The Mission of God | Genesis 1-3
Brian Hedges | June 26, 2016
Well, good morning to you once again. To be a Christian is to be a missionary. To be a Christian is to be on mission with God. That’s part of our calling. That’s part of what we do. That’s part of who we are—or, at least, it should be. And it’s important for us to understand that our mission as God’s people is rooted in the missio deo, the mission of God itself. Our God is a missionary God.
The word “mission”—essentially, carries the idea of being sent. And the whole story of Christianity is the story of God sending his Son into the world to save sinners and then the Father and Son sending the Spirit to the church to apply what Christ has accomplished for us and then, as Jesus told his disciples in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” So it’s this chain of sending, and it’s important for us as the church to recognize that our being sent is based on this missionary purpose of God—the mission of God. That’s why missiologist Darrel Guder writes these words,
"Mission is not merely an activity of the church. Rather, mission is the result of God’s initiative, rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal creation. ‘Mission’ means ‘sending,’ and it is the central biblical theme describing the purpose of God’s action in human history.... We have begun to learn that the biblical message is more radical, more inclusive, more transforming than we have allowed it to be. In particular, we have begun to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness.... God’s mission is calling and sending us, the church of Jesus Christ, to be a missionary church in our own societies, in the cultures in which we find ourselves.” (Guder, Missional Church, p. 4-5)
And, this morning, I want us to think about the mission of God, and consequently, our mission as the people of God. And the way I want to do this is to ground all of our thinking in Genesis chapters 1-3. So for those of you who have been here over the last ten weeks, we’ve been looking at these three chapters, Genesis 1-3. And we’ve been looking at the theology of these chapters, the basic teaching of these chapters about God, about creation, and about man, humanity, and about sin, and about the gospel. But this morning, I want us to look at these three chapters not so much in way of exposition but teasing out the themes of these chapters in relationship to the theme of mission. And I want to do that in three ways.
I want us to think about:
I. The goal of our mission
II. The scope of our mission
III. The message of our mission
And I want to ground all of it in Genesis 1-3.
I. The goal of our mission
From Genesis we learn the goal, the basic purpose for which we are sent. And we learn it when we remember the goal of creation. If mission is about new creation, it’s about the restoration of creation, we’ll only understand the purpose of mission if we remember the purpose of creation itself—the goal of creation itself.
And, you’ll remember, in this series we’ve talked a fair bit about the divine intention in the creation of the world. We’ve seen that God created the world to be the theater for his glory. He created it to be this cosmic temple, where the garden of Eden was the sanctuary of this temple, the very dwelling-place of God. And he placed in this temple, in the world, he placed man and woman, human beings, made in the image of God so that they would reflect his glory. They would image his glory to the world. Everything was created for this divine purpose: to display the glory of God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism had it right: “man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And of course, that is exactly what we’ve lost through rebellion and sin. That’s what we’ve lost through the fall. Romans 3:23 “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We’ve lost the glory of God.
But as we’ve seen in this series, God the creator is also God the redeemer. The creator God did not leave human beings to themselves in their rebellion and their guilt and their sin. He provided a covering for their nakedness. He promised an offspring, a seed, a descendent who would crush the serpent’s head. He promised to restore what was lost, to bring them back to the garden, to bring them back to Eden. And I love the “RE-” words that are in the Bible. They describe so well for us the purpose of salvation and the purpose of mission. These “re” words: renewal and restore and regeneration and reconciliation and restoration.
And so that’s the goal of mission, but that’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal of our mission is that by restoring us, by reconciling us, by renewing us, regenerating us, redeeming us, by doing this through the gospel, God would bring glory to his name. He does it all for the fame of his name. And we see this throughout scripture.
Psalm 67 reads,
3 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
4 Let the nations be glad and sing for joy...
5 Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
You see this same emphasis in the writings of the apostle Paul in Romans 15:9-12, where he talks about how Christ became a servant to the Jewish people in order that the Gentiles would glorify God for his mercy. As then he just gives a litany of texts from the Old Testament that are all about how the Gentiles, and the word there is “ethne”—the nations, the ethnic groups, the peoples of the world. The reason Jesus came, Paul says, is so that the peoples of the world would praise God for his mercy. And then you see it in Paul’s words in Romans 1:5, where he talks about how he had received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations. And that’s a great motto for missions right there—for the sake of his name among all the nations.
That’s the goal. The goal is that his name would be praised by a host of people from every kindred and tongue and tribe and nation—every family on earth. That they would praise him for his glorious grace, his glorious mercy. So that the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. As we read in the prophet Habbakuk 2:14.
