The Great Commission Is Bigger Than Personal Evangelism

0:00What is the great commission? Who does it reach and who actually carries it out? This is the topic that we are going to engage today on the magistrate. The magistrate is part of the EM network and I am Josh Howard. I'm joined today by my good friend and co-host Alex Kochman. Alex, it's so good to talk with you again, brother. Yeah. Good to be back here and good to be diving into this conversation together, brother. Absolutely. So for those of you who don't know Alex, he's obviously a long time EM contributor, has his own channel on the EM network and taking a little summer hiatus, we look forward to seeing you back. Your beard is looking full. It's vibrant. There's a long standing beard debate on EM, but nobody that's listening to this probably cares about that. But that's all in the background. We're going to talk about the great commission today and I'm fully aware that this is sort of a, it's always a point of discussion, but it's been one of discussion on Twitter, especially among Christian circles. We're going to wait into that a little bit. We've waited into the great commission many times in the past. I think this one will be beneficial for

1:01those who are listening, but I do want to mention our sponsors before we get going. Always want to mention our brothers over at rockwallbibles.com. Check out rockwallbibles. They actually, and I say this truthfully, they had a release yesterday. It was here yesterday or today. They post on social media frequently with new Bible offerings and I was like, my goodness, I want a new Bible already, although I've got this brand new one. Beautiful Bibles, heirloom quality, good letters, family owned business out of the Ozarks. Reach out to rockwallbibles and check out their offerings. They do rebinds. They do new Bibles. Adam will help you with all of your needs. If you use the code, I think it's EM 10, you'll get a discount. Try EM 20. Maybe they'll give you more of a discount. I don't even know how that works. Check out rockwallbibles. We are also, also, are thankful with our partnership with steadfast cigars over the years. Appreciate those brothers greatly. We're going to talk about the Great Commission today. The Great Commission found primarily in Matthew 28, 18 through 20. This is typically where most people are familiar with the Great Commission. It's

2:04reflected elsewhere as well. When we talk about the Great Commission, I think there's a lot of confusion in our day and age and in every day and age with, again, as we said at the outset of the program, who is it supposed to reach? What are we supposed to expect from it? Also, who carries it out? I think that third question is probably the most important for us today. I'm going to look at something that's a little bit of nerd work on the front end. Alex and I are going to get into a discussion of how the Great Commission is to be carried out and who's to carry it out. Alex has done a lot of work in this area. His book, Order to Love, is going to be a very helpful background in our discussion of this, the rightly ordered affections borrowed from Augustin and from other figures in church history. Let's do some nerd work on the front end. If you're following us on audio, I apologize in advance. I'll try to walk you through that. But I'm going to try to do a little screen share here real quick. I'm going to just pull up. All I'm pulling up is Logos Bible software. I've got open the UBS 5th edition. UBS is just one of the Greek editions of

3:11the New Testament. You may be more familiar with Nestlé Alond. I just kind of prefer the UBS for its simplicity of layout, especially on on digital resources. But this is the Great Commission. Both in the English, you can see that over here and in the Greek over here. The Great Commission is Jesus came and said to them, speaking to His disciples, all authority and the heaven and on earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. I want to point out a couple of things about what's doing the heavy lifting within the Great Commission. Again, this is frequently debated, but I don't think it's because of the Greek complexity. The actual Greek layout here is somewhat simple. If you're to look within the text here, again, even if you're not a Greek leader, a Greek leader, a Greek reader, of highlighted the relevant portions just so you can sort of follow along. Here's the main verb that's doing the heavy lifting. It's Mathetucite. So,

4:14Mathetucite is simply an active imperative verb and it means make disciples. So, if you look at Greek constructions, there are certain verbs that do heavy lifting. This one does the heavy lifting because it is an imperative. That's the Greek sort of lexical way of speaking about a direct command. It carries the force and the weight. It is shouldering the burden of what the command in the Great Commission is. Now, most of us are familiar with the fact that it starts with the go, therefore, many of you have been to youth conventions and youth retreats where it'll say, you know, therefore go or as we go. Those are all good, but when you look at the verb for going or to go, it's poor youth in taste, which is a passive participle. You can hear in that word, it is a passive verb. It doesn't actually carry weight to the extent that the imperative does. So, that's why oftentimes you'll find translations in the English that will rightly translate this as as you are going or going, then do this thing. It's something that carries a passive weight.

5:18So, again, here's the active verb, Matatucete. If I could just write your co-tails first. I can't do that. Yeah, man. Don't be. Josh, because he invited me to interrupt whenever. And I think I've seen some people that also want to make too much out of that, out of the tense of having gone and turned it into sort of a, well, as you're about your business, go and make disciples at the coffee shop in the grocery checkout line. That's all fine as far as application is concerned. But I think it's very similar to the sense in which you would say in English to your children, go and make your bed, right? The going is a part of it. The going isn't doing the work of that sentence that make your bed is, but it is reinforcing and adding weights the main imperative there. Absolutely. Yeah, and it carries a weight. So, when you look at Greek construction, because there is an active imperative verb within this sentence, the other verbs sort of carry that active imperative weight, even though they're sort of a lesser weight, they still carry an active imperative weight. So poor youth and taste going or to go or as you go, that still does carry a weight that is higher

