Go Where He Leads - Some Thoughts on "Missions" Pt. 3

At this point, I would like to clarify further what I am getting at.

The point behind the Gospel call and “missions” is not to make it appear as if God is in heaven fighting a battle against evil forces and needs soldiers to help win the war. It is not as if we are crucial to God’s mission to glorify righteousness and we must recognize our inherent importance to join God’s side. This sort of thinking is really just man-centered theology, whether we are willing to recognize it and call it what it is or not. Make no mistake about it—God does not need us to glorify righteousness. God has existed in loving community as the Trinity for all of eternity and before the foundations of the Earth were laid. He was not obligated to create man. Some “theologians” have postulated that God had to create man because “He is love” (1 John 4:16) and love must have an object of affection. This is a dangerous statement, because whenever we start prescribing rules about how God “had to do something,” we can slip into faulty doctrine and even heresy real quickly. No, God did not have to create anything. He could have existed for all of eternity; He could have chilled as the Trinity forever without any evil or wickedness manifested. (As a side note, I sometimes wonder why God went to all the trouble to bring us into being and have us go through all this sin, pain, and heartache, and only for many humans to never see the depravity of themselves, never see the greatness of God, never repent from their sin, and spend an eternity in hell tormented in the presence of a seemingly harmless Lamb. I will never understand it, but I must nevertheless trust that God knows what He’s doing). Anywho, God is not obligated to do anything, and He is not in need of wicked sinners.

The point, when all theology and missiology is broken down, is that God is good. He’s holy meaning different than us, He’s just, and He’s righteous but He can also be nice and merciful when He sees fit. He’s loving and gracious. In Jesus He displayed humility in coming down to be His creation (Immanuel = God with us in Hebrew). This tells us that we must not strive to be with God by reaching in futility to heaven like the fools and the Tower of Babel, this because we are powerless in our humanity to please God. Rather, God has come down from heaven as a human to be with us. Genesis tells us that He did so on a stairway to heaven that Jacob saw in a dream while napping with his head on a rock (Led Zeppelin totally ripped off the Old Testament). This Stairway that Jacob saw, according to Jesus’ own words in John 1:51 is the Son of Man, Jesus himself.

God, in His own use if irony and unpredictable graciousness, has decided to defeat evil by using evil, us wicked sinners. He changes us to be different people and empowers us to live differently than we previously did. This only happens by grace. We can only be used for good by His grace. God does not choose us based on our own innate ability, like designating some of us varsity and the rest junior varsity. The Bible tells us that He does not practice favoritism. Rather, He takes crappy people and does amazing things with them. Romans 9 tells us that “He has mercy on whom He wills, and He has compassion on whom He wills.” This is the pattern in the Old Testament, where God takes dumb, unaware, average guys and empowers them to do miraculous things. Abram was just living a normal life like everyone else, likely a pagan, and God showed up in His life, gave him grace, and promised him a son even though his wife was barren and he was passed his child-bearing years. He commanded Abram to leave his hometown and his father’s house to go start a different and set-apart life that would be used to “bless all nations.” The New Testament tells us that this blessing was not only the nation of Israel, a people outnumbering the stars in the sky, but it was Jesus himself who would bless all people with his substitutionary life, atoning death, and powerful resurrection. The Gospel was then spread all over the world and today Jesus’ legacy is a few billion people that worship him as God, the promise made to Abram, a lowly guy from some no-name town, just like all of us who have experienced the great mercy of God.

It is then that we see that the idea of missions is not about us recognizing God’s need for us or lost peoples’ need for us, but really recognizing our need for God. For it is Him that takes us and does great things with us; and I believe that it is not until our hearts are humbled and we realize our utter nothingness without God that we can truly become all things to all people that we may win some to Him. We must trust in Him who justifies us and in His Gospel that possesses His power. Even though the spiritually blind regard the preaching of the Gospel as utter foolishness, for those that believe we know of its power because we have experienced it. And it is the collective privilege of the missionaries, the seminarians, and the pastors; as well as the single mothers, the children, the cubicle trolls, the husbands, the wives, the fathers, and the friends to be about this Gospel in everything we do because we possess the power of God in our mouths, in our hands, and in how we live. Praise God we have such a blessing to give to all people and that we ourselves who believe on Jesus’ name have received this blessing spoken to Adam, Abraham, and Jacob and to all those that trust in the life he gives freely to us lowly people. Amen.