So that’s the goal of missions. The goal of missions is the praise of the name of God, the glory of God
John Piper says it so well: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man . . . worship is the . . . goal of missions.” (Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, p. 17)
It was the goal of creation. God created us for his glory. It’s the goal of redemption. He redeems us to the praise of his glory, and it’s the goal of our missionary task—the fame of the name of our God.
So the goal of missions. And then secondly,
II. The scope of our mission
We also learn this from Genesis 1-3.
A few weeks ago we looked at the oracles of judgment in Genesis 3, and we saw all that we lost because of human rebellion and sin. We looked at the scope of sin, the scope of our sin and fall.
And you may remember that I quoted those words from Isaac Watts, where he describes how God makes his blessings known far as the curse is found from the great hymn Joy to the World.
And we saw that the scope of the curse of sin extends to these different dimensions in life. It leads to a broken relationship with God (so there’s the vertical dimension) where we’ve been expelled from paradise. We’ve been exiled from the garden. We’ve been banished from the divine dwelling place and left to ourselves. Every single one of us are rebels, idolaters, prodigals, hypocrites. We’re sinners under the just judgment of a holy God. And the relationship with God is broken.
But the consequences of the fall extend beyond that. The consequences of the fall also affect us and our relationships with one another, our broken relationships with each other, so that we have war and violence. We have human beings who treat each other very poorly. We have people go into a nightclub in Orlando and murder people who are made in the image of God. We have people who ridicule and curse and rob and pillage and rape and kill. We have injustice on every side. And we have, oftentimes, in our own hearts, just indifference to these horrible realities of the world. The consequences of sin, in other words, affect the horizontal level. Right? They affect us in how we relate to one another, and we see the brokenness of the world all around us.
And then sin has also, thirdly, broken the harmony, the relationship between human beings and creation. We were created to reign as God’s viceroys over the created order. We see that in Genesis 1. Man and woman were given dominion over the earth. We see it in Psalm 8. Adam was placed in the garden to tend it and to keep it, Genesis 2:15, but because of sin man is now largely at odds with creation. Rather than exercising wise and loving priestly, kingly care over creation, we exploit the creation, we abuse the creation, or we idolize the creation. Sin has entered into the world, and consequently the curse is extended to the earth itself, so that Paul talks about the world—the creation itself—groaning in its bondage to decay, in Romans chapter 8.
And we see this on every side as well, don’t we? We see it in fundamental conflict between human beings and much of the created order. We see it in exploitation. We see it in environmental disaster that that exploitation brings. We see it in our own habits of consumption and abuse and neglect of the creation and of the environment.
And so here’s the comprehensive scope of the human problem. And what we learn from scripture is that the scope of redemption is every bit as wide and as large as the scope of the fall.
And so we’ve talked about these three dimensions to the problem. There’s also three dimensions to the reconciliation. There is vertical reconciliation between man and God. As God restores us through the shed blood of his son, he restores us to his presence, to his fellowship. Paul talks about this in Ephesians 2, how we are restored to God through the blood of Jesus Christ—that’s a vertical reconciliation.
But then there’s also a horizontal reconciliation. Paul talks about this also in Ephesians 2, where he talks about how Jews and Gentiles, in this tension, this seemingly unending racial conflict, are reconciled together and made into one new humanity to glorify God. And I think the implications of that extend far and wide into our lives—that there is a horizontal reconciliation that God came to bring—reconciliation between people who otherwise would be in conflict with one another.
And then in Colossians 1, there is a cosmic dimension to this reconciliation where Paul describes how all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled to God.
So the scope of the problem determines the scope of the solution. The scope of reconciliation is as large as the scope of the fall.
And here’s the crucial thing I want you to see. It’s that the scope of our mission corresponds to these three realities. And so there are three tasks that our given to us in mission.
(1) The first one is gospel proclamation, or gospel witness. This is evangelism. This is missions, where we are taking the good news of the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world, as well as spreading the gospel in our neighborhoods. It’s our proclamation of the good news, the saving message of Christ. Now, understand, this is primary. This is front and center. This comes before everything else. And where there is no gospel witness, where there is no evangelism, where there is no proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, then we cannot be said to be “missional” in any real sense of the word. The message has got to go out. All right? That’s primary, but that’s not all that we are called to do. There are other things that go along with this, and I’m going to come back to the message part in a few minutes.
But I want you to see that, corresponding to the scope of the fall and the scope of God’s redemptive project and his plan, there are other things that we are called to do. And these also are part of our mission, when they are joined with gospel proclamation.
