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18th February 2025
TuesdayReflection
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'John Piper'
chancellor of
Bethlehem College and Seminary
"The End of History"
Scripture: Matthew 24 v 14
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This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
Why do we care so much about missions?
And what is it any way?
We discovered that God is passionately committed to his fame.
God's ultimate goal is that his name be known and praised and enjoyed by all the peoples of the earth.
The gospel is about the kingdom of God.
It is about the reign of God.
It is about the triumph of King Jesus over sin and death and judgment and Satan and guilt and fear.
It is good news.
"How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news ... who announces salvation, and says to Zion, 'Your God reigns!'"
.... Isaiah 52 v 7
And the aim of preaching this "gospel of the kingdom" is that the nations might know King Jesus and admire him and honour him and love him and trust him and follow him and make him shine in their affections.
We have come to see that God is passionately committed to upholding and displaying his name - his reputation - in the world.
The central command of missions is
Isaiah 12 v 4,
"Make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted.
God is passionately committed to his fame.
This is his highest priority: that he be known and admired and trusted and enjoyed as an infinitely glorious King.
Jesus said,
"This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come."
The ground of this certainty is the sovereignty of Jesus:
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Matthew 28:18).
Nothing can stop him:
"I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" Matthew 16:18
From this discovery we saw that if we as a church are disobedient, it is not ultimately the cause of God and the cause of world missions that will lose - we will lose.
God's counsel will stand and he will accomplish all his purpose (Isaiah 46:10).
His triumph is never in question, only our participation in it or our incalculable loss.
The missionary task is focused on reaching unreached peoples, not just people -- people groups, not just individuals - and is therefore finishable.
"Nations" means ethnic groupings with cultural and language distinctions that made it hard for the gospel to spread naturally from one group to the other.
"Nations" were groups like the "Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites" (Exodus 23:23), Cherokee, Navajo, Berber, Fulani.
The task of missions was not merely to win individuals, but to reach all these different groups in the world.
That is the task of missions: not just reaching more and more people, but more and more peoples - tribes, tongues, peoples, nations.
This discovery gave us a sense of clarified and refined direction for our prayers and our mobilizing efforts.
The task was not primarily to try to keep up with or gain on the population growth rate in the world - as great as that would be.
The task is to make steady headway in reaching more and more "nations" - people groups.
Which means that the task is finishable, because while the number of individual people keeps growing and changing, the number of people groups (by and large) does not.
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This is an edited version.
The full article, and Bible references, is avaiable on request
Scroll down for the continuation of this discussion.
'John Piper'
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
More
We discovered that the scarcity of Paul-type missionaries has been obscured by the quantity of Timothy-type missionaries.
There seem to be two kinds of missionaries needed in the world.
There is the Timothy-type missionary and the Paul-type missionary.
We call Timothy a missionary because he left home (Lystra, Acts 16:1), joined a traveling team of missionaries, crossed cultures, and ended up overseeing the younger church in Ephesus (1 Timothy 1:3) far from his homeland.
But we have come to distinguish this Timothy-type missionary from the Paul-type missionary because Timothy stayed and ministered on the "mission field" long after there was a church planted there with its own elders (Acts 20:17) and its own outreach (Acts 19:10).
Paul (the Paul-type missionary), on the other hand, was driven by a passion to make God's name known in all the unreached peoples of the world.
He never stayed in a place long, once the church was established.
He said in Romans 15:20, "I make my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named" (Romans 15:20).
That is what we call "frontier missions" or "pioneer missions." That is a Paul-type missionary.
Back in 1983, it proved to be a stunning revelation that perhaps 90% of our missionary force from North America are Timothy-type missionaries working with established churches among reached peoples, and only 10% are Paul-type missionaries, even though hundreds of people groups, some would say several thousand, remain unreached - that is, there is no indigenous evangelizing movement among them at all.
From this discovery I came to feel that one of my callings as a pastor is to pray and preach and write for the mobilizing of more and more Paul-type missionaries, while not hindering the obedience of those, like Timothy, who are called to stay in the mission field of "Ephesus."
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