The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church E-Book

Justin A. Schell

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Short Studies in Biblical Theology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 190

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A Canonical Journey to Explore the Mission of the Eternal God "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). This declarative phrase introduces fundamental questions circling the minds of skeptics and believers of Christianity alike. What was God's mission when he chose to create? And why, through the Savior's death on the cross and the witness of his church, does he continue to redeem the very creation that rebels against him? To answer these imperative questions, author Justin Schell takes readers on a canonical journey exploring the mission of the eternal God—Father, Son, and Spirit. Drawing insights from creation, the exodus of God's people, the suffering servant, the Great Commission, and consummation, this book examines the purpose and beauty of God's great story. It is out of an abundance of love that God brings us into union with him, calling his church to bear witness to all that has been done in Christ, until the day that he returns.   - Explores the Mission of God: Takes readers on a canonical journey to examine the purpose and beauty of God's story  - Academic yet Accessible: Perfect for pastors, college and seminary students, missionaries, and lay leaders - Short Studies in Biblical Theology: Part of a series designed to give readers accessible volumes on God's word. Other volumes include Sanctification as Set Apart and Growing in Christ; The Sabbath as Rest and Hope for the People of God; and more 

Leseprobe

Thank you for downloading this Crossway book.

Sign up for the Crossway Newsletter for updates on special offers, new resources, and exciting global ministry initiatives:

Crossway Newsletter

Or, if you prefer, we would love to connect with you online:

“The theme of missions is a key to understanding the Bible. Justin Schell enables us to see this afresh in this book. This is not just a rehashing of previous books on missions, and it is certainly more than an academic book. It is a God-centered call to the church to see the vital place that its Christ-representing witness has in the mission of God. It brings us a message we all need to hear!”

Conrad Mbewe, Pastor, Kabwata Baptist Church, Lusaka, Zambia; Founding Chancellor, African Christian University

“Justin Schell provides an excellent overview of mission through the storyline of Scripture. His work reminds us of our identity as a community of witnesses to the work of God in the gospel and gives us a better glimpse of the God whose self-revelation is oriented toward restoring a relationship with his image bearers.”

Trevin Wax, Vice President of Research and Resource Development, North American Mission Board; Visiting Professor, Cedarville University; author, The Thrill of Orthodoxy; Rethink Your Self; and This Is Our Time

“I am excited to recommend this book. Today there are roughly seven thousand people groups on the planet with little to no access to the gospel. That’s more than three billion people. Justin Schell helps the church see the glorious God of mission, his gracious purposes in the world, and our role in that larger work. The reader gets to watch God’s mission unfold from the garden of Eden to the new Jerusalem. It’s a breathtaking story, and it’s our story. We are his witnesses. This book is a wonderful addition to an excellent series.”

Michael Oh, CEO, Lausanne Movement

“From Genesis to Revelation, Justin Schell shows us God’s relentless pursuit of a bride for his Son. This book will do more than shape your view of mission or of Scripture. It will refresh and refocus your view of our great missionary God.”

Glen Scrivener, evangelist; author, The Air We Breathe and How to See Life: A Guide in 321; coauthor, Come and See: A History and Theology of Mission

“This is a thoroughly readable and well-informed account of God’s mission in the world, in which we, as disciples of Christ, are privileged to share. Justin Schell carefully follows the redemptive-historical approach of this series, from the garden to the garden city. Beginning with God’s missional activity in creation and its continuation, despite Adam’s failure, we see God’s purposes unfold through Abraham and the nation of Israel, culminating in the coming of Jesus, God’s incarnate missioner, who empowers his people to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all people. A feast of biblical insights to enrich our understanding and equip us to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Glenn N. Davies, former Archbishop of Sydney

“Justin Schell carefully traces the theme of mission along the narrative arc of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Theologically rich and insightful, this engaging book invites the reader into the drama of Scripture as God reveals, redeems, and restores his creation. Emphasis on communion with the triune God as the aim of mission displays the coherence of the biblical narrative and rightly calls attention to the relational dimension of the missio Dei. Refreshing, like the wind of the Spirit, Schell’s book draws the contemporary church into the central theme of Scripture and the vital witness of the church.”

Carol Kaminski, Senior Professor of Old Testament, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“God made us for communion with himself, so we should care about his mission in the world. In The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church, Justin Schell helps us see how God’s mission emerges from the story that Scripture tells. Through God’s power in judgment and salvation, God is displaying his glory in the world he loves. Schell guides us through the panorama of Scripture as he takes us from Eden to the church’s Great Commission. We bear witness to the redemptive work of the triune God, and we long for the consummation of his mission.”