6:22than if you did not have the imperative within the verb construction. It's interesting, though, because I agree with everything you just said, Alex, I was reading a Greek primer or grammar. It was one of the introductory Greek works that we were reading within the MDIV program. And there's a footnote in there. Many will know the work if I'd cited it. It's a very popular work, but within the text, there's a footnote under that. And it says, we have to approach to go or going. We have to approach that with the same weight as making disciples, less we risk turning the great commission into a great suggestion. And that was sort of the reason and given, again, in a Greek grammar for why we're to regard the verb as it holds. Now, that's to me a little bit improper or imbalanced. A little bit interpretive. It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Yeah, like still give it that weight. You know, still encourage people to regard it in that way, but don't just gloss over the difference between the Greek verbs. So again, you have Matthew Tussete, and then you have the

7:25direct object of that. All the nations, it's Pantata ethne. All of the nations is the most literal translation of that. So you are to make disciples of all the nations. And then there's two more verbs that flow from it. These are the words for baptizing them and teaching them. They're active, but they're participles. So again, slightly less weight than the imperative. And yet they still bear that same weight. Babtitsante and Didaskanteis. So those are the three primary verbs you're looking at within the Great Commission. The primary imperative holder, Matthew Tussete, make disciples. The two verbs that build off of it with almost equal force, baptizing and teaching. And then you also have that sort of introductory passive participle of going or to go, which is Alex's brought up has kind of set the tone for the whole thing. If you're looking through a Greek grammar, you might see this, this construction is a very definable one. It's called a constructio ad sensum. Essentially,

8:27what that's referring to though is that it would be a very, the best I can say is it would be a very unique reading of Greek, very unique reading of Greek. If you had a transitive verb, Matthew Tussete, and then an accusative of Posse that did not in fact, or that meant out from or from or out of, it simply is not reflecting that within the Greek. There's no sense in what the Greek is reflecting baptize those who come out of the nations. Although, yes, you should do that. The direct object is simply in the Greek baptize the nations. And then you must grapple with what exactly that means and work through the the out workings of that though. It's a transitive verb where the direct object is receiving the action of the verb. You could think of this as like he swings the sword. What is he swinging the sword? You make disciples of the nations. What is the receiver of that action? The nations. And in fact, all of the nations, Pantatai ethney. And if I could again just hop in.

9:30I have one of the problems that obscures what you're saying in English is the fact that we don't use perhaps we do. We don't we don't tend to think of disciple as a verb often much less as a transitive verb. It can function that way. But typically to read more naturally, we render this make disciples of the nations, which in English could be transitive in the way that you described or it could be I'll give an example. I could say make bread from this dough. I'm taking something out of the lump. I'm reshaping it into something else. I'm fashioning cookies from this larger lump of dough or something like that. And so we tend to read it in the same way. We think we're to take disciples out from among the nations and assimilate them into something else. And to the credit of those who read the text in that way, you see something similar in Revelation that Christ has

10:35procured this people from out of every nation tribe in language and tongue. And so there's certainly some justification for that reading. But we ought to read it the way that you're describing to say that if I had a group of young children on my lawn and I said, oh well, I'm going to make examples of all of you. What I'm not saying is that I'm going to take some of them from out of the group of children that they're in and turn them into something else, which is an example. No, I'm saying that as a whole, I'm going to render them examples. And that's the sense of this is that the nations themselves are rendered disciples. And then how, now what does that look like that actually creates questions? And that's what the other participles of means in the passage explain to us, baptizing, teaching, and so forth. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. So this to me is this is step one, right. This is just great commission 101. I think we have to not only grapple

11:37with, but also just just regard it as settled that the Greek of the New Testament and the Greek of Matthew 28 says to disciple the nations, then we can have all the other discussions. But I feel like we really have to settle this because I do fear that there are many who are engaging with this text who quite simply are not understanding, coin a Greek construction. And I say that, you know, not not pridefully, hopefully or dismissively of others views. But this is just a very settled Greek construction that should be simple enough to grapple with disciple and who disciple the nations. Now let's jump into nations a little bit unless unless there was anything else on that one Alex, you wanted to cover? Well, if people haven't been online and haven't been following along, there is a great difference practically on how this works out between those who want to reduce the Great Commission to an individual mandate that you're to go and make one off individual disciples. There's a difference between the type of preaching and application that that produces versus

12:41someone that has a very expansive view and says Christ has been bequeathed to the nations by the Father at his resurrection and ascension in Psalm 2 and Psalm 110. And so whatever we do in terms of personal evangelism and all of the other missionary implications of the Christian life blows out of that macro cosmic reality, which is exactly what you have in the preceding verse verse 18. All authority in heaven and earth have been given to me. The commission doesn't start in verse 19. It starts in verse 18 as well. So that's what's at stake here. You know, why are we nerding out on this? There's real practical practical applications that come out of this. It also, I think it also just kind of building off what you said. It also betrays. I think we in general think of Christian life and endeavors in an individual kind of mindset. We think of what can I do? And there's some value in that, right? Like you should walk away from God's commands and scripture and say, okay, you know, I understand what the church is called to do, but like how do I, Josh, or how do you, Alex? Like how do we live faithfully? There's a place for that, but not to the exclusion of the work of the church.

