I’m about 5 or 6 blog posts behind right now. Since I last posted, we’ve celebrated Christmas, completed our current fundraising efforts for Lifesong Ethiopia, spent a week in Ethiopia, celebrated Josiah’s 3rd birthday, and spent a fun-filled week with some of our favorite friends. I really want to write about all of these things, and plan to very soon, but today I want to write about the new adventure that Casey and I are undertaking this year.

A couple weeks ago, Casey and I began taking the class called “Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.” We had our first lesson last night, and I’m already blown away. This material is incredible, mind-boggling, and life-changing. There are several people in our class that are taking it for the second time; it’s that good.

From their website: “Perspectives helps believers from all walks of life see how they can get threaded into God’s story of redeeming people from every tribe, tongue, and nation to Himself. From Genesis to the prophets, Jesus Christ to the early church, and Constantine to today, you will see how God has been moving, how the global Church has responded, and what the greatest needs in world evangelization remain today. It isn’t a class about missions, but a course on how every believer can be intimately woven into the story of God using His people to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth.”

Each week we cover a different topic with a different speaker, which we prepare for by reading through several assigned articles. In order to share what we are learning and to help myself process and record what God is teaching me, I plan to blog about each lesson.

Last night’s lesson was called, “The Living God Is A Missionary God,” and our speaker was Todd Ahrend, author of The Abrahamic Revolution and In This Generation. Todd works with Mission Revolution and The Traveling Team.

Todd shared with us many amazing things in his two one-hour sessions. He showed us how the Bible shows God to be a Missionary God from the very beginning. In the introduction to the Bible (Genesis 1-11), God creates His world, which is then compromised by sin. This sin results in a loss of relationship between God and His creation. After the people build the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, God scatters the nations across the face of the earth. But immediately following that, He calls Abram in Genesis 12; this begins the plot of the whole Bible, God restoring people to a relationship with Him, which concludes in Revelation with His victory over evil.

I’ve studied Abraham several times before. I know all about the promises that God gave him and the nation that was birthed from his obedience, but I never understood the point of God’s call or God’s plan for the Hebrew people before last night. God did not call and bless Abraham just because he was a favorite, or because God had given up on all other people. He called and blessed Abraham in order that all the people of earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3) and so that all people could come to know Him. In the same way, God did not elect the Israelites, the Chosen People, because He was fed up with all other people and wanted to only develop a relationship with Abraham’s descendants. His plan for the Israelites was always that they would point the rest of mankind to God. That they would serve as His priests, His mediators, between the lost people of the earth and the Creator of the universe. As Isaiah 49:6 says, “‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’”

I think a part of me always assumed that God only extended salvation to the Gentiles through the new covenant because the Jewish people had rejected Him. But now I see that God always desired a relationship with all people. He only chose the Israelites to be the vehicle for bringing His name to the nations. Think of Jonah, the Hebrew prophet sent to the Ninevites, a Gentile nation. God was reaching out to establish a relationship with those people, and He wanted the Hebrew people to help Him with this mission. Here’s how Todd Ahrend drew the diagram:

But the Hebrew people rejected this mission from God (just as Jonah initially did). They didn’t want to share God with the other nations; they would rather keep their relationship with God to themselves. As Todd Ahrend explained it, God intended to reveal Himself to the Israelites so that they could in turn reveal Him to all the peoples of the earth. He blessed Israel so that they could be a blessing to the nations, “that [His] way may be known on earth, [His] saving power among all nations” (Ps. 67:2). But instead, Israel’s disobedience ended up giving God a bad reputation on earth; they failed their mission. Ezekiel 36:20-22 says, “wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, in that people said of them, ‘These are the people of the LORD, and yet they had to go out of his land.’ But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came. ‘Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.’”

When Jesus entered the scene in the New Testament, the people in the synagogue try to kill Him when He reminds them of how God had reached out to the Gentiles (Luke 4:20-30). Later on in His ministry, the Pharisees and Sadducees demand a sign from heaven. In His response, He alludes to Jonah (remember the reluctant missionary?) and says that He will give them no other sign (Matthew 16). Immediately after this account, Jesus asks for Peter’s confession of faith and then describes how He will build His church. At this point, Jesus is relieving the Jewish people of their mission. Now the Church will be the ones to fulfill God’s plan of making His name known among the nations.

Peter echoes this transition himself in 1 Peter 2:9, when he now addresses Christ’s Church as the “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” And Galatians 3:14 says, “in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

So, if you are a believer today, you are now the seed of Abraham. You are the recipient of the promises and blessings that God originally gave to Abraham. But, we can’t forget the reason that God gave the blessing: that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:4), that we will be “a light for the nations, that [His] salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Is. 49:6).

So, the question is: are we fulfilling our mission as Christ’s Church? I think sometimes we are misled into thinking that our relationship with God is only for our own benefit, and the benefit of our own children. Just like the Israelites, we sometimes like to believe that the Church exists to be a warm and comfy community only for ourselves, as if there were only two bubbles in the diagram: God and the Church. But if God’s only intentions for us after we receive Him are to deepen our relationships with Him and other believers, why would He leave us here on earth?

That is what I’ve learned and been wrestling with, and this is only Lesson One. Worth the price of admission, huh? I can’t wait to see what else God has in store for us.