(2) So corresponding to our reconciliation with God, that’s gospel proclamation, the second task is what we might call social justice. And I have in mind here all of the issues of justice in the horizontal sphere. Issues such as poverty and abortion and racial reconciliation and putting an end to human trafficking, combatting AIDS and disease and sickness of all kinds, dealing with immigration, promoting education, medical care, seeking to feed the hungry and deal with the global hunger problem. All of these things are implications of this purpose of God to bring redemption and salvation and justice and restoration in the horizontal sphere.
And these are issues that are perhaps more urgent in our world today than, maybe, they ever have been. And the reason that you and I should care about these issues, is that God created human beings—all of them—in the image of God. Every human being. Every single person on this planet, no matter their color, no matter their creed, no matter what they believe, they’re still created in the image of God. They bear his image. And that means we have responsibilities to them and to him, because they bear that image: Black and white, Christian, Muslim, gay, or straight—they’re all created in the image of God. Now that doesn’t mean we must never express disapproval of religious beliefs or moral choices. It doesn’t mean that.
But the reality is that we’re all sinners, and talking about sin is one of our tasks in gospel proclamation. But it must never be done in ways that are unloving or unjust or disrespectful. There must not be within us as believers the least hint of pride or arrogance or condescension or ridicule. Hate speech should never be on our lips because we are talking to people and about people who are made in the image of God. And so in our speech and in our words and in our actions we should be just. We should be righteous.
(3) And then there’s a third category that we can also include here. Now this one may be a little surprising, but it’s the category of creation care. Now, that one may be kind of a surprising thing to say in a church that’s theologically and socially pretty conservative, but follow with me here. If the scope of our mission is shaped by the scope of the fall and the scope of God’s redemptive plan, and if that culminates in God’s making all things new, and creating a new heavens and a new earth, then surely part of our responsibility is caring for the created world that God has given to us.
We have better reasons that anyone to care for this world. Because, as Psalm 24 tells us, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything that’s in it.” It belongs to him, and we are just stewards over it. And so we should care about the world. We should be good stewards of it. And so of all people, we should be conscientious about things like sustainable energy and the conservation of natural resources and recycling and the humane treatment of animals. Do you remember how Proverbs says that “The righteous man regards the life of his animals” (Prov. 12:10, NIV)? You know what that means? It means that someone who is cruel to animals is unrighteous. That’s what it means. And when you trace the themes of justice and righteousness throughout scripture, you’ll see that God regularly speaks to his people about they treat, not only one another, but how they treat the land and how they treat their animals and how they treat all of creation. We’re meant to be stewards.
Now listen. A lost soul is more important than a tree. All right? So the urgency of getting the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world—that has more urgency than anything else. But as a Christian who lives in a world that God created, over which he gave us stewardship, you should care about trees. You should be green in that sense.
So, gospel witness, social justice, creation care. This is the scope of our concern as believers in Jesus Christ who are joining with the mission of God.
And then, finally, number three:
III. The message of our mission
And from a New Testament perspective, we would, of course, say that our message is Jesus Christ and him crucified. Paul says in II Corinthians 4, “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord.” The center of the gospel is the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s the message. That’s what we preach.
And, of course, we know that Jesus isn’t actually named in Genesis 1-3. All right? You don’t find the name Jesus. You don’t even find the word Messiah. You don’t find any of that in Genesis 1-3. However, what we do find is this—that many of the categories that the New Testament writers use to describe Jesus and what he’s done are categories that are lifted right out of these first three chapters of Genesis. And this could be really helpful for us in thinking about evangelism, in thinking about missions, in thinking about how to contextualize our message to the peoples of the world. So I just want to point out four of these really quickly as we move to a close.
(1) First of all we see Christ as the head of new creation who brings order to our chaos, who brings light into darkness, the one who raises us out of death and sin into spiritual life. He’s the head of new creation. You have those words in the first few verses of Genesis 1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."
Did you know that that very language was used by Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, when he talks about his apostolic ministry, his apostolic missionary task? He says in 2 Corinthians 4:5-7 “For what we proclaim is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay.”
And what’s he doing? He’s using creation language to talk about new creation, because Christ is the head of new creation. 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away and all things have become new.” New creation—God’s light shining into our hearts.
And you know, I was thinking maybe one reason why that imagery of light, Christ as the light, maybe one reason that that imagery so captured the apostle Paul is because of what happened when he was saved. Remember what happened on the road to Damascus? He’s on that road and I mean, he’s a religious guy, he’s persecuting Christians, he hates Jesus, he doesn’t want anything to do with Jesus. He’s in darkness himself, and then Jesus appears. Right? And he sees light, and then he’s blind. He’s in darkness for a period of time until his sight is restored. And remember what Jesus says to him? He said, Acts 26:17, “I am sending you, to open their eyes, (the eyes of the Gentiles, the nations) to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God.”