13:46So when you come to something like this and you say, well, I can't go to disciple Sweden. I, Josh Howard, incapable of discipling the nation of Sweden. Well, again, that's, that's divorcing it from that corporate context. The church writ large is called to in the many ways that God has given us disciple the nations. So yeah, I do think it kind of betrays a little bit of our Western individualism. Now, let's talk about nations because this is typically, yes. A lot of the stuff we talk about on the magistrate and on EM and elsewhere. We talk about sort of the out workings of this. How do you go about this work? That's an important conversation to have. But again, we're just starting with basics. This is 101. What are these nations? Because typically when I see this come up, especially with online discourse, people throw their hands up in the air and they say, ah, what's a nation? You know, they didn't have the United Nations back in, back in Abraham's day or back in the day of the risen Christ giving these instructions to the disciples. Therefore, you know, nation must be some sort of ephemeral thought. But you have to grapple with the fact that in scripture, old in New Testament alike, nations are a

14:49thing. They're addressed as a thing. There's something that is identifiable that when God tells his people disciple of the nations, there is at least some sort of sense in which they can look out and say, I can pick out some nations. There may be a little bit of gray area at parts. There may be a little confusion at parts, but there's a nation out there somewhere. This is all by the way throughout the Old Testament. The Old Testament is so helpful in this regard. You have cities that repent. They're called to either repent or be judged. None of them being one of the most famous examples. But you're also told, and I just want to run through it to a couple examples. We're told that God will be exalted among the nations in Psalm 46. We're told that nations ought serve the Lord their God, Psalm 72. We're told that the nations will know that he is Lord and that he will vindicate his holiness before the nation's eyes. That's Ezekiel 36. We're told in Psalm 22, one of the Messianic Psalms that kingship belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations. And just one more example. We're told nations rage and they plot and vain. This is the famous

15:51language of Psalm 2 in Psalm 46. We're also told that nations are judged for rebelling against God. And this is in many places, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Chronicles, etc., etc. So there is a conception in which there is a nation and we have to grapple with what exactly is a nation. United nations, you know, aside, what actually makes a nation. Let me give any thoughts on that. I'm going to pitch you a definition that I stole from somebody else, but any thoughts on that. Okay. So here's my working definition. I love when somebody summarizes this. There's a lot of really good and really accessible definitions of nation. It takes more than just a very quick five word definition, or five word, you know, definition typically, but Almouler recently was speaking about this and he's been doing some very encouraging work in these circles. And this is what he pitched as a definition. I doubt it's perfect. I think it's pretty good. He said this quote, well, he said a nation is quote, a distinctive people with a

16:54distinctive territory and a distinctive heritage and a distinctive worldview, a distinctive set of commitments that is the foundation for the establishment of the entire society end quote. I like this from Almouler for a couple of reasons. Number one, because it's short and it's kind of catchy in the way he's written it. But he's saying there's something distinctive. That nation's not the other nation. You can point those things out. There's a certain sense in which there's a kind of groundedness or temporalness to his definition. He's talking about look, they exist in a territory. They're somewhere. They have a heritage, a distinctive heritage. They came from some people. They have a distinctive worldview. In other words, they have conceptions about what is right or wrong, what ought we do, what's good for our nation. But then he also frames it in their commitment to that ideology that underlies it. It's neither one nor the other. It's both and. He also says it's a distinctive set of commitments for the foundation and establishment

17:58of the entire society or of a given society. I like that because it appeals to the I can see what a nation is like I can kind of point to one in a certain place in a certain time and from a certain people. But there's also that shared value system. You don't have to use the word worldview. I don't mind using the word worldview if we define it. But whatever sort of, whatever sort of verbiage you want to use for that, they believe certain things. Oftentimes that's going to mean they value a God. Hopefully the true and living God. But it means that that nation agrees that murder is good or murder is bad. That nation regards assaulting minors as wrong and morally wrong. Or they make permissibility for it. There's a conception behind it. Thoughts on that one. I think Mueller's definition is good. I've used a couple of different definitions that are all getting at this same thing. A nation is more than just a lineage of people or a racial subgroup.

19:05But it's typically not less than that. And one of the key words that I really like is that it's a constellation of multiple attributes. I really like the five Ls that some have used language, law, liturgy, land, and lineage. It's all of these things. You can take some of those out and not lose what a nation fundamentally is. For instance, the people of Judah and the Old Testament, when they were exiled out of their land, they didn't stop being a distinct people group in that moment. That often happens to people when they're exiled out of their land that didn't happen in the case of Old Testament, Judah. So it's not necessarily a checklist to say that all five of these distinct components must be present to equal degrees in order to have a full-fledged nation. It's a fuzzy boundary, but it's also identifiable. And again, it matters because these are the things that were called to disciple. So, Michel Mangalwadi, brilliant Indian Christian philosopher activist,

20:08he has said that in his opinion, and I don't know that I'm willing to go quite as far as him, but he thinks that one of the most harmful things that happened in evangelicalism and admissions was the shift in 1974 at the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization. Which is a watershed of it. If anybody's not familiar with that. Watershed of it. Yeah, and that's where we get our modern notion of unreached people groups, but he's convinced that what was harmful about that was the shift away from thinking of nations in this inclusive definition, which includes land, borders, holidays, governance of peoples, worldview, as Muller points out, and reduced it purely to what Michel just called today, ethnolinguistic people groups. Now, I do think that fundamentally what are we talking about? What's the irreducible part of what defines a people? It is a mixture of the linguistic characteristic and the ethnic characteristic.

21:12So, at the ethnolinguistic people group definition is not bad. Darren Carlson, in fact, wrote a really helpful article in the Gospel Coalition in 2019 called the Three Words that Changed Mission's Strategy. And are we wrong about it? And he's interacting with the idea of how moving of the goal posts around what we define as people groups, Pansatah, Ethnay, and the Great Commission has affected now generations of missions' strategy. And it's worth engaging his arguments there, whether you agree with him or not. See, he sort of argues, and this is a sidetrack, but there's also a debate in the missions world between whether we're called to evangelize all the nations without exception or all the nations without distinction. And he argues linguistically in Matthew that it's without distinction that's happening. In other words, you could render Matthew 28, 19, something like go and make disciples from among all the Gentiles indiscriminately. And functionally,