Mitchell L. Chase, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Preaching Pastor, Kosmosdale Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky

The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church

Short Studies in Biblical Theology

Edited by Dane C. Ortlund and Miles V. Van Pelt

The City of God and the Goal of Creation, T. Desmond Alexander (2018)

Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World, Thomas R. Schreiner (2017)

Divine Blessing and the Fullness of Life in the Presence of God, William R. Osborne (2020)

From Chaos to Cosmos: Creation to New Creation, Sidney Greidanus (2018)

The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross, Patrick Schreiner (2018)

The Lord’s Supper as the Sign and Meal of the New Covenant, Guy Prentiss Waters (2019)

Marriage and the Mystery of the Gospel, Ray Ortlund (2016)

The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church, Justin A. Schell (2024)

The New Creation and the Storyline of Scripture, Frank Thielman (2021)

Redemptive Reversals and the Ironic Overturning of Human Wisdom, G. K. Beale (2019)

Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death, Mitchell L. Chase (2022)

The Royal Priesthood and the Glory of God, David S. Schrock (2022)

The Sabbath as Rest and Hope for the People of God, Guy Prentiss Waters (2022)

Sanctification as Set Apart and Growing in Christ, Marny Köstenberger (2023)

The Serpent and the Serpent Slayer, Andrew David Naselli (2020)

The Son of God and the New Creation, Graeme Goldsworthy (2015)

Work and Our Labor in the Lord, James M. Hamilton Jr. (2017)

The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church

Justin A. Schell

The Mission of God and the Witness of the Church

© 2024 by Justin A. Schell

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2024

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8158-8 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8161-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8159-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schell, Justin A., 1980– author.

Title: The mission of God and the witness of the church / Justin A. Schell.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2024. | Series: Short studies in biblical theology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023032986 (print) | LCCN 2023032987 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433581588 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433581595 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433581618 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Mission of the Church—Biblical teaching. | Redemption—Biblical teaching.

Classification: LCC BS2545.M54 S34 2024 (print) | LCC BS2545.M54 (ebook) | DDC 266—dc23/eng/20240126

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032986

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032987

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2024-04-29 10:34:18 AM

To

the mission mobilizers

who remind us that the harvest is plentiful

but the laborers are few

Contents

Series Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Mission of God

1  The God of Mission

2  Mission in the Garden

3  Father of All Nations

4  Yahweh Saves

5  Land and Exile

6  The Great Commission

7  The Church on Mission

8  Mission and Consummation

For Further Reading

General Index

Scripture Index

Series Preface

Most of us tend to approach the Bible early on in our Christian lives as a vast, cavernous, and largely impenetrable book. We read the text piecemeal, finding golden nuggets of inspiration here and there, but remain unable to plug any given text meaningfully into the overarching storyline. Yet one of the great advances in evangelical biblical scholarship over the past few generations has been the recovery of biblical theology—that is, a renewed appreciation for the Bible as a theologically unified, historically rooted, progressively unfolding, and ultimately Christ-centered narrative of God’s covenantal work in our world to redeem sinful humanity.

This renaissance of biblical theology is a blessing, yet little of it has been made available to the general Christian population. The purpose of Short Studies in Biblical Theology is to connect the resurgence of biblical theology at the academic level with everyday believers. Each volume is written by a capable scholar or churchman who is consciously writing in a way that requires no prerequisite theological training of the reader. Instead, any thoughtful Christian disciple can track with and benefit from these books.

Each volume in this series takes a whole-Bible theme and traces it through Scripture. In this way readers not only learn about a given theme but also are given a model for how to read the Bible as a coherent whole.

We have launched this series because we love the Bible, we love the church, and we long for the renewal of biblical theology in the academy to enliven the hearts and minds of Christ’s disciples all around the world. As editors, we have found few discoveries more thrilling in life than that of seeing the whole Bible as a unified story of God’s gracious acts of redemption, and indeed of seeing the whole Bible as ultimately about Jesus, as he himself testified (Luke 24:27; John 5:39).

The ultimate goal of Short Studies in Biblical Theology is to magnify the Savior and to build up his church—magnifying the Savior through showing how the whole Bible points to him and his gracious rescue of helpless sinners; and building up the church by strengthening believers in their grasp of these life-giving truths.