And Paul just couldn’t get over it. He realized he had been in darkness and Jesus—the firstborn of new creation, firstborn from the dead, the resurrected Christ—Jesus came to him and brought him out of the darkness and into the light. Well, it all comes right out of Genesis—new creation.
(2) Here’s the second theme: Not only is Christ head of new creation, Christ is the woman’s conquering seed- the one who vanquishes the ancient serpent through his death-destroying death on the cross. We’ve already looked at the first gospel, the protoevangelion, in Genesis 3:15, where God promises that he “will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
And we’ve seen that the fulfillment of this is, of course, Jesus Christ. He is the child born of the woman, born of the woman, persecuted by the ancient serpent in Revelation chapter 12. He’s the one who vanquishes the enemy; he vanquishes the devil. We also see this in Hebrews 2:14-15: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”
Now, friends, that is wonderful news! We live in a world where not everyone has categories for understanding sin. Not everybody has that category. Now, they need that category. But everybody’s got a category for understanding death. Everybody faces mortality. Everybody knows that there’s a time limit and that the mortality rate for the human race is 100%. What’s the answer? The answer is the one who through death destroyed the power of death so that he could set us free from the fear of death. The woman’s conquering seed—this mighty warrior who comes to defeat the enemy, the enemy of death. Paul calls death the last enemy.
(3) And, then, here's another theme: Christ is the sacrificial lamb who atones for our guilt and covers our nakedness and our shame. In Genesis 3:21, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden. They become conscious of their nakedness and their shame. They’ve tried to cover themselves with fig leaves, but it’s insufficient. Someone one time said, “As soon as they started sewing, the leaves began dying.” It’s such a perfect metaphor for our self-improvement projects, our self-salvation projects. We try to cover ourselves. We try to make ourselves right. We just can’t do it. What do they need? They need a covering. But how will that covering come? Only through the shedding of blood. In Genesis 3:21, we read that “the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” Now he couldn’t make garments of skins without an animal being sacrificed.
Now, some scholars have questioned whether that’s really an allusion to sacrifice, but when you look in Genesis 4, it’s pretty clear that Cain and Abel have got categories for understanding sacrifice, and one of those sacrifices is accepted and one of them isn’t. The one that’s accepted is the offering of the lamb, all right? And so I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that this was the beginning of the whole sacrificial theme in scripture—a lamb loses his life to provide covering for Adam and Eve. And that’s what the word atonement means; it means “covering.” And of course, Jesus is the ultimate and the final sacrifice as Hebrews tells us. He’s the one who has appeared once and for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself (Hebrews 9:26).
(4) And then, finally, Christ is the second and last Adam. He is the true priest-king, the obedient servant of the Lord, who obeys God’s law, who receives God’s judgment, and then restores us back to the garden of God’s glorious presence. In Genesis 1:27, we read how God created man in his image. In Genesis 2:15, we read of how the Lord took the man and put him in the garden to work it and to keep it. Now, I’ve pointed out, that’s priestly language. So here was Adam. Here was his vocation. And he fell. He failed. He messed up. He’s banished. He’s expelled. He’s exiled. What do we need? We need a new Adam. We need another Adam. We need another representative. And you know what scripture says? Scripture tells us that Christ is the second and the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15).
Scripture tells us that Christ is the image of the invisible God. He’s the image of God, par excellence. He fulfills everything that Adam wasn’t. And just as Adam was supposed to obey and didn’t, so Jesus did obey. And Adam, who was banished from the garden under the judgment of God, can only be freed by Jesus, the second Adam who comes and takes that judgment, who takes that flaming sword of the cherubim guarding the garden and takes that himself. And so he can lead us back to paradise. Remember what Jesus said on the cross to that dying thief who hung beside him and said, “Remember me when you come into your father’s kingdom”? He said, “Truly, today you will be with me in paradise.” Again, it’s language out of Genesis.
So tracing these threads through the Bible shows us a couple of things. First, it reminds us that all of the themes of the Bible reach their climax and their culmination in Jesus Christ. And this is really important when we think about missions and evangelism, because, folks, the goal of mission isn’t to give people information. It’s not just to get them to the Bible, as important as the Bible is. But the goal is to get them to a person, and that person is Jesus Christ! And Jesus is the message of the Bible. It’s to introduce them to a real, living person—the resurrected Lord. And so every theme in scripture finds its culmination, its climax, in him. We’ve got to remember that.