22:13that's part of what is happening in the text, right? Everything in Matthew has been very Jewish oriented up until that point. You've had hints of this, though. In Matthew 24, this gospel must be proclaimed among all the nations before the end comes, right? You have these hints of the Gentile mission. Finally, the Gentile mission officially opens up and is inaugurated in the final commissioning passage of the book. The challenge is, okay, if that's what's happening in the book, that we're just supposed to preach the gospel to all Gentiles without discrimination. How do we gauge our progress at that task? And that's where I still think we can't get around this question of fundamentally, who are the peoples that were called to reach? What does it mean to reach them? Who are the peoples that are without gospel witness right now? And importantly, what does it look like not just to reach them in terms of evangelism? But what does it look like to disciple them by baptizing them and teaching them, which is comprehensive decades ago, there was

23:14the thought that the Great Commission would be done by the year 2000, because we would have evangelized all of the major people group blocks that we knew of at the time. Obviously that, you know, like file that under Y2K, a lot of that millennial fervor was misplaced. But the idea that the Great Commission would be finished just because all of these peoples have been exposed to the gospel is also leaving off what this says, we're to disciple them. Josh, when is your discipleship done? You're just discipleship is done until you stand in glory. Exactly. And I think the same is true for these people group blocks as well. However, exactly we need to find them. And that also should take a lot of the steam off of, well, it's an impossible task because nations have been Christianized. I know that language is loaded, but nations have in some form or fashion been Christianized and then drifted away. And so people throw their hands up and they say, see, it's an impossible task. I would just beg them, like, you know, this is ongoing maintenance. Maintenance is not the best term for the life of discipleship, but it is an ebb and flow, right? It is a drifting away and

24:17a coming back. And the fact that the fact that my car breaks down doesn't mean I abandoned the car, it means I've maintained the car and I fix it up, bad illustration, maybe anyway. Let me get back to this because I want to gear us toward who does the Great Commission. I know you've done, done work on this. But number one, I would just ask the listener to not blur the lines between nations and ethnicities. And that's one thing that Alex was just getting into. They're very kind of correlated terms, but they're not synonymous. A nation is not simply an ethnic group. There are distinctions there. I would also just ask those, those who are listening as you think about this, if you have a people group, you know, we're working through the book of judges. And again, the Old Testament's really fascinating with this stuff, I think, because you have a very distinct homogenous and oftentimes inclusive group in Israel. There's not a whole lot of coming and going of those from the outside nations. And yet you do have times, you know, again, in judges very end of chapter three, you have Shamgar pop up. And a lot of Incas has been spilled about Shamgar,

25:20but the best you can say from his name and from his lineage based on his familial name, he's not an ethnic Hebrew. This is not a Hebrew name. And yet what does he do? He comes and he supports and actually saves Israel because that has become for whatever reason we're not told in scripture. That's become his nation. This is where you get the rootedness of Mueller's definition with the adherence to the beliefs of the people. This is your people will be my people and your God will be my God. You have both. I want to be part of this people not maintaining my allegiance to a different people. Your people will be my people, but also the commitment to the shared ideology, your God will be my God. That's not propositional nationhood. That is that's a shared value system that again, Mueller's addressed it as worldview for decades at this point. Right. Look at the American founding. We are more than a propositional nation. We were a distinct

26:21nation with generally shared ancestry. Over time, became a little bit more of a pan-European project, but still distinctly European, English-speaking, Protestant and character. But you can't separate propositions out of that. So in overreaction against propositional nationhood, I think the term no nationalism as a scare term is a little bit ill-conceived because literally the word Nathan Ethnos in Greek is the same word, but in the vernacular, we make distinction. Right. We make distinction today. I think for good reason, because there's these other components that define nationhood, including some of the propositional elements, including polity, included culture, and not everything there is strictly determined by genetics or by land, those sorts of things. We're not genetic essentialists. We're not race determinists or anything like that at all. And so it is important to maintain some of that nuance that propositions do shape

27:22peoples. And again, this is getting back at the Great Commission. That should invite the question of, okay, how do we make sure that as we're going about the work of our Lord Jesus, which something else we can get into or not get into, depending on the direction you want to take it? But I think the Great Commission is still for us today. I don't think the apostles finished it. I'm glad they didn't finish it because it's because continued efforts were happening at missions in evangelism that my ancestors and your ancestors were evangelized. And we wouldn't be here today without continued efforts to obey this command. But then what does it look like to shape all of those constituent elements of a nation under the worship of Christ as we disciple them? What does it look like to disciple the language, law, literature, land, and lineage of a people group? That's what we're talking about. Let's aim toward that. Let's do it. Let's do it this way, because I'm going to scrap a couple of my notes because I think this is interesting. Let's do this. Let's talk about who does the Great Commission. And then let's morph that into. If we have time, and hopefully we can wedge these both in, let's morph that into then. What does it look like when a

28:24people is reached? Or let's just say, reached with the Great Commission. When the Great Commission is successful in a people or in a nation rather. So number one, the way this is coming up online is these are in conversations surrounding Christian nationalism. And by that, I mean, anybody who is advocating for any sort of official and public recognition of Christ as Lord by the government or by the state, capital S, that's typically just lumped in as Christian nationalism. That's the way I'm using the term, although we could nuance it, but we'll just use that definition. So the way this is typically being kind of pushed back against, especially online discourse, the YouTube's, the Twitters or the X. The way it's being addressed is, oh, so Christians, you want the state as state, state-quastate, you want the state to actually carry out the work of the Great Commission. So the state who's called to wield the sword, who is to punish the evil doer, reward the good, maintain piety, has been one of our arguments on this channel. But you want