Dane C. Ortlund and Miles V. Van Pelt

Abbreviations

BECNT  Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

EBC  The Expositor’s Biblical Commentary

NAC  The New American Commentary

NICNT  The New International Commentary on the New Testament

NIGTC  The New International Greek Testament Commentary

NSBT  New Studies in Biblical Theology

NTC  New Testament Commentary

PNTC  The Pillar New Testament Commentary

TOTC  Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries

WBC  Word Biblical Commentary

ZECNT  Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

Introduction

The Mission of God

There is a renaissance of scholarship and teaching on the mission of God today. Popular authors and speakers are attempting to help Christians live on mission. Mission agencies and church planting networks are training new gospel ministers to start missional churches. Missiologists and biblical scholars are exploring missional readings of the Bible along with the concept of the missio Dei—that is, the mission of God.

Despite all the discussion of mission, a cloud of confusion has descended on the church and academy about what exactly the mission of God is and what the church’s role is in it. This stems in part from the fact that mission is a slippery word. It has become a catchall word for Christian activity of any kind. When an important word like mission becomes so elastic that its meaning is cloudy, significant questions arise.

One such question is, What is the relationship of proclamation ministries such as evangelism, discipleship, and church planting to mercy ministries and efforts to serve the poor, the orphan, and the widow? Even more complex is the question of whether God’s mission is just about redeeming mankind or perhaps something larger, even as large as restoring the entire cosmos. This confusion demands that we go back to the Scriptures for answers.

Defining Mission

The English word mission is not much used in the Bible.1 That should not, however, lead us to think that the concept and practice of mission are absent in Scripture.

For our study, I will use the following definition for the mission of God: God’s revelatory work intended to establish a divine-human communion within creation. Or, as the apostle John puts it in perhaps the most well-known and shared verse in the Bible, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God reveals himself in sending his Son, the Savior, in time and space (i.e., creation), so that mankind might have eternal life, which John defines as knowing God (John 17:3). All of this radiates from God’s love for the world. Let’s look more closely at the three key terms in our definition: revelatory work, divine-human communion, within creation.

Revelatory Work

First, notice that God’s mission includes an activity: God’s revelatory work. Mission is first and foremost something in which God engages: it is from God, through God, and for God. He—not society, government, or even the church—is the primary definer and actor in the missio Dei. Before humanity is ever invited into mission, God is at work, revealing himself in revelatory word and saving deed.

You may wonder whether the word revelation adequately explains all that God does in creation and redemption. That may be because we have too low a view of divine revelation. When God speaks, the cosmos is born (Gen. 1). The good news proclaimed is “the power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16), and faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17) the word of Christ. When we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus, we are changed from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:4–6). Truly, all that God says and does can be summed up in the word revelation—so much so that Jesus declares that his very glory is revealed in his death on the cross (John 12:23–25). God’s revelation, in fact, creates and redeems.

This revelatory aspect of God’s mission is often connected in mission studies with the Greek verb apostellō, which means “send.” An apostle (noun: apostolos) was literally a “sent one.” The Latin verb mittere corresponds to apostellō. The noun form is missio, from which we get our English word mission. Apostellō captures the idea of sending on mission. English speakers might talk about sending an ambassador on a diplomatic mission. For our purposes, throughout Scripture we will see God actively revealing himself through sending. He sends the Son to create and redeem the world by the Spirit, whom he likewise sends. He sends his people, from our first parents to the prophets to the apostle Paul, into the world, as witnesses to his revelation. Each sending is meant to reveal who God is and what he is like. This naturally begs the question, Why is it so important for God to reveal himself?

Divine-Human Communion

If revelation is the activity of mission, communion is the aim of mission, specifically a loving communion between humanity and the living God. This is mission’s goal. Perhaps a second Greek word, a noun, will help us understand this aspect of God’s mission: telos. Telos means the desired end. Telos tells us why something is done, why it is important, or what we want to achieve. When coupled with what we have already seen, this helps us recognize that all sending (apostellō) has a purpose (telos). A king sends an ambassador for a reason. A humanitarian mission seeks certain outcomes. This is true, likewise, when God sends.

God reveals himself for communion both in the work of creation and in redemption. At creation, before the fall, the Spirit hovers over the waters to breathe life into the world, and the Word of God speaks everything into existence. Why? The triune God intends to bring humanity into communion with him as children and co-regents. This is also the aim of God’s mission in redemption. The cross of Christ is ground zero of a new creation where restored fellowship is made possible as the Spirit of God breathes new life into humanity.