And the other way this is helpful for us is when you think about how the writers of the New Testament, how the apostles, how they used the Old Testament. Because they used these different metaphors and others we haven’t even mentioned this morning. They used them in different ways in in different contexts. And a lot of it just depends on who they’re talking to. So, for example, when the apostles are talking to Jews, they often began with Moses and the prophets, right? And they showed how Jesus was the promised Messiah. You read the letter to the Hebrews—well, it’s written to Jewish people. And the whole point of that letter is to show that Jesus is the better priest and he’s the better sacrifice and he’s established this new and this better covenant. And this makes sense in the Jewish mind, in the Jewish worldview.
But when Paul preaches to the Gentiles in Acts 17, he doesn’t start with the sacrifices of the Old Testament, he starts with creation, right? And he talks about the God of creation and about the God who is over all the nations, and he talks about Jesus, as the resurrected Lord.
And when John delivers his apocalyptic vision to Christians compromised and at times persecuted by the Roman Empire in the book of Revelation, his focus is on Christ, the conquering king, right? In Revelation 12, he’s the one who conquers and overcomes the ancient serpent.
And so, what we see is that these writers were contextualizing the gospel to the cultures in which they lived, and we have to do the same thing. We have to discern where people are, and where they are conscious in some way of their spiritual need, and find that point and from that point, point them to Christ.
So if someone is enslaved to darkness and to sin and to addictions—that they’re in bondage, they’re beaten down, they need to see Christ as the conquering king, the one who can free them from those chains.
If someone is overcome and consumed with guilt and shame because they understand how they have broken God’s law, how they’ve transgressed, how they’ve messed up so bad—they need to see Christ as the atoning sacrifice, the one who covers them in a new robe of righteousness and glory and beauty.
Someone who’s engulfed in the darkness and the chaos and the confusion of life apart from God, they need to see Christ as the light. And so we have to find wherever people are and then from where they are, point them to Jesus. And we have a whole Bible full of images and categories and themes that can help us to do that.
So we’ve seen this morning the goal of our missions: the glory of God, the praise of his name. The scope of our mission: reaching as “far as the curse is found,” our relationship with God, our relationship with one another, and even our relationship, our responsibility to the created world. And then we’ve seen the message: the message which is Jesus Christ himself.
And I was thinking and praying this morning about how to end this message—about what to say.
And I started thinking about some of my missionary heroes through the years. I thought of Jim Elliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Or William Carey who said, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” I thought about Hudson Taylor who, even after he lost his daughter Gracie and his wife Maria, was able to say, “I never made a sacrifice!”
And when I think about those stories, I think about the passion they had. I think about the sacrifices they made. I think about what they went through. And those stories, they are inspiring, aren’t they? They’re inspiring to us when we think about those who have gone and have made those sacrifices. And we need those stories. I’m grateful for those stories.
But what about those of us who stay behind? Those stories can leave us untouched, because we think, “Well, that’s for the missionary. That’s for the person who goes to Peru or to Africa or to the Middle East or to an unreached people group—to a hard place. But do you remember how we began this sermon? Every Christian is a missionary. To be a Christian is to be on mission with God.
Someone one time said, “you’re either a missionary or you’re a mission field.” And you’re either one or the other. You’re either a missionary. You’re someone who is taking the good news to others, right here, Michiana, Niles, Buchanan, South Bend, on your campus, in your workplace, in your neighborhood, serving the poor, serving women in crisis. You’re either doing that here. You’re either a missionary or you’re a mission field. It’s one or the other.
And so the pointed question I want to leave us with this morning is just that. Which are you? Are you a missionary? Are you on mission with God? Or are you a mission field? And if you are a mission field, I’ve got great news for you. God is on a mission to save you and to rescue you. He loves you. He sent his son to die for you, and if you will believe in him this morning, he will send his Spirit into your heart, and he will make you new. He’ll bring order to the chaos. He’ll bring light to the darkness. And he’ll invite you into his mission.
Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, we thank you that you loved us so much that you sent your Son. You had one son, and you made him a missionary. And you sent him to be the sacrifice for our sins and to lead us into new life. And you have sent your Spirit into our hearts so that we can now call you our father. And now you’ve sent us into the world. Thank you for this calling. Thank you for this vocation—this responsibility you’ve given us. Would you make us faithful? Would you give us an undying passion for the glory of your name? Would you equip us with everything we need to do your will? And would you sustain us by your grace to be faithful to what you have called us to do?
As we come to the table this morning, we come to our risen and ascended Christ. We come to eat the bread and to drink the juice—which are really just emblems of Christ and his glorified humanity by which we are saved. And so we come to take him. We pray that as we come to the table, you would draw near to us. By your Spirit unite us more closely to the Savior. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