29:30the state actually to go about the work of the Great Commission. And this is where I would just say, quite frankly, I don't think, maybe some are advocating for that. I don't think that that push back is fair to anyone who is in this conversation. It's certainly not what I'm advocating, but you want to walk us into that one a little bit out? Yeah, I certainly don't know any Protestants that are advocating for that position, certainly not any credible ones. The Great Commission is very clearly given to the Apostles. Let's start with that. This is direction given to the 11 remaining Apostles. Add in Mathias, add in Paul, but this is received by the Founders, the Foundation Stones of the Early Church. And it's inherited by the ministers of the Church today. So the Apostolic model in the Book of Acts is the outworking of what they understood this command to me. So how do we apply the Great Commission? We'll flip the page,

30:32go to Acts, and you'll see what they understood that to me. It meant breaching, establishing a community of believers under the leadership of local elders, installing the ministry of the Word, installing the ministry of the Sacraments or the Ordnances there, and then going on to the next place where there was not yet a Gospel Foundation as Paul describes in Romans chapter 15. So that ongoing church planting, disciple making, gospel proclaiming, and all of Christ for all of life instructing teaching ministry, which you see from Acts 13 to 14 alone. Paul and Barnabas sent out from Antioch, go and plant churches, establish elders, check in on them, come back, report back to the sending church. You see all of that modeled in that short collection of episodes there. That's what the Apostles understood that this meant. So this is specifically a mandate that's given to the church. Now that being said, I think we have to think holistically about what it means to

31:35be discipled or to be brought under the Lordship of Jesus in terms of teaching them to obey all that I commanded them. Clearly the impact of that is not limited to the ecclesial or to even the piotistic sphere. And right now what you're seeing is if somebody were to go online right now and say, as I've basically said, hey, the great commission is only given to the church. The immediate pushback on that will be, no, we need, we need things to bow to the sun and kiss the sun, you know, lest they perish in the way, solemn to. And we would affirm that. This is not a statement that verse 18 is limited to the church. All authority in heaven is believed to belong to the risen Lord Jesus. But this specific task is given to his church. And what this does is plants obedient communities of disciples in and among all of the nations such that the overflow of that is that nations themselves are discipled. So the fruit of your discipleship goes beyond just your engagement and corporate

32:38worship on the Lord's day. And it goes beyond your personal piety and your devotions throughout the week. Your discipleship is comprehensive. Yeah. And the same is true for the nations as well. Yes, these churches are planted as beech heads of discipleship and witness. And the spillover of that is cultures are changed. People are changed. Value systems, laws, worldview, muller, all of that is changed. So we need to guard again that and everybody's very ready to guard against sort of a very top down state driven. Nobody's saying that the state drives this. We also need to guard against the reductionistic version of this that wants to isolate it completely with the church and say that see there's no spillover that's happening with, for instance, the civil magistrate. No, actually he's he's part of the nation and he's getting discipled along the way as well. And he's going to live differently as a result. Yep. Yeah, this is this is part of the you know, we we've brought up the distinction. It's a chiperian distinction, but you could find

33:41it elsewhere as well. But he talks about the church as organism versus the church's institution. You know, what is the church to do as church and what is the church to do organically through the members of the church in society? And when you look to something like this, again, we're coming both Alex and I are coming at this from just sort of a I think what we're presenting here is sort of just a pan Protestant ideal. This is not necessarily some sort of high-magisterial view. Although many of us myself included would take sort of a magisterial to kingdom approach to this. What we're talking about though is if you looked at the early church, there was a conception. If you look, I don't even want to say early church, if you look to scripture on the whole, there is a conception in which the church is to act in a prophetic role to the state. In other words, you want Christians living in their own vocation in place. You see this within Baptist confessions, Presbyterian confessions. Every Christian is called in whatever place and position God has given them to live as a Christian and try to influence accordingly. But there's also a position in which the church is to speak or influence prophetically to the state. And this

34:45were all the debates typically come in, to what extent? Are they to maintain or they to promote? How does that exactly work? I'm just backing up to the fact of if you look to the early church, at least the conception of Rome was these are political rebels. John was exiled on Patmos as a political rebel and insurrectionist. Not because he was John's primary aim as you read John was not to transform the state. His conception though was that Christ holds authority in heaven and on earth so that the magistrate ought respect the law of God. Christ when he was crucified was labeled as King of the Jews. That was a political statement. This is what Calvin says and I think this is helpful. He talks about the he says quote, the law is a silent magistrate, the magistrate a living law in quote. So if you agree even in passing with Calvin's conception there, you should say, okay, the magistrate is to know the law of God and observe it. How is the magistrate to know?

35:45If the church regards itself as completely silent and uninvolved on those political issues, if if if Proverbs 1434 no longer holds, which Proverbs 1340 1434 says that righteousness exalts a nation but sin is a reproach to any people. If that no longer holds, the church can actually slip back into what you described as sort of that pietism, right? This is the raw pietism of we do church as church and really what happens outside is none of our concern. But if Psalm 33 is correct when it says that blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, then the church has some sort of vested interest with whatever nuances we work out to be a prophetic voice to the state, saying, no, no, there is a law of God and it binds you. It binds you kings. It binds our laws and you should, you should respond to Christ. I see part of that in the great commission, but like you were pointing out Alex, what you don't, what we're not doing is putting the cart before the horse. So I view this as a correction of saying the state is not outside the purview of the prophetic voice