This relational goal of mission is critical to remember. The sending dimension of mission is often the sole focus of missional readings of Scripture. As a result, what is highlighted is simply the church’s activities in the world. We truncate God’s mission, however, if we neglect the relational heart that undergirds God’s sending. This results in two problems.

First, an overly weighted focus on the sending dimension of mission explains why some sections of the Old Testament appear not to apply to God’s mission. We clearly see the sending activity in the book of Jonah as missional but fail to see how the Song of Solomon or Hosea, declaring God’s plan for communion with humanity, fits into the missio Dei. The relational dimension of God’s mission helps us make more sense of genres like wisdom and poetry in our biblical theologies of mission.

Second, when we neglect the relational dimension, we don’t know what to do with the church beyond involvement in missional activities. But, if God’s very aim in his mission is to establish divine-human communion, then the church cannot be reduced to a sending agency. Some twentieth-century scholars contended that the church has no special role in God’s mission; instead, God may fulfill his mission through government and popular uprising more than through the church. Even evangelical scholars have made statements like “it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission.”2 In this way of thinking, the church exists for mission, not the other way around. I will argue the opposite. The revelatory activity of God (and those he sends) is to create and redeem a people for communion.

Within Creation

The final part of our definition alerts us to the fact that there is a setting for mission. Nonhuman creation has a role in the mission of God. Whether in the garden (Gen. 1–3) or the garden city (Rev. 21–22), the Lord has never intended a bodiless, noncontextual existence for humanity. The cosmos was God’s idea; it was to be where his mission would unfold. It has served as the stage on which the great drama of creation, fall, exile, and restoration take place. In eternity future, the new creation will be the everlasting dwelling place of the Lamb and his bride.

The cosmos, whether Edenic, fallen, or renewed, is not the ultimate end of the mission of God; nevertheless, it is the context. Scott Hafemann unpacks this order of relationship when he writes, “Mankind is not created to provide for the world; the world is created to provide for mankind.”3 The creation is good, it is from God, and it exists to host God’s designed communion with humanity.

So the missio Dei has an activity, a purpose, and a context: revelation for communion in creation. These three key terms and their amplifications will become clearer as we move through the narrative of Scripture. If what I have said is correct, we should see this theme naturally emerge from the text as early as the creation narrative (Gen. 1–2), carry right on through into the new creation (Rev. 21–22), and appear everywhere in between.

One facet to our theme that we should prepare for at the outset is that early in the Scriptures we encounter an enemy to God, a being opposed to God’s mission. In fact, we encounter three enemies: Satan, sin, and death. While God’s mission as I have defined it existed before the fall, much of the narrative focuses on the post-fall restoration necessary to reestablish (and surpass) what has been lost. So the relational purpose remains the same despite the need for new revelatory action on the part of God in the world.

The Mission of the Church

We have begun to unpack the missio Dei, the mission of God. Here I want to take just a moment to ask, what is the role of God’s people in his mission? The answer, in short, is that we are his witnesses. God accomplishes his mission, and his people bear witness to what he has done. This may seem to belittle the role of humanity in the mission of God, but perhaps that is because we misunderstand what is meant by witness. Much like the word revelation, witness in the biblical sense points to an awesome reality.

It is through the witness of God’s people that the invisible God becomes knowable. Of course, God is most clearly revealed in the incarnation of his Son and in the testimony of Scripture. Our part in the drama is to witness to that revelation in word and deed. We are called to speak lines that will reveal the great author of the universe and the redemption he has wrought. Similarly, we are called to act out our part in a way that reveals his heart and intentions.

How our words and actions work together has been the source of much debate in mission studies. Space limits our ability to fully explore the key positions, but let me speak into the debate briefly. How ought Christians to think of these things? Consider this: Humanity contributed nothing to the work of creation. Just so, God’s people supply not one iota to the work of redemption. He has done all. We are his witnesses. We cannot save, but we witness to his saving work. We do not bring the kingdom, but we pray for it, witness to its inauguration, and wait for its full consummation. Do our good works play a role in this? Certainly. We let our good deeds shine so that our neighbors give glory to God (Matt. 5:16).

Our words and deeds reveal truths about God, but in differing ways. When we speak of the doctrine of revelation, we often differentiate between general revelation and special revelation. General revelation includes the ideas, attributes, and concepts about ultimate reality and God that anyone may discern simply by what has been created. For instance, Romans