here in Genesis, that is "who we are"—the children of Abraham; and that is "what we are here for"—to participate in God's promised mission of bringing people from all nations on earth into the sphere of God's redemptive blessing through Christ.
However, in "Queuing the Questions" we also asked, "What kind of people are we to be?" Abraham was called not only to trust God but also to obey him. There is an ethical dimension to being a people of blessing that also derives from the great Abrahamic tradition. That is a dimension of the mission of God's people that we must explore further in the coming chapters. In the next chapter we will see that it was in God's mind even when he chose and called Abraham.
Relevant Questions
1. What does the word "blessing" usually bring to mind for you? In what ways has your concept changed in the light of this chapter?
2. "Being a blessing" might not seem an adequate description of "the mission of God's people" (and indeed, by itself it isn't!), but what aspects of our mission would be challenged or improved by thinking in such Abrahamic terms?
3. Abraham was called to "leave and go". Whether or not you are called to physically leave your country and go overseas as a missionary, what elements of your present cultural and social context do you need to "leave" if you are to follow Abraham in "faith-obedience"?
4. Does the notion of the demand of obedience to the mission of the church sound like legalism to you? How might this unbiblical notion be biblically rebutted?
1 For a much fuller study of this theme of the election of Abraham and its implications for mission, see the two chapters devoted to it in The Mission of God, chs. 6 and 7. Some of the sections that follow in this chapter draw extensively on that survey.
2 Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Mission in a Postmodern World (Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 34–36.
3 "A Statement on the Prosperity Gospel", by the Africa Chapter of the Lausanne Theology Working Group, paragraph 2 (italics in original). The whole statement can be read at www.lausanne.org/all-documents/a-statement-on-the-prosperity-gospel.html.
4 The form of the Hebrew verb is known as "Niphal," which can be reflexive or passive. Translations vary, therefore, between "by you the nations will bless themselves" (reflexive) or "through you the nations will be blessed" (passive). The meaning of the former is that the nations would see in Abraham and his people such a signal demonstration of God's blessing that they would use Abraham or Israel as a model for blessing one another: "May you be blessed like Abraham." In this case, "you will be a blessing" (at the end of verse 2) means that Abraham would become the name on people's lips when they uttered blessings. This is certainly possible and fits with other cases of such practice (e.g., Gen. 48:20; Ruth 4:11–12; Ps. 72:17; Zech. 8:13). However, the ancient translations, including the Greek Septuagint (LXX), and the apostle Paul (Gal. 3:8) all render it with the passive sense. In any case, if the sense is reflexive ("all the nations will bless themselves by you"), then it implies that the nations have come to know about Abraham and Abraham's God and seek blessing from that source. God promises to bless such people in the first line of Gen. 12:3, so ultimately a reflexive sense comes to include and imply the passive, "will be blessed."
5 Bauckham, Bible and Mission, 33.
6 The doctrine of justification is the subject of considerable recent controversy, between proponents and opponents of the so-called "New Perspective" on Paul. I do not wish to enter that discussion here, but it is clear to me that for Paul, what God has accomplished through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus, constitutes God's fulfillment of his promise to Abraham, such that the inclusion of people from all nations in the blessings previously enjoyed only by Old Testament Israel is at the heart of Paul's understanding of the gospel.
7 R. W. L. Moberly, "Christ as the Key to Scripture: Genesis 22 Reconsidered," He Swore an Oath: Biblical Themes from Genesis 12–50 (eds. R. S. Hess et al.; Carlisle: Paternoster and Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 161.
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Regards,
Ryan Chia
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Mission exists
because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is
ultimate, not man.
*From John Piper, Let The Nations Be Glad*
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