36:45of the church and whatever influence we conceptualize there. It's certainly not outside of Christ, Lordship and authority, but that's not what we're looking to drive the boat. The state is not where our hope lies. Okay, we recognize that. The state is not what we want to carry out the great commission by the sword. Okay, fair enough. And yet what we're trying to push back on is as the church completes the great commission pursues the completion of the great commission in discipling all of the nation's part of that means discipling to whatever form and fashion we get there, the magistrates, the rulers, the authorities, the laws, the customs, the mores of that particular culture in which God has placed them, the church is not uninvolved or uninterested in those ventures. And it's also a twofold process. There's influence in both directions. And this is, again, where you don't want to get out of your skis or advocate for something that we're not supporting. We don't believe that the great commission proper is carried out by civil magistrates

37:48with respect to their role as civil magistrates. But Isaiah 49, the King James, talks about the language of kings as being, nursing fathers to the church. There is a function that the state can have in supporting the ongoing work of the great commission. Remember, why does Paul tell Timothy to pray for kings and all of those in high places so that we can lead a quiet, peaceable life, dignified, godly in every way? In other words, so that the church is free to be the church and do what the church does. And we wouldn't bristle at this in any other sphere. So we would say, for instance, that it's not necessarily the local business owner. Let's even say, let's maybe he's the president of the Chamber of Commerce. It's not his job in that office to be administering word and sacrament. That's his pastor's job if he's a believer. But he is going to influence by his own discipleship influenced by the gospel be a sanctifying, evangelizing and discipling influence on those under

38:55his authority in that sphere. And that's good. And that's how the kingdom not just gathered formally on the Lord's day, but in all of these organic ways that he referred to as well. That's how it's fully demonstrated and made manifest. So yeah, we can look at the early history of the church. We can see that it's a political persecuted minority in the very beginning. The Lord and His Providence didn't leave it that way. And there's a reason that Christianity ended up working in and through the empire and the Providence of God where the abuse is along the way probably and certainly so. But you can also trace the history of missions, the history of the progress of the spread of the gospel. And it does follow in many ways with the trajectory of empire, the trajectory of Western civilization. And there's a mutually interdependent relationship there. The gospel is having fruits in culture and it's dignifying peoples and it's changing the way that entire

39:57cultures think and operate. But the inverse is true as well. Sati is ultimately banned in India, not just because of William Kerry's evangelization, but because of the British imperial power to do so. We're not doing this anymore. Yep, right? And you have other examples of that as well. The organization with which I served with ABWE, we had our start in the Philippines. Well, early in our history serving in the Philippines, Japan attempted to invade and annex the Philippines, the US was able to liberate it during World War II. And because of that, the gospel has spread, but what would the story of the gospel in the Philippines look like? It fallen under imperial sun worshipping Japan. It would be very different, right? There are certain ways in which the Lord and His providence uses magistrates to establish the conditions of peace necessary to gospel flourishing as well. It's something that Andrew Fuller talks about in his sermon on Christian patriotism. And so what we need to do, and I'm speaking to my fellow evangelicals here, I'm speaking to my fellow missions

41:00minded people that doesn't mean we need to blend church and state that doesn't mean we need to quote unquote get political or get partisan. But what it does mean is we need to not be naive about the use of means. We are in a world that God has ordered under natural temporal governments. If you want to look at the no way at covenant, you know, if you want to use a two kingdom structure, however you want to do that, but there are natural 10th oral governments as well. And God uses those in the part of the story of the progress of His kingdom as well without taking away any of the uniqueness of the great commission as the church's responsibility. Yeah. And this is what I want to push in on because I think this might make for I really want to cover this. You've got time, right? You got a couple more minutes. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Okay. So the because we're getting into the application part that I really wanted to kind of push in on as the number two or the second thing to to address. So if you look at your book, for example, you've you've retrieved something that I think needed to be retrieved within Protestant circles, which is just a very general, but also a very

42:03kind of you get into the meat of the matter later in the book, but it's just a very general conception of rightly ordered loves. Your love for a nation, your nation being a prerequisite for your love for other nations, you have to love your people. If you were to love other people, this is just rightly ordered affections. I have to love my home. If I'm to love Christ's church, this is a this is an instruction upon pastors. There's that and there's also pushing back against those who would say you're valuing your earthly citizenship above your heavenly citizenship. And I think what we're advocating is your earthly citizenship is to be a reflection and ordering based on your heavenly citizenship. In other words, we're not not stick. We're not bifurcating the two. You are citizens of a heavenly kingdom. That means that is to rightly order than your earthly citizenship and the nation that God has placed you in. So, you know, from not to get all like, you know, personal anecdote on you, but my lineage is like, I don't know, like 99% German.

43:04So our family line comes from Germany and among the Germanic tribes and it doesn't take a whole lot of history flipping to realize that was a pagan place for a long time. Some might say it's a pagan place again and that's a that's a travesty. And yet you can look back to the history of the Germanic tribes that came, you know, from which my ancestors descended and say there was a sense in which God has in his providence placed our family here, you know, have ancestors that have fought in wars for this country. This is my people, my country. I want to love my country. I want to see my country honor Christ. And then from that, that gives me the ability then to love other countries, to love Germany, to love the nations that I am called to disciple. But you've written on this, I'll kind of help walk us into that because what I don't want people to think is that a concern for nationalism, I shouldn't have even used the phrase, it's so heavily laden, a concern for the love of your nation, a particular as, you know, Mueller was using the the verbage of particularity,

44:08a particular concern for your people, your nation, that that somehow makes using a phobic or hateful toward other peoples. When in fact, I think the inverse is true. I think nobody can actually have a true concern for the world, no matter what sort of anecdotes they might spew out, nobody can actually have that concern unless they first learn to love their people and be concerned that their people might turn to Christ. Completely agree. So without rehashing everything in ordered to love, which of course, he can pick up on founders, press, but good friends. The way Augustine, yes, and have published both of our books, the way that Augustine handles the order of love is not to say, love these people, don't love these other people. First of all, it's to say, number one, love God supremely. He's the sumimbonum, he's the highest good. Number two, love others on account of their nearness to God. So all my fellow men are my neighbors, that's what the children's catacism taught us to say. That does mean that I have an obligation to every fellow human being

45:13that bears the divine image. The question is, given my finitude, how am I to do that? Well, God in Providence and in the natural order speaks to me about how I should go about structuring my duties so that I can please him. And he does that by limiting me by accidents of time and circumstance and setting so that I'm around certain people. And those are the first audience of my acts of Christian charity. That's the first rightful recipients is those who are in my immediate sphere. We're talking about family relationships. We're talking about neighbors. We're talking about congregants. You have to start with first things before you're entrusted with the more. Take that same principle and apply it to the nations. I affirm that to the extent that we are mirroring and honoring our Lord's heart for the nations, his zeal for his glory among all the nations, all the distinct people groups that we see everywhere from Genesis 10 in the table of nations to Genesis 12

46:18and the promised Abraham to be a blessing of the nations all the way through to Matthew 28 all the way through to Revelation 5, 9 and 7, 9. If we share our God's missionary heart in that way, then yes, we're called to love all the nations. We're called to desire the glory of God to be displayed among those nations for them to worship God, for them to enjoy God and benefit from that themselves. How do I though given my finitude love all the nations? I must start with the one that God has placed me in. Now some of us are uniquely called to go to a different nation as missionaries but that doesn't actually overturn the rule. That's the exception that proves the rule because it proves that you're primarily responsible to exercise love and evangelistic interest in and among the people that you're planted in and rooted in, rooted in, situated among. So I think it's very easy actually to see how the principle works itself out. I tweeted this morning, making the great commission and the order of love enemies, making the order of love the the enemy of the great

47:23commission is like making a river the enemy of the ocean. So we're not trying to just limit love and only direct it this one way. The whole point is yes, we directed a certain way so that the overflow is this experience of love. God for his people, his people for God and the same thing is true for us. So we need to order our obligations correctly. That means if you are not supporting your family, Paul says you're worse than an unbeliever and it doesn't matter if half of that money is going to a sponsor child overseas, you're worse than an unbeliever if you're not supporting your own family. This is how the order of love works in ethics. If someone is applying for church benevolence, we're holding scripture again. Paul says to Timothy that the family of that, let's say this widow has a responsibility to care for her before she goes onto the church doll. Again, there's a natural way in which these obligations of charity are to sort themselves out. But the overflow of all of that is the relationship of love between God and his people from among all the nations. If we

48:27lose our heart for that, we're going to become very inwardly turned and parochial too quickly. And the person who's thinking around this, I really appreciate is Rusty Reno. And when he critiques in his book Return of the Strong Gods, when he critiques Karl Popper in the open society, and we've seen where the open society leads, we've seen globalism, we've seen sorrows, we've seen all of those sorts of things. The alternative to the open society that's completely universalistic and cosmopolitan and derasinated, the alternative is not the closed society. The alternative is not to become hunker down, closed, parochial, you know, for us as even gelicals that might mean like, I don't believe in missions, I don't support any missionaries anymore. No, the point is to replace the open society with the love society. Let's not think in terms of just openness and broadness as a value or an end in itself. Let's think through how do I love well? And loving well means loving in order. As well as recognizing we are commanded to love. It's not optional.

49:32Yeah, and this is where we've talked about Althusias on our channel many times. I greatly appreciate his work. But if you look to an Althusian model, and it's not just Althusias, you can find it in Bavink, you can find it in Calvin, you can find it so frequently within our Protestant heritage, so much of this comes back down to the household. You can find it dare I say in Paul. When Paul is trying to instruct the church, he starts talking about the household because things become very plain. My household honors Christ as Lord. He is the Lord of our home. I raise my children telling them, like, this is not some sort of, you come and go and decide if God is your Lord. We honor Christ in this house. Now again, I know there's differences in way Presbyterian's Baptist and stuff might approach that. But I think most would agree on that general conception. In the same way, we look out to our neighborhood and we're blessed to be in a neighborhood where there's kids running around all over the place. So our kids play with their kids. You can see households that exist in our neighborhood. Now sometimes those households are a little bit difficult to define, just like nations. You might have three generations living within one household and you're thinking, okay,

50:35are there multiple households within this one building that we call a household? What does that exactly look like? There's something I can point at. There is a household. I can see it right over there. There's a building. There's a place. There's a people. And yet there might be some distinctions on, you know, exactly what makes up that household. But it doesn't just, it doesn't just completely rip that out of the context of it's a defiantable entity. And we want those households to honor Christ as Lord within them. Now when I when I lead my family, when I lead my household, I cannot do that to the exclusion of my own household in order to reach the households around me. I love those other households best when I love my children best and cataclyze them, teach them to observe all the Christ is commanded. It starts in the household. That gives me the ability then to reach out and to love those by the way, many of which in our neighborhood do not love Christ. But they know when they come inside my household, this is a Christian household that they worship Christ, they honor Christ. And I need to respect that when I come in here. And hopefully we can be a means through which God reaches them for the gospel. But that's why I feel like so much of these these discussions. If you just reduce them down to what Althusias called that sort of seed

51:41bed, that primordial seed of society, that that that thing from which the symbiotics, the symbiosis, the way we live together as societies, if you reduce it down and just say, what what do we see in the household command? We don't just look at to our neighborhood and say, there's something called households, but I have no idea what they are. They certainly they certainly can't be reached in any meaningful fashion. We wouldn't say those things. And I think the same thing is true for nations. Nations again are a bigger concept. There's there's lots of layers of bureaucracy and governance that go into those, but the seed bed form is the same. So that's what I find kind of encouraging about this conversation is so much of it is those very tangible, very near to home fun intended sort of dynamics. Yeah, absolutely. And there's something else that I want to say on this point as well. You know, anyone who follows this channel is probably reading up on eschatology and knows that there's a variety of opinions about how the end of the world intersects with the great commission. And I've seen it's the old hyper-Calvinist position is starting to become popular on the web again.

52:48William Kerry, Andrew Fuller in their day, were contending against this idea that the Great Commission was only for the apostles and that it was completely fulfilled in the first century. And there's some textual evidence that points you in that direction in Colossians. One, this gospel has been proclaimed among all the nations under heaven. Certain readings that we might even be favorable towards in Matthew 24. The gospel will be proclaimed to all the nations and then the end will come. And I think there's a good case that that end is not referring to the ultimate end is referring to the covenantal end in 8070. And so there's certain reasons that people reach this conclusion that this is all just a first century thing and isn't that you know, all this great commission fervor in this activity. It's actually distracting us from taking responsibility locally. I mean, it's unplug from that. But it's the same people that make that argument I've found that are also saying, look, Christ has all authority on heaven on earth. The Great Commission

53:48commands us to take our nation back first. And I just want to say those two are mutually exclusive positions. You can't have a hyper-prederous reading of the Great Commission and say it's not for us today, but then also want to claim it when it's time to take back the culture war for your side. And I am all for a Christianly understood culture war that is seeking to claim dominion in the name of Christ through the means that he's appointed through the law and the gospel rightly understood and applied. I'm all for that. And I'm all for also understanding the nuances of eschatology and realizing it's not all future, it's not all past, right? There's depends on the passage that we're talking about. But let's just be careful that the Great Commission does not become this wax nose for us. And let's make sure that however we parse out some of these individual applications of it, that we do feel the weight of it, that we both want to win our neighborhoods and our nation or the Lord. And we should. And those qualifying words you used, I think, are really important because I wrote a book right out of seminary called The King's

54:51Command through college and Clayton Press. But in any case, like I kind of grappled with this little bit, many of us have grappled, Alex, I know you've grappled with this one online as well in written form. But to see a fulfillment, a fulfillment, the technical term I would prefer to use is a pro-leptic fulfillment. In other words, it's a near fulfillment that kind of signals a greater fulfillment yet to come. We see that within the Great Commission in the book of Acts. You see all people's being gathered together in Acts chapter two. You see later passages that say, look, the nations have actually been exposed to the gospel and to the reach of the church, the reach of Christ through the work of his church. So you can see little fulfillments of that. I think you're right to caution against. That's not to say this is the final fulfillment. Because again, what do nations do? Nations, my mind is so in the book of judges right now. But what do nations do? They follow the Lord and then whatever whatever's right in their own eyes. Do it. Whatever's right in their own eyes. Yeah, exactly within five seconds.

55:54Right. Now they're doing what's wrong. You know, right in their own eyes and they've sent against the Lord. You're like, what happened? Well, they need to be they need to be brought under the bear of the Great Commission. That's the ongoing work of the church. The fact that you see a nation who experiences the blessings of Christ seems to respond as a national unit to the gospel message and and follows Christ in whatever form or fashion you want to qualify that. The fact that you see that and you see that nation drift away, that's not that's not a testimony to the failure of the Great Commission or its impossibility. That's simply the recognition of sin at work in this world. We're not going to see nations not fall back into sin until Christ returns. That's the ongoing work and we hope to see less of that. But that's that's probably a topic for another day. And if I could just give us somewhere to camp out. Yeah, absolutely. John Knox's words. Give me Scott Linder. I die. Yeah. Brooks, Buu Sir, a friend of mine. He found the admissions organization. His father has has reflected on this and he said something that was to the effect of who do I

56:57want to present to the Lord or I die? For him, it was a particular tribal group in Papua New Guinea that he worked with and his son went on to do the same thing. For you, it might just be your neighborhood or your your household. And that's a good and glorious thing. Some of us listening, the Lord might put a different people group on your heart that's maybe farther away. But who is it that you went to render to the Lord in Romans 15? All sees himself in fulfillment of Isaiah 66 as a priest offering as sacrifice in worship to God, the Gentiles themselves, the nations. That's the imagery that's hiding in the background in Romans 15. So he's a priest giving gifts to God. He's laying the nations out on the altar to ascend as a burnt offering to God. So who do you want to bring with you to heaven? Who do you want to give to God as obedient disciples? And whether you're someone who's part is completely resonant with let's take back our nation, let's make America

58:03Christian again under the Lordship of Jesus. Yes, amen. But let that drive you to action, not just to tweets. And likewise, if you're somebody who I just have a particular burden for this, this people group or this place that has yet to hear the gospel yet, let that drive you to action as well. But who do you want to render to the Lord? Yeah, good word. Give me Western PA, or I know, I'm sorry, I just cut you out of the loop. Give us PA, or we die. Yes, yes. Amen. Honestly, that's where my mind has been a lot is this corner of Western PA in which God has placed me. But good word, Alex. I appreciate you always coming on. And if anybody's got any thoughts or feedback on this, reach out to us. We can be found on the socials. You can reach out to us at eschatologymatters1 at gmail.com. You can, I don't know, text or message us. But we'd love to hear back from you. But in the meantime, Alex, it's just always a pleasure. God bless your work, brother. And thanks for joining me today. You as well, my friend. Let's do it again.